Inventory management is something I could do with less of. I don’t always want to play Tetris with my bags, trying to be sure there’s somewhere for the next item to fall into. I’m pretty sure nobody in their right mind considers this fun. Sure, spatial management is a game in the clinical sense, but it’s not fun, and not something the game needs to teach us unless we’re around 3 years old. In a game that encourages farming (Eternals, anyone? Leather? Ore?), why the hell does vendor trash only stack to 5/10/20? Is there really a benefit to not just stacking these indefinitely, or at least in considerably larger stacks? Is it a memory thing, where you only want to spare 4 bits for a stack of 10?

If a creature drops 3 kinds of trash loot, I should have 3 stacks of trash loot after an hour of farming. I should not have 35 stacks and an unwanted trip to go vendor it all, just so I can go fill my packs with vendor trash again to get a few more items.

Warlocks know this pain all to well, in a much more acute form: Soul shards. They already have a unique tag, limiting the number you can have at once, yet they still don’t stack. Hunters can stack arrows up to 1000, but soul shards? One to a slot. I could understand this if the shards had some unique properties: “Contains Soul of PVPBob, a Warrior” would be pretty cool, particularly if you could use that to influence the spells that consume the shard.

No such luck. Your pack is full of a bunch of little pink crystals, each one the same as the last.

A Solution: New Stacking Rules

If it stacks, it should really stack. None of this 5/10/20 junk. Set a standard stack maximum of 250, and let the Unique tag take care of any special cases. This should free up your pack for loot you actually want, like magic items.

“But, Seditia,” you say, “Wouldn’t people stop buying larger bags?”

Probably not. With dual spec added, some folks need to carry 2, maybe even 3 armor sets. Then there’s quest items, a few hundred kinds of crafting ingredients, and flavor items. I don’t know about you, but my priest doesn’t go anywhere without her Bloodsail Pirate outfit (complete with dual tankards, and Corsair’s Overshirt ’cause red is superior to white).

Freeing up inventory slots means freeing up space so the player can have more fun with it.

Because, as much as it wants to be, inventory management will never be Tetris.