No more room for rewards

World of Warcraft rewards your actions in two ways, either by giving you some sort of points (xp, honor, reputation, gold), or by giving you items. Points might or might not be capped, but even if they are, the cap is usually high enough to enable you to keep collecting them for a very long time. Item rewards are a lot more critical, because the number of spaces in your inventory and the bank is so limited. So you end up throwing away rewards, just because you don't have room for them.

A number of item rewards in World of Warcraft are not very useful. Especially holiday events tend to reward you with items which are cute, but have no major impact on gameplay. There are festive clothes, stones that create columns of light, items to transform you into a snowman, all sorts of non-combat pets, and many other fun but useless things. But you can also get non-combat pets or other items that are just for fun, like the faded photograph of Link with Princess Zelda, or the rod that transforms you into a furbolg, from quests. Obviously as soon as your inventory space becomes a problem, these useless items are the first to go. Most of them are soulbound, and have no vendor value, so you can just throw them away.

A major drain on your inventory space are tradeskills. Whether you are doing alchemy, enchanting, tailoring, leatherworking, smithing, or engineering, you soon find lots of slots in your bank and inventory taken up by all sorts of tools and ingredients. But fortunately most of them are not soulbound, so you can simply create a bank character, and just send him all the materials. That is sometimes annoying, because it is hard to keep track of what materials you have when they are distributed over two or more characters. And sending them back and forth takes time. But at least you don't have to destroy them when space runs out.

Gear, as in armor and weapons, starts out as being not much of a problem, as long as you still level up. In most cases, when you find a better item, you don't mind vendoring the old item, because there is no reason to keep it. Once you hit the level cap, the situation changes. You might have one cloak with great stats, and another one which gives a great bonus to fire resistance, and you will want to keep both, depending on the situation. But then both of them will be soulbound, and you can't store them elsewhere. For quite some time fire resistance will be all you need, but then you start going to Ahn'qiraj, and start collecting nature resistance gear. And it appears obvious that as Blizzard is adding more dungeons, you soon will be needing resistance gear for all 5 types of magical damage. And then sometimes you just have two items which are different, without one being clearly superior to the other, for example one that gives more intellect, while the other gives faster mana regeneration, or a bonus to healing spells. Again it depends on the situation what item is better, and you might want to keep both.

After spending a lot of money on bank bag slots and 16-slot bags, you can reasonably expect to reach 136 bank spaces and 80 inventory spaces at level 60. Special bags for herbs or enchanting materials, as well as ultra-rare 18-slot bags can improve that slightly. In addition Blizzard recently added a "keyring", a special bag holding only a few specific dungeon keys, but not other dungeon-specific items, like the "keys" for UBRS and Onyxia. But given the hundreds of possible items you might want to store, armor, weapons, materials, quest items, potions, and other consumables, most players don't have enough inventory space.

One possible solution would be offering people some additional slots for storing armor. Players could for example get a number of mannequin dolls, each one able to hold a complete set of armor. So you could have one mannequin with your fire resistance gear, one with your PvP armor, one with your PvE armor, and so on. If WoW one day in the far future introduces player housing (an option which the developers still think about), the mannequins could be in your house, serving as decoration as well as storage. But for the time being the mannequins could be accessible just from your cities tailor store, and work a bit like a second bank, just with some added button to quickly exchange your armor with that of the mannequin.

And of course there is always the simpler option of introducing bigger bags into the game, something which is already expected for the Burning Crusade expansion. But one thing is clear: As Blizzard considers collecting items to be one major point which attracts players to the game, they need to enable the players to actually keep those items somewhere.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:51 AM Permanent Link