Overcoming Packrat Syndrome

...or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Inventory Management and Just Sell Vendor Trash

I blame the MUD. As always. (No, it's not -my- fault. No really. Honest.) From the beginning of online time, I've had rampant collection addiction and packrat syndrome. Just so many cute or cool names on items, -that I could pick up and look at- (virtually speaking,) and OMG, keep.

No limits on the amount of characters and pack mules one could make either. So it got to the insane point where I had possibly 8 warriors with 999 inventory space, and multiple containers, and sit down sorting out shtuff into various categories - actual 'valuable' equipment for various alignments and classes, sentimental rare one-of-a-kind items with memories of a special moment/quest/feat/deed, and the catch-all 'cute stuff' for things I just liked the name of.

And yes, I was obsessive-compulsive enough to sort things out into A-Z order. One item at a time. Shuffling from bag to bag.

Eventually the collection habit takes its toll. When you run out of space to keep stuff, you no longer feel like doing things because it is just going to accumulate stuff you have no place to store.

Then there's the maintenance aspect. Logging in characters regularly just to keep them, and the entire inventory alive. Huge upkeep cost in terms of time and effort. Fortunately, there were no subscription fees on a free MUD.

(There's a real life parallel as well. But that topic for another time.)

When it all got to be too much, I went for the cold turkey treatment and just let the whole stockpile delete. (Just saved a log of it for sentimental memories' sake. Akin to taking a photo or scanning it into digital form and throwing away a physical object IRL.)

Next game was a complete roundabout. No loot. None whatsoever. Inventory consisted of 10 enhancement slots. Yay. No inventory management to speak of.

One of the reasons why I was so terrified about playing WoW on any kind of level - serious or casual - was this whole gear-dependent aspect of inventory management. After falling afoul of it in RoD, I was very wary of having my ego/pride/self-worth vested into a seemingly 'physical' object such as character gear. Especially if there was little/no risk of actually losing the object => potential forever payment of subscription just to 'keep' ownership of the item?

Welp, as the years passed, all the other games I wanted to play ended up with some form of limited inventory space. CoX, Guild Wars, LOTRO, etc.

As one look into our SG base bins will tell you, I'm not over packrat syndrome in CoX just yet. The potential to benefit my alts just feeds the urge to hoard stuff for the future. Add to that the ability to get more inventory space by earning 90k prestige, plus the fact that I'm apparently hardcore invested into CoX for the long term, well, no winning out there.

Downside of that, not wanting to play extensively villainside until base bins are set up, etc.

I'm proud of what I'm doing in Guild Wars and LOTRO though.

I realized that I was just crippling my gold income by leaving inventory space filled with moderately useful, maybe-in-the-future stuff and not having enough room left for mob drops that could be vendored for money.

(And when the rest of the MMO is doing that, and the devs are assuming that people do that all the time, that means you're going to be way poor not doing that.)

I cleaned out my two Guild Wars mains first, along with the account storage. Helping me along was the realization that I wasn't going to settle for anything lower than max level weapon and armor types (preferably gold). What if I needed to equip heroes? Well, max level collector exchanges, of course, because those had stats you could choose anyway. It wasn't very much effort to farm up bodypart drops, and yielded gameplay that amused me. That freed up all the white, cyan and purple items to be converted into $$$.

Runes would be mostly immediately used, or sold to a rune trader for a reasonable price, with only a few potentially-useful ones kept and held. After all, most of the runes were selling at affordable prices at the rune trader, and could be bought when needed.

Bodyparts? Well, if there weren't immediately needed for a collector item I wanted, also vendored. Could always farm for more.

The amount of money I started to accumulate with this mindset was most persuasive in encouraging me to keep the new habit.

LOTRO had the exact same problem. Made worse because monsters would drop about 4-5 differently named body part. Fortunately, Book 13 instituted a global change that altered all the body parts to more generic ones to help inventory space. While I kind of miss the old names because of the flavor text, I managed to fight off the urge to collect the old types of bodyparts (no room, no room!) and traded in all of my existing crap for the newer, leaner models.

Having room in one's inventory to actually pick up stuff without worrying about it fitting is most...liberating.