Lost & Found

I'm supposed to be preparing for Saturday's tabletop RPG, but I'm not. I was getting started when my wife suddenly yelled, "I hate this game!"

She was playing Shroud at the time.

She was in her greenhouse, and planting the Eternal Seeds her mom had given her. But she could not find her Eternal Nightshade Plant Seed. And it's not the first time something like this has happened, hence the outburst. She's misplaced her favorite music and other things previously.

It seems that somehow multiple items get selected when she's transferring things from one inventory to another. There are a variety of ways that items seem to get selected without the player actually CTRL- or SHIFT-clicking things, such as when someone trades with you or when you loot a container. (Oh, and whatever you do, don't press E when you have a container that's stored in your bank open - everything in it will get selected and dumped into your inventory!) Anyway, so what normally happens is that the misplaced item was unexpectedly transferred into a container other than where it was supposed to be.

I am a programmer by trade, and know that UI design is ... something I stay as far away from as I can. It's far more difficult than it would seem, and there are all sorts of edge cases and difficulties to consider.

But this is just painful. We've already gone through every inventory in her house, and in her apartment, and in each and every house that has containers that she has access to, and we haven't found the seed. We also checked all the planters to make sure it wasn't planted. We're sure it's here somewhere, and it's only a matter of time before we found it (we found her missing music, so there's that, at least).

Despite my purchase of a package way-back-when, we've only been playing since mid-late June. We've already put a significant amount of money into this game, far more than we do for most games, and we all have subscriptions. We don't hate this game - we love it. (Hell, as I type this she's getting the book dungeon entrance, because it's on sale.) But this sort of thing really needs to not happen. Others may have a similar sentiment and actually mean it, and that's bad for everyone, because they quit, and that has knock-on effects.

I know that the devs have said that a universal finder is coming. It can't come soon enough.

Thanks for reading my rant. Also, if you know of any tricks to finding misplaced items, I'd like to hear them!

UPDATE:
She found it! It was planted in one of the other planters she has access to, not the ones in her greenhouse! (There doesn't seem to be any way to update the title of the post.) Still, the point stands.

 

I figured out how to edit the title, but now it won't allow me to remove the comment I made about not being able to update the title:

The following error occurred:
Your content can not be submitted. This is likely because your content is spam-like or contains inappropriate elements. Please change your content or try again later. If you still have problems, please contact an administrator.

If you are an administrator, consider yourself contacted!

 

I really don't understand why this would not already be in game, other than the recent property permissions that may have kicked this can farther down the road...

Also, I believe that only those that are concerned about picking up apples and placing them back on the cart as they fall off, read the forum posts, and those that are actually responsible for determining where the horse is headed probably fall into the RARELY IF EVER category or readers...

 

It really depends on the way in which your items are stored in the game. I suspect it's not a single simple SQL query to find everything a single person owns in the game.

I suspect each item knows who its owner is, but not where it is. Each container ("container" here may mean "backpack", but might also mean "lot" or "house") knows who its owner is and what items are stored in it (and in the case of a lot/house/basement/dungeon, also it's coordinates, rotation, size, etc.). This would make a very simple system for navigating your inventory, even with bags inside backpacks inside chests, but very difficult to figure out the other way around. As a result it might be easy to get a list of everything a player owns, but difficult to know where it all is.

The program would have to search each container and each container in that container all the way down, cataloguing items. And even then it might not be terribly helpful - e.g. "Your eye of naturamans is in a chest in your 1-story village mine basement in your village lot in Crafter's Town". That is a perfectly logical description of where the item is, but if you have many chests in that basement, how do you know which one has the eye?

And it's even worse when it's a bag in a backpack in a box in a (ad nauseam ... in a) basement, because the game's UI has to somehow convey all that information to the player in an intelligible way.

Yeah, I really want a universal finder. I also know that it may not be easy to get or what I want when I get it.

 

Is it necessary to know where it is? A universal finder could transport any item to the player's location if requested by the player. Problem solved.

 

I am still perplexed as to why a search of what I am actually carrying does not display anything in a bag in my inventory screen...

 

Yes, the UI, its responsiveness, and design, all need an overhaul.

Some day.