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Do you use the "Compact" inventory option?


Wolfb.7025

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With the recent change we got two extra buttons on our inventory panel which are Deposit All Materials and Compact, so it made me wonder, how many players does actually use the Inventory Compact option? not a peculiar reason for this poll other than satiate my curiosity, so go ahead, vote.


I personally never used Compact because I organize my inventory in a specific way where I put items on the top and on the bottom of the grid.There was algo an option before the change that allowed you to move the Compact option down below the droplist of the Settings icon, and it was useful because you could get that option out of the way. But now with this change there is the risk of missclicking the second icon and messing up with your inventory arrangement, It already happened to me once.

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@Dawdler.8521 said:

@"Wolfb.7025" said:But now with this change there is the risk of missclicking the second icon and messing up with your inventory arrangementThere is specific bags for that.

If there were bags that would let me put food at the lower right of a bag in an order by effect, and a row of spare weapons at the top of another, and keepsakes/rp props in another, and fun items like the rift stabilizer or birthday cake gun on the left side in a bag that shows up without scrolling down, and salvage kits to the right above the food, and things I plan to move to the bank in the first slots of bag 2, etc etc, I'd be all over it. But I have a bag that grabs all my consumables and it drives me nuts that it acts like an invisible bag so I have to manually move anything I want to deposit out of it if overflow gets into that bag, and I can't quickly see that I got new unid's. I want items to go where I put them, not where the game thinks would be awesome for them. I have items sorted by location in the overall inventory window, differentiated by separate bags to help me find them. The only specialty bag I like is invisible, and I want just one of those, at the bottom of my inventory, to hold all the random nostalgia items that I don't actually use much.

It's like finding information in a book I've read. I know what I'm looking for is about halfway into the book, near the top of the right hand page. It really wouldn't be helpful for someone to digitize the book into a PDF and hand it to me, beaming, saying "Here, you can scroll around on a screen to find your information, which btw I rearranged into chapters that make better sense to me."

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Nope, never. My bottom bag is generally an invisible bag where I keep unidentified gear and anything else I don't want to accidentally salvage, but I'm someone who fills their inventory from the bottom up. I will periodically move anything I'm keeping to the bottom so that I can see new loot as I get it because I cannot stand a "top heavy" inventory and it's easier to judge when I need to pop by a bank when I don't need to scroll to the bottom of my inventory.

I'm also not a fan of specialty bags because they affect where loot can go. I have the Reinforced Olmakhan Bandolier on one character and I can't even list the number of times it's caused me to salvage unid gear by accident or how drops get lost because suddenly instead of loot filling from the top down, it fills both from the top and middle. And that's just one bag—I'm not going to use a mix of invisible, craftsmen, equipment, oiled, and Olmakhan bags on one character because that would be utterly obnoxious for me to deal with. Maybe some people are fine with that and I'm not knocking them, but I refuse to do something that makes looting a frustration for me in an MMO where loot is a large part of gameplay.

I'm also not going to go out and replace every bag of my 37 characters with various other bags to the tune of hundreds to over a thousand gold just because of a bad design choice that ignores the history of the compact button and some people don't want for there to be an option to move the compact button's placement despite that being the case when it was an option in the cog menu.

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I don't use it for two reasons:

1) I keep some things at different points in my inventory and the placement helps remind me why it's there, and helps keep, for example, weapons I'm saving because my character uses them sometimes, separate from karma weapons I'm keeping to put in the Mystic Forge when I have enough. It's not worth buying special bags because what I'm keeping changes frequently (putting in in a character's inventory is often a prompt to use it up sooner or later) and the bag rules are too vague. If I used an equipment bag to store the karma weapons then random loot would get mixed in there as well and I'd have to sort it all out anyway. (I do use an invisible bag for stuff I don't want to accidentally salvage or sell, but that's right at the bottom and I don't want to fill it with stuff I can't salvage or sell because that's a waste of the space.)

2) My normal way of sorting my inventory is to open any containers (except unidentified gear which I do separately later on), deposit materials, sell whatever I can on the Trading Post, click on the shared slots at the bottom to jump down the list and salvage any remaining rare or lower tier equipment (the salvage kit is in a shared slot) then scroll up the list looking for anything remaining which isn't part of what I normally keep, so I can decide what to do with it. Doing that manually is more effective for getting me to actually stop and think about what it is and what I want to do with it, rather than just dumping it all into a heap at the top where I can see it as starting over filling my inventory with drops...only now I'm starting with a bunch of stuff that won't ever get cleared out by my normal process and will just build up until it's impractical, and then it seems more daunting to sort it all.

I completely understand different people have different ways to organise their inventory and I think it's great that the game allows us to choose whatever method/s we prefer. I don't understand why wanting to get back an option we had for years to simply choose not to use one of the options available has become so controversial. It's not like anyone is suggesting anything should be taken away from those who like the compact option and want to use it. I just want the option not to use it, instead of having it so close to a button I do use that it's highly likely I'll hit the wrong one by accident when I'm in a hurry.

It's like, I hardly ever use the search option either, but I'm fine with it being there for the people who do use it. I can't imagine it offends anyone that I choose not to search my inventory, but somehow it's controversial that some of us don't use compact and don't want to hit it by accident because it messes up the system we do have.

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My characters all have a single invisible bag at the bottom. It's where I keep things that need to be hidden to avoid depositing, merchant screens, salvage all, etc. Just above that, I put things that don't need to be protected from all that. Some things are permanently there, some temporary, like now with the halloween event. The character I use for that has growing stacks of all the rubbish drops that I only deal with when a stack overflows. Every character has some stuff just above the invisible bag and all of it is ordered the way I want it.

Loot accumulates at the top, and when I clear that out, I clear out all of it. There's never anything left to compact. Any rearrangement that will ever occur as a result of compacting, is unwanted. So, I prefer the compact option, be it a button or a menu option as it used to be, well out of the way of the deposit option to avoid misclick disasters. Or, alternatively, create keybind options for those buttons so I never have to move my mousepointer anywhere near them.

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Well, I have 320 slots on each characters, one 32 invisi bag on the bottom for unidentified gears, I'm farming a lot and I like to see my bags clean, I'm using the shared inventory (24 slots) for important consumables and sometimes gears when I have to swap.So Salvage => Compact is a no brainer for me.

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@kharmin.7683 said:I don't think that you'll gather the data you want. The forums represent such a small portion of the entire player base.

That's true, but I think in this case the forum could be a representative sample of the whole playerbase.

It's not a good idea to use forum polls to gauge the whole playerbase's opinions on things like what's most confusing for new players, how much the average person spends on GW2, how much ascended equipment everyone has etc. because people who visit a games forum (and especially hang around to answers polls instead of asking their own question then leaving) tend to be more dedicated or enthusiastic players, who are more likely to spend a lot of time (and money) on the game, because that's the kind of people who also want to talk about it when they're not playing.

But I think it's unlikely that makes us more or less likely to use compact than the average player.

Having said that I'm sure Anet have their own metrics. I don't know if they can see things like how many people used the old option to separate deposit and compact, or even how many people used the compact button but I'm sure there are always that they can work it out. They certainly decided previously it was worth building an option to separate deposit and compact, so they knew there was a demand for it.

But also we have no access to whatever metrics they use, so if we want an answer to refer to ourselves this is our only option. I've seen a lot of posts claiming the majority of people do or don't use compact and the other group is a tiny minority, so I'm finding it interesting to see how the vote goes. Before seeing the poll my guess would have been it's about 50/50 so I'm surprised it seems to be showing an overall preference for not using it.

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No and I risk messing up my inventory management by pressing it.

1.) I have fractal bags on pretty much all my 30+ characters which presort loot by rarity.2.) I have 3 slots in the shared inventory dedicated to blue, green and yellow Unidentified Gear so these neither get salvaged by accident as well as accumulate no matter which character I play. I open and salvage all any time the stacks in the shared slots get close to 2503.) As others have mentioned, I have my entire items in the bottom part of the inventory, mostly in 1-3 invisible bags. This prevents accidental sales, salvages, etc. My main roster of characters all have 160 slots (often around 120 or so free at the top) and my alternate characters have 80 slots (often with around50-60 free slots).4.) I have all my bags merged. I have no need for using separate bags as sorting or management tools

This allows me to keep a clean and organized inventory which presorts drops into the top and middle part of the inventory. Immediately warns me when my inventory is nearly full, given how the remaining space between presorted new loot fills up the spaces to my regular items. As well as allows me to keep specific weapons and items in fixed places for switching out short term for blasting or prestacking (both PvE and WvW).

I can only recommend any player who hasn't tried this to give it a try. My old inventory stile was always: stack everything at the top, then have some type of "wall item" or cut off point from where on everything "new" starts collecting. The new approach is imo far superior because it removes the necessity for such a transition placeholder plus it allows to make use of presorting bags more easily.

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New player. I like the bag system so far and do mostly what Jilora does. I use the deposit button quite a bit to free up space, salvage stuff, then deposit again and then compact. The useful stuff stays at the top of my inventory which seems to be mostly consumables and some items that seem important but I haven't looked up what they do yet. I like having them as buttons instead of going into the gear menu.

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I use it occasionally when clearing a lot of inventory. Still, I don't like it's placement right next to the deposit button. My crafting alts generally hold extra armor of their weight class, sorted by level and type. Just after the new buttons were introduced I accidently hit the compact button instead of the deposit button after crafting some materials. Sorting everything in that alt's inventory out and getting it back in its right place was a pain. And if you tell me to use invisible bags, I'll tell you to send me the extra gold to buy those bags and I will. :)

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Almost every time I play. The stuff I use most is in a maxed out bank of shared inventory slots. And all the stuff I use less frequently (but want to keep handy) is in a 32-slot invisible bag directly underneath the shared inventory. I actually have to put filler items in that invisible bag to prevent empty slots from being filled with junk.

Every other bag in my inventory is an overflow reservoir for trash loot. And I use the compact button to help "empty the trash" every time I play. Silver fed salvage-o-matic > deposit all materials > sell to merchant > compact > start dragging and dropping all the trash that's still there.

I've never even come close to needing all 32 slots in my invisible bag. So I'm confused by so many people who seem imply they need to spread out dozens of items across all their bags in specific spots. I just cant imagine what anybody has in their bags that requires such a system.

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I don't use "compact" inventory option, but at the same time I don't care about that button being pulled out of the menu. It changes nothing for me and I don't see a problem with it being like it currently is (and I won't see the problem until I somehow start missclicking that button I guess, maybe having an option to "lock" that button to avoid these acciddents would make everyone happy).

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