I am about to write five little words that I never thought I’d commit to text. Ready?
I’m tired of loot bags.
No one will ever accuse the new Heart of Thorns zones of being unrewarding. Players receive loot bags for participating in small local events, and then even more for taking part in the grand, zone-wide meta events. Sometimes I get a loot bag just for hanging out in an area even if I didn’t participate in anything at all!
The ground in each of the new zones is littered with localized loot containers containing their own special currency. We get bags of goodies when major creatures die, bags just for logging in every day, and my personal favorite, rewards of bags that contain nothing but more, smaller bags.
It might seem like a treasure hunter’s dream, but in reality I think I’m developing loot exhaustion.
A great deal of my current disillusionment with this shower of loot bags is because they so rarely contain anything of value.
In general people like opening crates of goodies, and for a while I would get excited when I looked in my inventory and saw random unopened bags. Eventually, though, I started to notice that the vast majority of the time my reward bags contained… nothing important. Even killing a zone-wide meta boss generally rewards a bag containing something like a piece of junk, two blue gear items, and a bit of material for a craft specialization that I don’t even know. It’s truly underwhelming.
One of the most popular design choices of Guild Wars 2 is its “vertical progression” and the lack of a gear treadmill. While that philosophy has a number of wonderful upsides, one of the downsides is that without gear, there just aren’t a lot of options for reward items, particularly ones that get handed out multiple times a day. You can’t flood players directly with gold or crafting material for fear of inflation, so it’s hard to know what else could go in these bags aside from junk and unwanted gear.
The situation would seem more reasonable if dealing with a full inventory of bags wasn’t such a long procedure. Sometimes when I get a loot bag I even feel as though it’s a penalty rather than a reward, a thing that forces me to stop whatever fun activity I’m doing to go find a vendor and play inventory manager.
First I double-click to open each of the multiple layers of loot bags in my inventory. Then I sell all the junk to a vendor (I’m usually in dire need of the bag space for the next step). I line up my salvage kits of various quality and spend time making sure that I salvage the right piece of equipment with the right kit. After all that I have to continue clicking to deposit crafting materials and consume any Luck, and THEN I load up the Trading Post to price check my sigils and post any that are worth selling. After all that I go back to the vendor and sell any sigils that weren’t worth selling on the Post.
A month ago Reddit user low_effor took the time to figure out exactly how much work goes into inventory management. They figured out that it will take an average of 35 open bags to completely fill the average player’s empty inventory. Once it’s full, to manage all those loot bags you need:
The grand total of all this work is 118 mouse clicks to process a full inventory of rewards, or roughly 3.3 clicks per loot bag. Yikes! Other players responded to low_effor’s post to estimate that they spend 10-15% of their playtime dealing with inventory overflow, and while self-reported numbers are often inflated it’s clear that managing loot rewards can feel very unrewarding.
I suspect that at least some of the reason why we’re being buried under loot bags is basic player psychology: people like opening gifts! Salvaging gear is also how many players make their gold and find crafting materials, and is a way to discover the occasional Superior sigil and other rare items needed for various quests. Map rewards in general are an issue that’s dear to most players’ hearts.
However, Arenanet is first and foremost a business, even if they are a pleasant business with an excellent product. The buy-to-play model of Guild Wars 2 means that people need to be funneled to the Gem Store on a regular basis for the game to survive in any functional way.
Cool new skins and gliders and minis are great inspirations to get players spending money, but so is designing systems that encourage people to pay to overcome inconvenience. If you have to travel back to a vendor every thirty minutes to handle the overflow of loot in your bags, you might be more willing to spend 400 gems to open up an additional backpack slot, or 800 gems to buy a permanent Copper-Fed Salvage-o-Matic.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with this kind of design! Players can get a lot out of the game without spending a penny more than the initial software cost, and Arenanet needs to make money so it can pay its talented staff and create even more fun content. However, the buy-to-play model means that unless annoyances are so ridiculously unbearable that they cause players to quit forever, they probably won’t be changed.
It’s not in Arenanet’s best interest to make loot bag inventory easier to manage, outside of a gemstore option. And I can’t even imagine the player outrage if they decided to take loot bag rewards out of the game – that just wouldn’t sit right with many even if they don’t get anything of value from the vast majority of the bags.
I’m not sure there’s a good solution, but boy, doing the loot shuffle every 30 minutes while I play in Heart of Thorns zones sure does get annoying.
Related: Column, Guild Wars 2, Heart of Thorns, The Tyrian Chronicle
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