Beta Feedback

It seemed like converting the bank to use this system would be great. People liked the Shared Storage and we thought they’d like the new bank too.

Then we started the Beta Test. The response of the beta testers was tremendously negative, quickly growing the forum thread to over 40 pages. There were several concerns with the new vault. The primary concerns were focused on two factors – the inability for players to organize the items in their vault using whatever organizational system they preferred, and the inability to see all items in the vault on screen at once. Addressing either of these issues would require major work to fix, and normally we might have decided to hold off on making any changes until the next release. However, in case of user-organization, there was a critical reason to create a solution in time for the Volume III Book 2 launch. Beta feedback showed that many of our users had already spent several hours organizing their vaults just the way they wanted. If we didn’t provide them with the means to preserve their existing arrangement, then even if we introduced a user-organization solution in a future release, players would need to start from scratch and once again spend hours reorganizing their vaults.

The problem was how to implement and test an appropriate solution in the time available to us. I spent a while in talks with other engineers and designers and finally we were able to come up with a design that could be implemented within our time constraints and would serve to satisfy the immediate needs of the players. Thus were born the new “chests.”

The first version of the chest dropdown had an “Unassigned” entry, followed by “Chest 1” all the way to “Chest 10”. However, we realized that “Main Chest” was a better name than “Unassigned” and would map nicely to the way users had their items laid out previously. One of the advantages of the new chests is that there is no limit to the number of items that can go in any given chest. You could choose to store every item in your vault in the main chest or split them up as you see fit. We are also able to assign your items to chests based on where they were in the old vault.

Everyone was on board to implement chests quickly, but we ran into a problem that we thought might mean no chests for launch. The problem was one of auto-merge. Let’s say that you have 37 Sturdy Hides sitting in your vault and you come back from adventuring with 40 more. You could drag them in and just have a single stack of 77 Hides. This is great, but creates weird situations with chests. Say that you have Chest 2 displayed on screen and drag in your 40 hides. The stack of 37 hides may be hidden away in Chest 1. Do we take the resulting stack of 77 hides and put it all in Chest 2? Does the newly-grown stack just stay in Chest 1, but then the hides appear to disappear from the user’s screen? After quite a bit of discussion, we decided that the hides should stay in Chest 1, but that we would shift the user’s view to that chest.

Even without chests, there was a potential for items appearing to disappear due to the filter option, so we applied the new reasoning to the filter selection as well – if you drag in an item not matching the current filter, the filter is changed to display the item.

Given that this view-switching behavior might be a bit confusing to some players, we decided to display some basic vault usage tips whenever the current vault view was empty.

One of the great things about chests is that they gave us the ability to sort the items when viewing all of them, in a way closer to the way the user thinks of them. We can show the items in the Main Chest first, in Chest 1 second, etc. To select this sorting option, you can use “Chest” in the sorting menu. Items within each chest are sorted alphabetically.