The thing is, GW2’s loot economy is based around drooping and salvaging large quantities of items. In order to pay out what feels like good loot for killing stuff, the “trash” greens and blues have to be somehow manageable without requiring people to visit a merchant every 5 seconds.
In order to cut the number of bags, they’d have to seriously increase the number of inventory slots be bag, or offer some sort of median vendor payout for said bags.
Increasing inventory space doesn’t solves the “click all the things” issue, and offering a vendor payout for unopened bags would just feel like a penalty for people not willing to open the bags and loot things “properly”
Without completely changing how the loot>materials>crafted items economy works I can’t really see a better option than what they started in the HoT maps, use less bag types so at least when you’re looting the bags stack better. Anything else would require not just an overhaul of loot, but of the whole loot and crafting systems to a point it wouldn’t be worth the headache and require stupid amounts of resources to to band-aid somethings that’s a pretty core part of how the game’s economy works.
Plus, I like taking the down time to open a bunch of bags. It’s like when you’d trick-or-treat as a kid and then come home and inventory all the loot. It’s kind of relaxing after several hours of murdering stuff.
Why can’t mobs drop the approximate amount of gold and/or mats instead of useless gear we have to sell? Add blues and greens to merchants (I think they actually may be already), so newer players can buy it if they want it, give the rest of us the raw results. ez pz
There are choices inherant in the greens and blues that are important to the economy. See, greens/blues are a built in risk/reward system. You can go the safe route and vendor them, or the unsafe route and salvage them or mystic forge them. That unsafe, gambling route can result in much higher payouts than vendoring, but also risks resulting in lower payouts, and also serves to provide luck.
Both of those things are important to the supply of crafting materials, runes, and sigils to the economy, which in effect determines their rarity.
Economies that mostly reward just currency with no coice point in what to do with the majority of the loot aren’t any fun, and just result in boring and unfulfilling loot. This was the problem diablo 3 had before they shut down the gold AH. Once you had “good” items, every other item was completely useless and it was very rare you’d find something that had any use other than as a fancier colored piece of vendor trash.
If your proposed solution was adopted, the price of materials would skyrocket, as their only source would be from spending money, in order to spend even more money to salvage them, or gathering. Most of the t5+ common materials the player base introduces to the economy are the result of salvaging, not harvesting.
Would adding more liquid currency balance that cost? Yes. But it would also result in far less potential rolls for fun loot by getting some ectos or T6 maps. Ectos would tank, and gameplay would reward players more for buying items from vendors than actually playing the primary focus of the game and killing mobs for loot.
But hey, lets say you put the raw pats on the drop tables too. Just adding the mats to the drop tables would remove the choice point, meaning far larger amounts entering the economy. in order to balance that you’d have to pay out far less per player on average than you do with the opportunity cost of salvaging them.
That results in an economy where rare mats are far less rare, which in turn results in lower payouts for the mats that drop for you, personally, leading back to the same problem. The only loot of value you’re acquiring is currency, but because everyone else is doing the same thing, only a very small handful of drops (unique skins) have any value at all, so your loot is just numbers shifting around that you pile up for mich longer periods before you can get the satisfaction of spending that money on something you want.
In a game with constant stat ramping, this kind of stuff is okay because what’s “bad” loot for you may be great loot for a lot of other players. In GW2, however, stats cap out pretty fast, which means there’s no incentive to look at an item you don’t need and make a choice regarding how valuable it is to other players.
The GW2 economy replaces that choice by giving your loot multiple built in purposes so that loot is still interesting despite most experienced players never finding “better” items, or even finding items other players would be willing to purchase because they’re an upgrade.
Guild Master – The Papacy [POPE] (Gate of Madness)/Road Scholar for the Durmand Priory
Writer/Director – Quaggan Quest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky2TGPmMPeQ 
. So, Happy players and happy business. win/win for ANET.
. RSI is no laughing matter and all the clicking … I fear for my health. (This wont stop me selling my lewts)