I posted this because I actually am getting repetitive motion strain and so I looked at all the places where this could be streamlined. I want to play the game, but without some help from Anet I am going to have to stop for health reasons.
Or you could just play less/take breaks between mass salvaging/opening if it’s truly creating or exacerbating a health condition? I have hypermobility and lipodystrophy. It hurts me to sit for long periods of time. On the other hand, it also means I take regular breaks from the game to move around and do things around the house. Now consider the 2 hour long metas in HoT – I don’t expect the game to change around my issues and some of those changes would be to the detriment of other players’ enjoyment. I can take a short break or two during a meta to loosen up my joints, make a cup of tea and get back into things without losing participation. It sucks to be sick/disabled (speaking from experience here) but sometimes you do have to adapt your behaviour to fit in with it, rather everything changes to adapt to you. I’d recommend investing in a gaming mouse if you haven’t already done so as you can bind actions to extra buttons – my mouse wheel is my action camera toggle, side button 1 is skill 1 etc.
While I’m on the subject of mouse wheels, I dug this up via Google:
This has been a problem since the launch of the game, and to my knowledge has never been responded to officially in any way. Due to this, I can only assume that they purposefully intend to make using stacks of items as painful as possible to discourage people from doing it. Maybe it’s to discourage farming, who knows (“gee, opening all those bags I farmed would be so annoying, maybe I just won’t”)?
There are, however, ways to deal with the problem without breaking the “one button, one action” rule. One option was already mentioned: bind the “click” action to the “click” of your mouse’s scroll wheel as it turns. It is physically much easier to activate that button many times than it is the left or right click buttons, and it still performs just one action per each unit of physical input (rotating the wheel a certain number of degrees). You could also bind “click” to multiple different buttons at once, such as every single key on your keyboard, and then go to town on it with both hands and your face.
I’ll also note this was before the ‘Consume All’ option was added to Essences of Luck. I’d like a similar option for Piles of Silky Sand but I doubt that’ll see the light of day.
I actually like pop up chests and, sad as it sounds, they make me feel properly rewarded as well as being a kind of checkpoint for certain stages of metas. As I have the autoloot mastery, I don’t see most of what goes into my bags. Certain things in chests like HoT keys, I like to know when I’ve got them so I can make sure I have a space in my inventory for them as they won’t go automatically into my shared inventory slots with my existing HoT keys.
Automatic ‘Deposit all’ for materials – some materials are at almost max capacity in my bank (and I’m at the 2k cap on material stack space) such as dragonite ore, bloodstone dust and increasingly, empyreal fragments. These items won’t go straight into my bank and if I’m mass salvaging from loot bags, I’d rather materials stacked up than my Craftsman bags fill up with sigils/runes. Not to mention there’s people who’d rather not have to go to a bank to retrieve the mats they’ve just gained in order to sell them. Imo this would have to be a toggleable feature.
The drop down with options is preferable over buttons to me. Why? Means more options can be added in the future without worrying about having to reposition things on the inventory every time so another button can be fitted in. You say there’s 4 options now, should ANet decide they like the ‘Salvage All’ idea, it’d be 5. ‘Open All’ for containers would make it 6. You said ‘big buttons’ as well which to me would increase the UI clutter which is overwhelming at times as it is (admittedly better now I don’t have the entire right of my screen covered with various game messages). In fact, I would guess they’d have to redesign/recode the inventory to change over to buttons from the current dropdown.
‘Open All’ – would that include the bags inside bags inside bags? If so, I could see my inventory being full in seconds with the over encumbered popup, even with my max bag slots filled with 18 slot bags. I open my champ bags in bursts of 25-30 before salvaging, green masterwork bags in bursts of about 20. Opening a stack of those bags would create the backlog you wanted to avoid with this not being automatic as your inventory would be instantly full, meaning items would be queued to be deposited in your inventory, which you’d then have to deal with immediately.
Open All on crafting material containers would be fine by me though as you’re not having so many different items entering your inventory (or the queue of items to enter your inventory) at once.
‘Salvage All’ – wouldn’t actually mind that but I find I don’t tend to get enough salvage items for this to really be a problem.
Mystic Forge – I’m interested to see what’s coming in the pipeline with the update to this. I’m hoping it’ll be streamlined in a few ways along with the ability to load up the items from your bank and material storage.
I would like to not have to open Fractal Encryptions twice. The Cracked Encryption serves no purpose for the player.
Seconded.
“Even if we find a way to save the world from the
dragons, I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever find a way to save us from ourselves.”
