This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer's very own MMORPG column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
The year is 2025, and every major MMO is shoving more of your old collected junk at you than your mum's attic. Stop me if this sounds familiar:
You open your inventory. You have ten scraps of linen cloth, thirteen XP boosters, two halloween candies, three Helmets of Refulgent Anger, seven different types of ores, ten Tokens of Nightmare, and an Essence of Catastrophe.
Okay, you say, let's start with currencies. You stop playing the game and open up a wiki page. If you wanted to spend your loot as intended, you'd need to visit three separate vendors. One of them's in a city you didn't know existed from an expansion that was released four years ago. You don't know how it even got there.
You close your bag. The next time you open it, you delete almost everything. One week later, you open your inventory.
You have ten scraps of linen cloth. You cannot escape.
It's not unusual, or even bad, for MMORPGs to have a lot of items. In isolation, all of those bits and bobs serve their purpose—but we've still all wound up in a spot where inventory bloat is a hallmark of the genre. And while I'd like to sit here, guffaw, and say 'we shouldn't be putting up with this!' I know an inconvenient truth. Us and our full bags are stuck together. Sorry.
But first, definitions
There are a lot of bag-clogging items in MMOs, and for the purpose of grumbling about them, I'll be simply referring to them as 'tat', a lovely little British word that means a shoddy thing. Tat can include, but is not limited to:
- Item tokens, exchanged to vendors for gear.
- Miscellaneous consumables, including XP boosters and buff food.
- Crafting materials.
- Currencies that are not the default currency of the game.
- Items that contribute to optional content, such as Mythic+ keys in WoW, or FF14's "Sacramental" items for Pilgrim's Traverse: Quantum.
- Seasonal holiday items.
- Bags-within-bags.
- Upgrade materials.
- Usable items, not equippable by a character, that have some secondary effect..
- Glamour or 'vanity' items.
…and so on. What I won't be including in this list, confusingly, are junk items. Junk items are entirely inoffensive, since most MMOs now come with a "sell junk" button. As a matter of fact, I actually respect the junk item—flooding your bags with easily-disposable garbage creates natural break moments and directs you to social hubs to sell your crap. The junk can stay.
No, I'm talking about items that do allegedly have a use. Basically, anything you'd have to Google to discover what it does—miscellany that serves no immediate purpose, but might, conceivably, someday soon. If it prompts the thought 'wait, what if this is important?' then it's tat.
And while most modern MMOs do try to solve the problem of tat, very few solve it entirely.
Points for effort
As regular PCG contributor and WoW enjoyer Heather Newman observed back in January, World of Warcraft has a currency problem. It has around 200 of them.
Blizzard understands this, and has relegated all of these currencies to their own tab, but as Heather put it: "No one should have to farm time-delayed cooking tokens for a rolling pin or frying pan that was new a dozen years ago."
WoW has a different problem, too: Crafting materials. You can purchase a crafting bag, but it's comparatively small—and each season mandates you collect some kind of Fragment to build into some kind of Spark to use at some kind of special vendor that gives you a tier set. Or elemental motes that combine into bigger motes. It's a nightmare.
Guild Wars 2 solves this handily, by having a (functionally) infinite crafting materials bank you can one-button press all of your tat into, but it still has tat of a different kind: XP boosters, seasonal event items, little tokens, salvage kits, tools. It's perhaps the kindest inventory out of the big MMOs I've played, and even then I still find myself drowning in nonsense.
Final Fantasy 14's backpack system doesn't offer solutions for crafting materials OR miscellaneous gubbins. In fact, it's by far the worst at this. Pilgrim's Traverse, a recently-released megadungeon, has an end-boss with a scaling difficulty that you need to provide offerings for. These offerings take up five entire inventory slots on their own. Bad Square Enix!
It does, however, handle past gear well when it comes to currencies: There are three types of 'Tomestone', all in a separate currencies bag. Two for max level (one buys lower-power items than the other) and one for everything else. When a new type of tomestone is added, the lower-power tomestone gets depreciated, and the higher-power tomestone takes its place. Simple.
Even then, some duties award you tat in the form of item tokens, which you need to give several of to specific vendors to get gear you might not even like the look of, and have no way of previewing through the item token itself—even though that content's not been relevant for years.
So why? Why any of this?
In defense of tat
Tat does serve a few key purposes. When it comes to crafting, it's part of the verisimilitude. You want to get ores to make armour, lumber to make furniture, that sort of thing. And for some players, having to manage your inventory could even be part of the appeal—couldn't be me, though. I like how Guild Wars 2 does it.
The bigger problem is in how all MMORPGs are engaged in a secret economic war with their playerbases.
MMO economies are weird. Unlike real-world economies, it's extremely straightforward to take money out of an MMO economy to avoid inflation—this is why repair costs, fast travel costs, and "gold sinks" like mounts or cool bits of gear are a thing.
However, these are videogames. And any time a mob dies, money gets printed, because enemies need to respawn and players need to feel like they're getting something for killing them. Get it wrong, and you get Star Wars: The Old Republic circa 2023.
One might say that allowing most items (which would otherwise require a certain kind of tat to buy) could be purchased for gold, avoiding tat bloat entirely. And this isn't a terrible idea on paper. You create more goldsinks, keep inventories lean, and reward players for their time invested.
You either balance your new content for them, shutting out newer, poorer players, or you make it trivial for the moneybags to churn through."
Except this doesn't work, because now you've given your long-time players an advantage. Unless they're big spenders, they'll have more money. So you either balance your new content for them, shutting out newer, poorer players, or you make it trivial for the moneybags to churn through. In which case, your most loyal players barely have to engage with the content at all.
Also, when it's new content, there's also the argument that getting little gubbins is kinda fun. The developers can finely tune the game's rewards structure to have a nice balance between time invested and rewards given. They don't always do this right, but the upshot is that a newer system is more easily tweaked, and can be hotfixed without causing any knock-on effects.
Okay, so tat-free newer content isn't strictly possible, but what about years-old expansions? You might, as Heather suggested, simply convert older currencies to gold or gil. The end result of which would be objectively good—except there's a list of problems there, too.
Gold ain't all that glitters
Firstly, you now need to decide how much gold the old content rewards you in the tat's place, and how much its rewards should cost. This is still complicated for the exact reasons I've just mentioned—long-standing players won't have to engage with older stuff at all, and newer players will be made poor for wanting a cool hat. At least with inventory tat, everyone's at an even playing field when they visit that part of your MMO for the first time.
Secondly, you need to decide what happens to the tat that players already have. Do you convert everything to money (thus injecting a huge amount of cash into your virtual economy and potentially tanking it?) If you don't do that, then what if a substantial number of players are three-fourths of the way through a grind, and you've just screwed them over?
Alright, you might say, we'll make a secondary unified currency, similar to FF14's Tomestones of Poetics. Except everyone who has been playing the MMO for any prolonged period of time is bound to have a massive bank stored when you roll all their various tats together. In which case, they can probably just go and get whatever they want, and they don't have to engage with much at all.
Then there's the technical challenge. I won't pretend to know every single MMO's unique architecture, but I can guarantee you that changing prior content is never as simple as moving a bunch of ones and zeroes around. Even if you did any of the above options, you'd still need to devise a system in which it's converted, en-masse, without any bugs, glitches, or hiccups.
This can always go terribly wrong. For example, in World of Warcraft, the latest expansion pushed a minor update to help support cross-world guild banks. This created a bug that caused some guild banks to have missing items, and it was later discovered that this deletion was, in part, irreversible. Not every guild got their items back.
It doesn't take coding knowledge, or even that bright of an imagination, to picture a scenario in which completely overhauling 200 different currencies from 20 years of expansions might catastrophically biff something up.
Part & parcel
There's also the elephant in the room, and one I've brought up before in more existential articles: MMOs are just kinda old. Lemme take a jaunt over to our best MMOs list:
Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn is 12 years old. World of Warcraft celebrated its 20th anniversary recently. Guild Wars 2 is 13 years old. Elder Scrolls Online is 11 years old. Star Wars: The Old Republic? 14. Black Desert? 9. Sure, there are relative spring chickens like Dune: Awakening and Lost Ark—but it's rare to find one of the big boys without a few grey hairs in their scalp.
Tat is a function of age. It's wrinkles in an old sage's face, it's a sign of survival and success. WoW only has 200 currencies because it's been out for over 20 years—and that's no great shame. It's partially our fault, too: If the genre was livelier and more competitive, we wouldn't be here. But we like what's familiar.
These overhauls, which would require a lot of time and effort, just aren't worth it."
The other side of this coin is the fact that these old gents are all expected to put out new stuff at a regular click, and development teams are only so big. Game dev isn't as simple as "put more devs on this"—everyone's highly specialised, artists can't fix bugs. But it is true that these overhauls, which would require a lot of time and effort, just aren't worth it.
After all, in a lot of MMOs, engaging with all of this old-world stuff is entirely optional anyway. FF14 is an outlier given its linear story, but WoW's mostly focused on its current patch. And in horizontal-progression minded games like ESO or Guild Wars 2, everything's optional, so it matters far less.
And hey, I hate having full bags as much as the next guy, but for most MMO devs, there's just more important work to be done. The occasional gesture or fix is appreciated, but our bags will always be full of Tokens of Shadeborne Night and Snow-Witch Confetti and Hero Medals and XP boosters and Motes of Wind and Oak Planks. Tat is our burden to bear.
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