I don't have the time to play to have houses, but I do have my own guilds. Some of those are full, and some aren't. I stopped doing tradeskills, not much personal spare time. I remember a few years ago someone from EQ posting that certain items stacks wouldn't be increased. So those will stay at 20.
My program now includes a simple search of all items. New version 2.5 now available. http://everquest.fanra.info/wiki/EverQuest_Inventory_Report
I agree with a couple of the other posters here - I have my own guild and guild neighborhood. I have 53 plots with houses. I use most of them to store TS stuff - I throw quick decorations in the yards of houses that store the same items (all my smithing houses have flamingos in the yards for example). I have made every alt in my guild a co-owner on each plot. I find no issue with storing/organizing this way and (knock on wood) have only had problems with anchors - not houses disappearing (sure sometimes I get evicted when I don't manage the upkeep correctly, but it's always waiting in my parcels). I find this works well for me. I have also set up hotkeys across all my alts that own houses and periodically run the /output realestate and copy it all into an excel I can easily sort/search on, but even that's not necessary you can search directly from the output files if you know exactly what you're looking for.
Having to use houses for storage management and third party programs to find stuff should be a pretty clear flag that it's crap.
You don't have to use both if you just use houses. Honestly even if they doubled bag storage, bank storage and made items stackable up to 1k people would be back here in a year or so asking if they could increase these things. Bags are simply inefficient for storage management when it comes to anything tradeable. The only items that sit in my bank are no trade items that I hang onto and even then I have a "no trade" house for items I don't really want to carry but want quick access to. Even if you have a great system using bags the only way one of your alts can access your items is if the toon carrying said items is logged on or via shared bank and that's assuming the toon you want to get those items is even on the same account. Houses allow you to store everything in a central location and grants all your toons access to your items. Its basically like a UPS warehouse ready for your toons to pickup packages and distribute them.
^This. pretty much sums up everything. Given how trivial it is to have a bazillion houses for storage [as indicated in this thread], the concept of limited bag/bank space is obsolete and flat out stupid. Increase everything two fold. Minimum. Don't make it an 'expansion feature'. Also, don't act like you're doing us a favor (it should have already happened eons ago). If this thread doesn't demonstrate the current state of insanity for item storage then I just can't even-...
Once Artisan prize is done...yah. Gonna be a big purge. Everything must go!!! Not going to do that (brown word that starts with S) again and I think getting rid of all the TS debris will be a Cortéz burning of the ships moment. Yes, not really adding encouragement to there being a good, solid storage solution but sometimes you just need to let it all go. This game creates a hoarder mentality.
Tradeskills seem to be on the back burner as of late so not sure anything would be added to support TS.
Doesn't help that every new zone and level increase necessarily adds yet another 1-2 dozen pieces of junk to manage.
Maybe they could add a count to the loot window. I've looted 56 billion bone chips, give me back 100 of them. No need to store anything if you don't want to. Just like alt currencies aren't "stored" anywhere.
No houses do not mean limited bank/bag space is obsolete. You have to go to effort to store and keep stuff in houses. One of the reasons I don't bother doing it. Increasing items that can be stored on toons just works well for botters who never leave a zone for days at a time. Storage is fine as it is especially since we see few if any new tradeskill recipes. Plus daybreak will bring out big bags again if you are already maxed in those you don't need more storage or as others have stated you will be asking for more space yet again even if they did double it.
That's a good point. Making stuff stack for 200, putting tradeskill vendors to Sunrise Hills or whatever, it should be addressed in some way.
Why do we hoard? Is it because we have learned that it pays in both time and money? We hoard not because it's efficient but because the EQ system for selling items is so restrictive. We don't sale tradeskill items because they have low value and are priced off are traders to make room for higher value items. Because they aren't readily available we hoard them. We have all, well most have seen the condition when working tradeskills where we literally buy out all available supply and then have to wait days for new supplies to be available. That waiting costs time and money for players. The fix is to open up space for traders to sale more items so we end this self destructive behavior by players. As for why they haven't fixed this problem already? In my view it's motivated by the desire to sale larger bags to player and to keep players having more than one account subscribed on the extra account. Those reasons are not worth the cost it imposes on players.
You hit it on the head in terms of bags. They want to make money I mean after all this is a business. Maybe they make larger marketplace bags which I can see happening but in all honestly this fixes nothing in terms of out of combat storage. This problem as people keep referring to it is not a problem of the masses but of the minority. Hoarding in real life is not a healthy behavior and it really is not logical in an MMO either. I say this as a terrible hoarder in EQ even though I know its not logical. I mean seriously if I got rid of all of the items I have not used, have no plans to use or have no clue what they are used for I would probably eliminate 70% of my housing inventory. This whole thing is like a bunch of people at an AA meeting getting upset that they don't provide free beer during the meetings. Enabling an addiction or irrational behavior is never the answer for anything in life it just leads to more irrational behaviors and a never ending loop of this poor me mentality. If people want to hoard there are methods to do it but don't ask for developer time to be taken away from current content or fixing actual broken things just to feed your irrational mindset. Again "hi my name is Aurastrider and I am a Hoarder".....
In my opinion the better answer is to remove bag slots and instead have an "Item Management" window. Could look like the keyring or bazaar windows, put in items, have search capabilities based on name, type, etc. No more having to organize, no more having to look at items across multiple locations... Bags could become a tool to unlock max capacity, and maybe tradeskill items don't count towards the max... jm2c if I were making a new game from scratch and it was all greenfield.
I'll jump in with other and say, housing is definitely the way to go for this, with alts for each tradeskill. However, if you feel you MUST keep all that stuff in your bank, at least get a real bank window! Try this, for example: http://www.eqinterface.com/downloads/fileinfo.php?id=6334 No more having all those bags open and cluttering up your screen. And it's far from the only one of its kind, though it's my favorite.
It's because we've learned they lazily recycle content and it's best to have things in inventory than spend hours farming some ancient crap they suddenly decide is relevant for current rewards.
Just making all items that stack 20 or less change to 100 would be a wonderful thing and relieve the countless stacks of misc stuff uff clogging the banks of norrath
Not anymore, now they change one letter in it or put a lvl requirement on it and BAM it's a different item and we have to go find and horde them too.
