Just One More Thing...

Sunday Morning. By long tradition a time to sort through packs and bags and vaults. To wake sleepy half-elves and dozing dwarves and send them grumbling down to the mailbox or the bank. Sometimes morning runs into afternoon. Sometimes it lasts all day.

Alright, I'll come clean. Sometimes it lasts all week. An inordinate amount of my gameplay in most MMOs seems to consist of moving items from one virtual storage area to another. There's a reason this blog is called "Inventory Full".

Am I complaining? Hardly! It's one of the things I enjoy the most. It's satisfying in the same way tidying a cluttered room is satisfying, only without the dust and the endless bending over. Nothing better than sitting back after a couple of hours hard clicking to see three empty bags looking back at you. Another 120 slots to fill with Large Meaty Bones and Droag Egg Fragments.

Sunday Morning at the Bank. With Bear.

Available storage space has a big influence on how loyal I am to an MMO. A game that allows me to hoard vast quantities of junk that I'll probably never find a use for has a significantly better chance of seeing me log in regularly and keep on logging in for years than one that doesn't. I may lose interest in progressing the characters, I may never have been interested in the story, but I will always need to visit my stuff.

Spot the odd one out

 Contrarily, MMOs that are extremely stingy with storage space sort of work for me too. It's liberating to know that I can't just pick up everything that falls out of a goblin or hang onto all my no-stats starter gear in case I ever get the urge to stroll around town dressed as a dirt-poor farm-boy. Having just the one bag and a measly bank vault means I spend a lot more time actually doing the things the designers probably meant me to do, like quests and stuff. I've never once felt tempted to spend real money to get more space, though, so that part of the design doesn't seem to be working.

I rarely build up any kind of long-term connection with MMOs where space is a commodity. I find I think of myself as a wandering ronin. Oh alright then, The Littlest Hobo. I'm free to come and go as I please, and after a while I don't please all that often and finally not at all.

So, masses of storage space good, almost no storage space also good, if not for long. It's in the middle that I run into problems. I moaned about Lord of the Rings Online a while back. At the time I was complaining more about how tiny everything was rather than how much of it I had but the sheer quantity of junk that I have squashed into a middling amount of storage space does present a real barrier to entry when it comes to dropping back in.

No I am not a "beardy hobbit"

What I lack in height...

The recently-announced and somewhat controversial Premium Wallet that I read about over at KTR  isn't going to help me all that much. I don't have all that many extraneous currency items clogging up my packs and even if I did I surely wouldn't be paying any ten dollars for aggregation rights. Mostly what I have is crafting raws. And food. And potions. Something else that Zubon mentions could just make a difference to my LotRO quality of life, though, and that's the Shared Bank. I might finally have found a use for the 1045 Turbine Points I have somehow accumulated. Well, 995 of them at least.

Not quite sure what brought all that on. None of this was what I intended to write about when I started at the top of the page. That's Sunday morning for you.