Inventory Management in Retail vs. Classic

With the launch of The War Within coming up soon, I had to knuckle down and finally get at least some of my characters ready for the expansion in a major way: by cleaning up their bags. And it made me think about how it's weird that I find inventory management in retail to be so much more of a chore than in Classic.

Classic WoW is extremely stingy with bag space, while absolutely overwhelming you with crap to pick up. Look up a random low-level mob on Wowhead and it will show it dropping from a loot table of literally a hundred different items while you're starting out with a 12-slot backpack which is already partially filled up with things like quest items. Earning any extra slots is extremely slow, and you'll find yourself running to see a vendor all the time.

And yet... I enjoy that. I'm that person who has to loot absolutely everything, and I generally enjoy the decision-making process involved in deciding what to keep and what to throw away if I run out of space while out in the field - though there is definitely a pain point where I feel I have nothing but "must-keep"s left and I'm just upset that I really can't pick up anything new anymore.

Retail has evolved into a very different game in that regard. It's pretty generous in terms of bag space - if you're a returning player, you can instantly get a full set of 22-slot bags for free, and it's not hard to get up to 30+ slots per bag. At the same time, they've dramatically reduced the amount of random crap that drops out in the world (I bemoaned this as early as Wrath of the Lich King). M+ has no loot drops at all to avoid the inevitable friction of someone like me slowing the group down just because they want to pick up their well-earned silver from the trash. So... keeping your bags clean should be easy, right?

Well... it is and it isn't. It is in terms of everyday gameplay in that you shouldn't find yourself running out of bag space after every dungeon run or session of questing. I saw a post on reddit the other day where someone showed that it's possible to level a character from 10-70 without visiting a vendor even once (though by that point their bags were very full).

The problem is that your available inventory space will shrink over time as your bags fill up with items of questionable utility. In Classic, there are very few of those. Almost everything can either be classified as gear, consumables, vendor trash or "useful whites" which are usually either relevant to crafters or for some kind of reputation hand-in. It helps of course that everything in Classic is a known quantity, but even so, I think that even if you were to approach it as a completely new player, you can make sense of how to manage your inventory relatively quickly.

Now, retail has theoretically optimised inventory management in many ways over the years. Mounts, pets and toys are no longer items you have to carry around but simply go into a dedicated tab of their own. Same for currencies. Even quest items don't always exist in your bags and often get relegated to just being clickables in the quest tracking UI, though I honestly find that a bit confusing sometimes... the point is, it should all be optimised and extremely easy.

However, the reality is different. For some reason, even though we have all these dedicated tabs for things, they love giving us currencies that don't go into the currency tab, and toys that don't go into the toys tab. All those world events they added in Dragonflight often have some currency or event item associated with them that will go into your bags. They removed the keyring years ago but that doesn't stop them from giving you keys for stuff. The Zkera Vaults in the Forbidden Reach were particularly terrible for this, giving you both a stack of keys and an endless mountain of items that were only useful in that particular instance and nowhere else (but you better save them for next week!)

In Dragonflight in specific, someone also thought it would be funny if a lot of vendors wouldn't accept gold as currency, but would instead insist on bartering for random crafting mats or even gear items. I remember being excited to unlock some new rep reward from Wrathion and Sabellian just to find that I didn't have enough bear spines or whatever on me to purchase it. There was also that trader in Iskaraa who wanted jewellery in exchange for one of his mounts and would literally take off people's equipped rings and necklaces if you weren't careful. Just fun times all around. I picture a WoW dev coming up with this idea as "fun and quirky"... but in practice it was just a pain.

More to the point though, it created this environment where you were never quite sure whether to get rid of some things or whether they weren't meant to be extremely useful for something later that you just hadn't quite figured out yet. I hated that. I enjoy having to choose what to keep in my inventory based on items having different values. I don't like not having a clue what the value of anything is and having to spend the afternoon trawling through Wowhead to figure it out.

Anyway, I finally bit the bullet the other day and actually threw a bunch of stuff away, including thousands of Artisan's Mettle. I strongly identified with this reddit post. I mean, I could tell from the tooltip that it was used in crafting, but never came across anything that used it myself (never mind the "myriad of uses").

On the plus side, with the pre-patch making those coins for the Niffen account-bound, I was able to pool those and buy a few mounts (after looking up where to find what). It was all just a bit exhausting. I can only hope for less of that in War Within.