Bag Sorting Inventory Features Coming February 26th

image courtesy Suzita Star Shadow

Are your bags out of control? Do you spend hours each week just sorting your inventory? Next week, we’ll be getting some tools which will greatly facilitate this drudgery.

From EverQuest2.com:

Colette “Dexella” Murphy talks with Kenneth “Terrogaunt” Roecks about the new inventory abilities that will be launched with the update!

Colette “Dexella” Murphy: Players have already heard a little bit about bag sorting during the Podcast, but let’s recap. How does the new bag sorting feature work?

Kenneth “Terrogaunt” Roecks: The sorting process is essentially grabbing all of the items from your inventory and then checking each item to see what it is. It then groups similar items together in an “order of operations” method ( IE: All attuned gear is equipment, but not all equipment is attuned, so the attunement must be checked first.) to drop them into the destination bags in logical groupings. It makes use of this same system for picking up items now too! Say hello to a designated quest item bag!

Dexella: How do you use the new bag sorting features?

Terrogaunt: Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever used that big “Auto Inventory” box on the Persona window, so I made that a bit smaller and added a button that performs “/sort_bags name” OnPress. If you’d rather type out the command, you can do so with /sort_bags followed by either “name” or “level” to sort items within their groupings by name or level.

Dexella: How many categories are available? What are they?

Terrogaunt: At the time of writing this there are 14 different filters in the Bag Options window, but we can easily add more as players request them. These currently include:

• Adornments
• Armor
• Attunement (on equipment)
• Baubles
• Cloaks
• Collection Items (or shinies)
• Harvests
• House items
• Jewelry ( rings, charms, etc )
• Misc ( those various items that might not perform a great enough or common enough function or purpose to designate their own item type )
• Poisons
• Potions
• Quest Items
• Weapons

Dexella: How can bag sorting benefit the players?

Terrogaunt: Bag sorting just makes so much sense in a game where you can have over 200 items in your bags after you finish running through a zone or two. I put off going back to the vendor until the very last second, so it’s nice to have the items I want to throw on the broker in one section of my inventory and all of the vendor trash in another. I can only imagine it will also help in situations like when new players get the overflowing inventory message and when a more seasoned player is using the “double click to sell” from bag option. Combine the on-press item relocation with the auto-allocation on looting and you’ve got an almost completely autonomous inventory management system. I can only hope that it proves to be as useful to everyone else!

Dexella: The feedback from the In Testing forums seemed to have a significant impact on this feature. How did their feedback help you shape this during development?

Terrogaunt: Having players willing to try out stuff while it’s still in development is an enormous boon to both development and the player base as a whole. On features that focus on usability, it just doesn’t even make sense to only have other developers look at it. Having users tell us what they want and what works for them eliminates a lot of the guess work. In reality, we also don’t tend to have any extra time to allocate on going back to revise old systems, so making sure that we can get it done right the first time is a huge boon!

Thanks, Terrogaunt, for this look into the new inventory options coming on February 26! Stay tuned for even MORE news and information about what’s coming next week!