"New" bank interface

[Elfishski]

A good banking system should be:

1. Searchable (by name)
2. Filterable (by slot of item, by level range, by binding)
3. Sortable (by age of being in the bank, by name, by binding)
4. In one place
5. Responsive (you click and it doesn't take a minute to load whatever's next)

Unbelievably, all of the many current concurrent systems for storing items (except the auction house) fail at some or ALL of those basic functions (!). Updates have huge lists of new items and honestly it is sucking the fun out of the game trying to move them around. Either you throw them out when not using them and spend hours re-farming the same things if you want them again. You spend hours arranging them carefully on specific alts by your own sorting scheme, or you just have random piles of garbage on a lot of alts and spend hours searching. Playing just one build that uses one set of items and doesn't have to sort much is also popular I guess, or just giving up on storage and use whatever you find in a given life. None of these are ideal.

Recommendation:

1. Leave inventory as it is, that's fine and we can organize as we see fit for things that are carried around.
2. Replace the shared bank interface, the bank interface, the guild chests, the crafting storage, and the reincarnation cache with a single unified system.
3. This system could very easily be adapted from the auction house system, which actually succeeds at basic functionality.
4. It would be possible and tempting to include both auction houses inside this functionality too, but might lead to errors that lose people favourite items or spending shards when they didn't mean to etc so probably best not to.

In the new banking system, changes from the auction house interface:

1. The "duration" just counts up from when it was put in the bank instead of down as in the auction house.
2. Add in deposit/withdraw buttons next to the current balance displayed at the bottom, and make this current balance refer to what's in the shared bank (aka platinum vault)
3. Instead of current price/buyout, there is a "available to" column, which for each item displays the current status of the item, which you can change with a dropdown menu, options of "Character", "Account", or "Guild". If an item has a binding status that would preclude one of those options, they aren't available (e.g. you can't make a BTC item available for anything other than character, but you could set a BTA item to be either character or account)
4. To deposit an item, you can just drag and drop it onto the auction house. Double click or click and drag to withdraw directly into inventory rather than sending a mail!
5. Either at the top of the screen or at the side, it can display something like:
   150 of 160 character, 200 of 210 account, 100 of 250 guild, 1000 of 1400 ingredient
   Equating to what would be classified under existing character bank, shared account, guild chests, and crafting storage.

Thorny issues with the various options available:

1. Defaults availability:
   
   • Stored as an ingredient if possible, account if not, BTC otherwise. Guild only by deliberate choice. - I think this is simplest, but pros and cons each way.
   • Make deposits have to happen through a specific "deposit" page where availability is chosen
2. Cosmetic items:
   
   • Regular account or BTC items, but they DO have a separate sorting category in the left hand menu along with weapons etc, and categories for each type of cosmetic within those
   • Separate category entirely with their own counter, purchased independently
   • Not included in the banking interface, cosmetic options moved to a cosmetics closet available any time in any quest just like pets - I think this is the best solution
3. Reincarnation cache (what to do when a character reincarnates):
   
   • Everything in their inventory, on their person, and "available to character" gets stored in a separate character "reincarnation cache" which only the character can see just like "available to character", and they can move things out of that status via the dropdown but not back to it. Essentially maintaining current functionality of reincarnation cache but searchable etc.
   • Put all items in a characters inventory into the bank with "available to character" set. Allow overflow of this e.g. 250 of 160 character, overflow just means items can only be withdrawn, not deposited (if choosing this item, need to sell a lot more character banking space) - I think this is the best solution.
   • Sell enough cheap extra banking space to make up the current size limits of cache + inventory + bank, move things to the bank and do NOT allow overflow, refuse to let a character reincarnate until there is enough space available.
4. Ingredients:
   
   • Convert all "crafting storage" slots into regular account storage, but have ingredients only use up 1/100th of a slot or so? - I think this is the best solution, much cleaner
   • Have as a separate category for storage alongside account, using the current purchased values for crafting storage

[systemshaker1941]

I'm onboard with any system that improved the ****-poor storage systems in this game.

In the shared bank, the FIRST page shows you the LAST item put into the bank. That would be a huge improvement.

Currently in shared bank you can sort of get some of the functionality with search, but its not great.

Bank space needs to be about 4-5 times bigger. I really like your "unified system" idea, especially if it would mean I could see one character's bank contents from another character. No more hopping between mules in a blind, desperate search for items!!!

[Enoach]

I agree that improvements need to be made to the inventory system.


However, I think a short term improvement would be to add the current "standard bank" and "TR Cache" interfaces to the current Shared Bank/Bag interface.


The reasons I feel this would be a good short term gain to improvement
1. It has paging
2. It has filter
3. It would improve Bank Load time as it does not need to "load" 3 different interfaces and their inventory before a player can interact; standard bank, TR Cache and Shared - This could default to the standard bank tab which is generally the smallest
4. This can help avoid issues of trying to move items between bank interfaces
5. The inventory wouldn't need to be loaded for each "tab" until the user access the tab (part of faster loading but also based on reducing time to load data a user may not even need)


After this:
1. Additional information can be added such as ML
2. then adding of the ability to Sort could then be added to all for the cost of adding it to a single
3. Any additional features that could be added

[BurnerD]

Good Luck with this request... Your idea is good and should at least be considered and commented on by the Devs, but likely will not be.

The antiquated banking system is one of several reason I don't play as much as I used to.

At this point it's not strictly about volume of items, but just about being able to find stuff without logging in and out sveral times, or in the case of the shared bank clicking thru 7 pages (with a delay on each) to get to the last one to grab the item you just placed in there from a different character...

One wonders if a cleaned up, streamlined Inventory system would have an effect on overall game performance...

[Elfishski]

I agree that improvements need to be made to the inventory system.


However, I think a short term improvement would be to add the current "standard bank" and "TR Cache" interfaces to the current Shared Bank/Bag interface.


The reasons I feel this would be a good short term gain to improvement
1. It has paging
2. It has filter
3. It would improve Bank Load time as it does not need to "load" 3 different interfaces and their inventory before a player can interact; standard bank, TR Cache and Shared - This could default to the standard bank tab which is generally the smallest
4. This can help avoid issues of trying to move items between bank interfaces
5. The inventory wouldn't need to be loaded for each "tab" until the user access the tab (part of faster loading but also based on reducing time to load data a user may not even need)


After this:
1. Additional information can be added such as ML
2. then adding of the ability to Sort could then be added to all for the cost of adding it to a single
3. Any additional features that could be added

I'd agree move the reincarnation cache to that system if at all possible - the TR cache as it is fails at all basic bank functionality goals and the multi-second delay to load it and to withdraw each individual item suggests it could certainly use some performance improvement and is probably dragging the server down too. The only way the TR cache could be worse (*except losing items when you TR) is if you couldn't see a preview of any of the items in it I guess?

I strongly don't think the regular bank should be moved to the shared bank interface until after including all minimum functionality - I'm not attached to aesthetics of auction v shared bank, but the former has all the functionality that the latter just utterly fails at right now. If we can't sort items in any way anywhere else (*short of withdrawing all of 200 items in the order you want them and manually placing them back in each time you want to reorder), the player bank at least allows one to manually arrange sets of things for future levels in a coherent fashion without carrying them.

[systemshaker1941]

Simple, quick and dirty solution: add ~500 or so extra slots to the regular bank, eliminate the TR cache entirely. When you TR, all of your inventory is just in the bank.

[Elfishski]

Simple, quick and dirty solution: add ~500 or so extra slots to the regular bank, eliminate the TR cache entirely. When you TR, all of your inventory is just in the bank.

This also only solves one problem of the TR cache* without the others... but yes, if there's no scope for fixing storage properly then quick solutions like this and definitely changing the shared bank from first-in-first-out to first-in-last-out (i.e. most recent deposits on the first page instead of the last page) would be a lot better than nothing.

*would still need something like overflow on banking where you can't deposit until withdrawing enough items as otherwise people will just fill up their newly increased bank AND inventory.


Side note: I'm also curious about how the auction house is not just better in terms of sorting and having minimum levels etc, but it not only contains far more items, it's SO much more responsive when you press buttons than any of the banking systems which often take seconds to load each page and you have to click through all the pages in order. Whatever the server is having to do with those items, it would surely improve the situation greatly if it was using the auction house style instead.

[blerkington]

Good on you for making the effort. But if DDO is still around when we have evolved into beings of pure energy, it will still have the same astonishingly awful bank interface. Death and taxes will be gone, but inventory hassles will remain.

What's even worse is the only recent developer initiative on this issue was an offer to give (spelt s-e-l-l) us more bank space in a form that would have been even more of a pain in the backside to use. Which suggests that the company field trip to the Business Zoo, so staff can finally see what a customer is and learn more about our activities and preferences, really needs to be moved up to occur ASAP.

Thanks.

[systemshaker1941]

I'd buy more storage space if they'd sell it.

To be clear, I still want an improved banking/inventory system; but I'd still buy any additional BtC space they care to offer.

Computer storage, even at the enterprise level, is dirt cheap. Allowing every character to have thousands of items is something freaking Ultima Online could do 20 years ago. There's really no excuse for the exceedingly low inventory caps.