I find it annoying too. If my cellphone texted me every 1 minute and 55 seconds (the duration between food / drink spam messages for a non vah shir with max metabolism aa's) telling me a was "hungry" something my brain already knew, i'd literally befriend the head guy at my phone company and when i met him i'd throw my cellphone at his brain as hard as I could.
This seems to be more of an argument for removing consumption of food and drink and the food and drink items from the game entirely.
Ok, dont use the trade skill bag in your top slot.. just be perfect and organized as you obviously are
I use a bag full of clickies with stat food in my first slot. A tradeskill bag with food and water in my 2nd slot. If I'm not in the mood to pay attention, I swap them around.
The way the game currently selects which food/drink to consume is a weird game mechanic, it may have made sense back in the day before food/drink had stats. To a potential new player (yeah, yeah) it's another stumbling block when their quest/tradeskill item vanishes mysteriously; since you only get a message (I think...) when you character has run out of food; or you manually eat. Currently it's like being able to force feed yourself cheeseburgers all day, and as long as there is an uneaten salad in front of you, you'll lose weight! Good stat food can last forever. I would call that EZ-Mode. Bakers and Brewers should have a recurring market, like for alchemy and poisons; not the current "wax apples" that are look-but-don't-eat. Logically, automatic consumption should be removed; and eating stat food should give a temporary buff to an probably invisible ('cause it's inside you) 'food slot', which disappears after a while. (like alcohol in game) This might allow the devs to give even better stats to food and drink, along the lines of power sources, since they can't be exploited to last forever. (and don't kid yourself, force feeding other food to make a consumable item last perpetually is an exploit, albeit a minor one) Maybe they should just remove being able to click food to eat it; the only reason I know of to do so is to to make other food last longer. (Although... could make for an interesting raid mechanic... "eat 20 Jumjum Pies in 2 minutes, or get hit by a detrimental effect in phase 3 of the Bristlebane raid." would be hilarious.) But I would put this pretty far down the work queue for the devs.
I carry two 40-slot tradeskill bags in my bottom two slots. Each of those 80 bag slots has a partial stack of something that I collect. Any components I loot fall into those bags and pile onto the partial stacks. Once a stack is full, I offload it. Perfect and organized. You just keep right on organizing your inventory so poorly that you eat stuff you intended not to eat. Afterwards, you can complain about it.
Tobynn, what I do (thanks paladin serverwide) is just add the food/drink you force feed to a actions bar that has all your clickies on it. When you refresh your clickies, you try to eat/drink and it prevents you from consuming the pricey stat food.
It's probably too late to change it now, but food just doesn't make much sense in EQ and more. Stat food really should come from eating it. How can I brew up a fantastic drink or a legendary bit of food and then gain stats by totally ignoring it!? Makes no sense... may as well have left it in the bank! If the food grants stats, the only logical view is that you gain those stats by consumption. Every strategy we use atm is a way to try and game the system - force feeding with other foodstuffs etc. I think it's a backwards step to embrace these devious policies and go an extra step further in that direction.
I use stat food in my top slots and have water/rations on my bar w my clickies, whenever I re-do clickies, I force feed and it saves quite a bit of consumption of my better stat foods.
