Implementation of a button located on the inventory, stash and cube screen. Press the button and all items will be relocated inside the inventory in an arrangement that will allow to most potential space both horizontally and vertically.
One possible downside would be, that items that the player wants to stay in place such as town portal book, key stack and charms may going to be also relocated which could cause some inconvenience. To counter that perhaps a lock function could be implemented, such as, left click on the item and select lock/unlock. Then the items will be locked in place and will not be moved by auto sort function.
I do not know how much work/labour this feature would require, this is only an QoL upgrade and doubt it would affect gameplay much, I’d like to know what others think.
Waiting for the purist to come in and say the mere presence of that button will RUIN D2R and the universe by its mere existence. “BUT MUH TETRIS!!!” Cool don’t press it then.
In that case, they can choose to sort items manually, nobody would force them to use auto sort button. Plus what others people do with it is not their concern and would never affect their gameplay experience anyhow.
But muh tetris!!! There, I said it lol. Seriously I do enjoy organizing it myself and I’m way too OCD about it. The lock feature would help me because the only thing I don’t like organizing are pesky potions at low levels.
I remember my friend and I sharing certain accounts and we’d get into fights about which side of the inventory the cube, tomes and charms belonged on.
Anyway, I don’t see why this would be a bad feature at all for those who want it…
The mere presence of that button with RUIN D2R and the universe by its mere existence.
On a serious note though, probably one of the reasons D2 never had such an auto sort button is because they never thought about it in development. Those types of things weren’t really part of games at that time.
It wouldn’t be a problem, however, it could be argued that going down this path of auto-sort functionality could lead people to also suggest auto-level up skill/stat distribution tools and other automated systems that would detract from the rawness and joy of discovery in D2 that many oldschool players love about it.
Systems that automate things in games are a modern development and it isn’t really in the spirit of Diablo 2 to have such things. Everything was done by the player and there isn’t really enough of a good argument here to change that.
(Also I never use auto sort functions in games, because it sorts things in a way that I don’t like. I prefer to sort on my own.)
Definitely, people will find a way to dupe items and even kill other players with the auto sort button.
Keeping the game raw which contributes to its spirit is a good point, but then I never wanted to go further with this subject than inventory management. My idea is only about cutting of time spent with inventory sorting so that people can spend more time with playing the game. I understand, that some people consider inventory “tetris” an activity that is absolutely important, so towards that end, I am also offering the choice not to use the auto sort function, and like I mentioned before, nobody is forcing anybody to use it. Tetris gamers can ignore that button and enjoy playing tetris in their inventory.
Also worth considering, writing code for an auto-sort program within D2R would be significantly more complex than the ones that exist in most games, where all items take up 1 space in the inventory and are all the same size (like WoW, Baldur’s Gate, Divinity: OS, etc.)
Diablo is unique in that different items take up a different amount of space. It’s doable but it’d probably a lot of work to write a program that has algorithms and conditionals that does this effectively.