You Guys Are Going To Hate Me - Shared Inventory Problem

So I was waiting in line at a Wendy’s for an inordinate amount of time while waiting to get a vanilla frosty. Then it occurred to me a problem with shared inventory space that I have not seen discussed in this forum yet. I don’t know, maybe this was discussed much earlier on and I missed it. Either way, this may be THE #1 most crucial massive change in the game’s dynamic that seems to be being completely overlooked.

It’s real simple:

  1. I find an SOJ, now every character on my account has an SOJ.
  2. I finish an Enigma, now every character on my account has that Enigma.
  3. I build a perfect CTA, now every character I have has that perfect CTA.
  4. I get a hold of 20/20 Anni and now every character I have has that 20/20 Anni.

With the way things worked before in D2 Legacy, transferring gear back and forth to characters like this was not only tedious and obnoxious to do, but it came with a lot of risk of losing that gear for one reason or another. So of course players had a lot of incentive to make sure each individual character had their own SOJs, Enigma, CTA, Anni, ect ect. This incentive largely drove players to continue playing & MFing & trading, to completely fully furnish any character they made with its own gear. But this will not be the case in D2r with shared inventory. There will be much less incentive to actually keep playing & MFing & trading, when a single Annihilus as example, can easily & safely & non-tediously be shared by every character on a single account.

I wanted to see what other forum users thought about this. Do you guys think that this will be healthy for the game in the long haul? How will it effect the economy? How will it effect incentive to keep playing?

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With (hopefully) less bots, these items will be less common anyway. In the original game, those that have multiple game key sets can transfer the items safely anyway via direct trade.

More power to the legitimate player. If they want to sacrifice a portion of their shared stash for the convenience of having that nice enigma, CTA and/or other gears available for all of their account toons to use, that’s fine with me.

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You’re late, i mentioned this day 1. No one cared.
1 anni and 9x 20-5s is all you need now.
If you have 3 pallys, 1 torch will do as well.

Edit: just so you know my suggestion to fix I proposed first 3 minutes of joining a game has SharedStaah disabled and/or only 1 item per X seconds can be withdrawn.

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Yeah I think it closes the wealth gap between botters that have millions of fg, and legit players that have 10 thousand or so.

I’m perfectly okay with 1 20/20 anni being enough per player.

It’s already enough of a problem that certain players are going to buy perfect or near perfect chars within the first month.

D2R is fun, but equitable it is not.

There is a reason most Arpgs are trending toward personal and account bound loot.

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I think maybe they SHOULD care ^^

This will be no small change to the psychology that once gave Diablo 2 great incentive to keep playing. This shared inventory will essentially be like taking a marathon race and cutting it short to 1 mile only.

When really stopping to consider the cause & effect of what is going to happen here, I do believe something like your suggestion needs to be implemented, as to ensure incentive to want to outfit characters with their own individual gear.

I certainly hope Blizzard is paying attention to this. Replicating the old “5 minute before game perm timer” is probably the best way to go about this.

Yeah I hear you on that.

What I am concerned about is keeping player base incentivized to play.

I am worried about this problem replicating something that is akin to that feeling in Diablo 3 where “outfitting characters is really easy to do” and then people get bored much more quickly.

Diablo 2 was fun because it was an adventure building new characters, but that adventure will largely be cut short with the way shared inventory works now.

Eh well if anything, this will totally vindicate the reason & purpose behind 3 or 4 month season resets. Honestly.

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I agree, as far as ladder goes I don’t think many people will have more than 1 high end torch/anni anyways, and nonladder is primarily about pvp, and honestly my biggest issue with pvp was finding people with good enough gear to challenge.

The more people of relative wealth, the better the PvP. Maybe people will bot less if they don’t need more than 1 griffs, 30%fathom, etc.

Probably being a little optimistic there, but one can hope.

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For some people this will be a blessing as they don’t have to aquire as much gear as before. But to players like me this doesn’t change anything. I can’t stand having to swap gear from one char to another, so I’ll be fully gearing each and every char. Even ES prebuff sorc was a no for me as I had to swap to prebuff gear in order to duel.

Each to their own I suppose. Also it could be seen another way. Perhaps some people don’t think it’s worth putting the time into getting high-end gear on several chars and therefore would quit once they get fully gear their first one. With the new shared stash the entry for playing more chars at late game is lower, resulting in more playtime across different classes/builds.

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Yeah I’ll be honest I’ll still look for extra annis and I enjoy torch hunting, so lots of my duellers will have median torches.

I’m not going to go through the hassle to move my 20/20 sorc torch If I have an extra 18/18, tbh, even with shared stash.

Like I said I’ll still kill Uber’s just to give away torches, they’re a lot of fun to slaughter. I don’t think anything will stop me from farming even when my toons are fully geared.

Except when botw2 comes out. I’ll take a ladder off for that.
And a ladder off for d4, so far it looks promising.

Other than that, I just love MFing, both solo and as a glitch team.

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This isn’t really an issue because this is what we did already. It just took some extra time muleing over gear for those who needed it. Once you were good at muleing or had a friend or a second account you never lost anything muleing. The shared storage is just an added convenience but it is not letting us do things we didn’t already do.

I still have an interest in making extra of each item so I don’t have to transfer between chars. I generally also gear different chars differently…novel idea I know. I will still make a mid level of different items that will be used as a hand me down for each char. But if I had an Ani or other good item on one guy and I didn’t plan on playing him for a bit I would move them over to the guy I was playing.

Again it doesn’t give us something we didn’t have before it just makes it more convenient.

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Modern Bnet does not have “perm” games. It closes if you leave. If they change that, we will have to see, but don’t expect it.

Yes. They always did though. Think of it more as your ACCOUNT has X on it.

Exactly. The change is that now it is low risk and easy to keep items in the Shared stash for other chars to use.

They always intended the items to be shared on the account which is why you could move them around to other chars. They apparently decided that the issue was not that they were shared, but that sharing was tedious and risky.

Yep. That eliminates a whole huge slew of issues from botting to shared gear on an account. Some consider that a “feature” of D2 though - warts and all.

There would be no economy otherwise - a choice they made in RoS with D3. It seems they don’t want to do that to D2R.

Ladder will certainly have a lot more rarity and item hunting each reset. Didn’t they say they wanted ladders shorter than 6 months in D2R?

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Account bound and personal loot don’t eliminate botting, though. I hope Blizzard comes up with a system much better than paragon for endgame d4.
D3 it is a massive advantage to Xp-bot.

I think there are many ways to do it but I won’t derail the topic, I’ll leave that for the d4 forums :slight_smile:

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This is not a problem, this is a description of the function of a shared inventory.

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that would leave the option of equipping more chars to have fun with, like a faith gmb on ur ama ( not cheap) than dual axes for the barb, exile for the pala 6 ls claws for the sin. with the moving of charms like anni it leaves room for you to spend ur hard earned runes on other chars, now you have more chars to have fun with, and as hinted at in my examples, not every char benefits from the same things, ES sorc dont need life scs and pala combat skillers and venom sins dont need psn charms and so on, though it can be moved around alot of it is far from optimal. but i do see what you are getting at, the need for only 1 anni isnt really that bad, getting a perfect one is extremely rare, and Dclone will spawn alot less due to the lack of duped sojs, which would also make the anni alot more expensive.
your point 1. not all classes uses sojs
point 2. not all classes uses enigma, though it is a well rounded armor it is not the end of gearing its a nice item but it is not perfect ( not cheap with no duped runes)
point 3. perfect cta are hard to make, and again few people uses them as attack weapons so they will be swapped around your classes anyway, i used to have 2 or 3 and switched the ones i had to other chars for a while when i played them.
point 4. a perf anni is a very rare thing to even see, and Dclone will be hard to find as no duped sojs.

though it was abit of a hassle, we did mule gear around to other chars, if you wanted ur perf anni/torch/cta on an other char u just muled it, this just makes it easier and less risky, and most people used friends to hold the gear

the economy will be fine dont worry :smiley:

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Just like you have currently. You just have to waste time to mule it with someone.

I think its fine, i played with shared stash on single player and i dont see issue with this, yeah i can switch equip between chars, but why should i not be? If you find item its up to you how to use it and all heroes should have access to it.

I could even switch charms every time between heroes yeah but its tedious work.

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Before D2R, all characters could have access to your gear by using an alt account, a friend, or just a public game, to transfer your gear around.

Now you can just do it through your stash.

This isn’t an issue. It was already possible, it just took 20 seconds instead of 5.

You’re literally creating a problem where there was none.

In fact, I will push this one step further:

This is a game in which you can LEND PEOPLE GEAR.

Does your friend want to try out Enigma? You can let them borrow it.

It’s awesome.

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I don’t have a problem with it, swapping stuff will still be annoying and if they can keep bots to a minimum, gear will be hard to come by anyways.

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Uh, no its not a problem at all, it fixes problems… People would call it pay to win because people who bought a 2nd account would use that account to safely transfer items, Vs unsafe way. So I see no problem at all.

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There will also be the people(like me) that will want Fully Geared guys that there items are theirs.

Have 5 pallies? get 5 Ptorches. I like my characters to feel “Completed” and while rotating gear will be nice for acquiring wealth, I know I will want full items on my characters in the long haul.

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Huh? no, they didn’t. This is why muling was literally a massive epidemic that lead to the shared stash being created in the first place. Literally 99.9% of everyone whos ever played D2 has made mules and also transfered many items via either gomule or in game on bnet. This did not lead to additional MFing or farming beyond what anyone already did. If someone wants to gear up 2 or 7 characters, they can more easily and efficiently now overall. This will improve the experience and keep people playing longer not shorter. Whenever i lost an item Xfering i would ragequit and play LESS, not more. lol

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Methinks someone hasn’t been paying that much attention. Shared stash has been argued as a gameplay change. We do it anyways though, even though the concept of muling is/was against the original intent of the creators by having limited stash space (you were meant to “choose” and trade, not hoard). The original itemization however of this system, complemented this well enough though (rares were bis, very limited unique/sets, no charms, no jewels, etc). The stash was doubled in LoD due to more items in the game worthy of collecting. With shared and expanded stash, comes less opportunity cost in grabbing and storing more items while gaming due to muling not being as big of a pain to do, it really is a gameplay and balance of items change imo, but it needed to happen for many reasons.