Inventory Limits

Why is there a limit on inventory items like Catalysts and ISO-8?

I have over 2300 T4CC Fragment Crystals, 20+ T4CC Crystals, 100+ AQ Crystals.
Yet I’m missing out on T4CC Mystic catalysts.

But the other 5 types are full, so I am not opening yet.

I am also pretty sure my numbers are low. Others have many times more stored away.

So why not remove that cap?
What positive game mechanics does it provide?

Comments

Carnage313

It used to not be this way. Personally I’ve hated it since the implementation. It’s so stupid to have things that we put in a lot of work to get only to expire or have to always remember to sell.

DNA3000

Why is there a limit on inventory items like Catalysts and ISO-8?

I have over 2300 T4CC Fragment Crystals, 20+ T4CC Crystals, 100+ AQ Crystals.
Yet I’m missing out on T4CC Mystic catalysts.

But the other 5 types are full, so I am not opening yet.

I am also pretty sure my numbers are low. Others have many times more stored away.

So why not remove that cap?
What positive game mechanics does it provide?

In general, inventory limits are designed to do two things. First, they are intended to add temporal value to resources. in other words, use it or lose it. Game designers will tell you there are two benefits. First, it adds another dimension to resource management gameplay. If you could just accumulate resources indefinitely, you could also just wait indefinitely for "optimal" moments to use it. Inventory limits add a strategy problem to solve. And the second is that it reduces player paralysis. Consider all the players who think they need XYZ champ to progress. Such players would just sit and wait, if they could sit and wait. And they would never have any of their gameplay assumptions proven wrong, because they would only traverse one path through the game. They would never be surprised by what they think are suboptimal choices. The constraints force them off their assumptions which adds a dynamic benefit to player experiences.

The second reason is that it bounds extremes. In other words, the resources that flow into the game are designed around players having certain reasonable amounts of different resources. But different players will play the game in different ways, so there's no way to design the game in such a way that everyone gets the same reasonable amounts of resources. I might have more than you, or less than you, of certain resources. Between random chance and player choices everyone is going to have more of this and less of that. But they will tend to be limited by the thing they have the least of. If you try to address this by increasing rewards across the board, you'll get more of the thing you're short of, but I will get even more of that thing that I already have a lot of. This can cause balance issues.

Nowhere is it more obvious than at the top of the game. At some point you're going to have a very large roster of ranked up champions. Your need for more rank ups will drop relative to everyone else. At some point, you could choose to simply stockpile indefinitely for the day when the game adds more progress points at the top - in other words, more rank up levels. And when those become available the players that have stockpiled indefinitely will be able to spend those resources all that once to immediately max everything out instantly. That's ultimately bad for the game, because you can't make any interesting progress ladders for high tier players. But this isn't just a high tier problem, it exists at lower levels in more subtle ways.

There's a reason inventory limits, in different forms, exist in the vast majority of games like this. There's general agreement among the vast majority of game designers that these kinds of limits alter resource management in ways beneficial to the game. Games are, in simplified form, problem solving. Resource limits are another problem to solve. Take too many problems away from players, and the game becomes too boring. It may not seem that way when you're stuck under certain inventory limits, and of course inventory limits can be set too low or too high, but they aren't here by accident.

And before anyone says it, they aren't here as some kind of "money grabbing" mechanism. Games with no way to earn money from inventory limits, like pure subscription games, have inventory limits with the same prevalence as F2P games. So that's completely irrelevant.

Kyuff

@DNA3000 thank you for the welll written explanation. It makes sense as a concept.

My point stands though.

We don’t have inventory limits. I have near 100 T4CC worth of crystals. I accumulate them boundless.

I also have an annoying way of accessing those Catalysts. But I could.

In fact I may be suffering from Player Paralysis as you describe it.
I could R4 She Hulk, Luke Cage or Spider Gwen, but is holding back in hope for Cap IW, Quake or Void.

DNA3000

@DNA3000 thank you for the welll written explanation. It makes sense as a concept.

My point stands though.

We don’t have inventory limits. I have near 100 T4CC worth of crystals. I accumulate them boundless.

I also have an annoying way of accessing those Catalysts. But I could.

In fact I may be suffering from Player Paralysis as you describe it.
I could R4 She Hulk, Luke Cage or Spider Gwen, but is holding back in hope for Cap IW, Quake or Void.

If you really believed you didn’t have inventory limits, then you wouldn’t have a problem.

The fact that you do have a problem means there are inventory limits that do affect you. That they don’t exist everywhere is due to the fact that all games are made by humans, who only have imperfect ways of compromising between different competing design requirements.

They never expected players to accumulate crystals like we do, as odd as that blindness may seem. If they did, they wouldn’t have implemented crystals in such a way that merely letting them pile up could compromise the performance of the game. And we know it does because of the crystal trade in they implemented last year.

Theheretic

Why is there a limit on inventory items like Catalysts and ISO-8?

I have over 2300 T4CC Fragment Crystals, 20+ T4CC Crystals, 100+ AQ Crystals.
Yet I’m missing out on T4CC Mystic catalysts.

But the other 5 types are full, so I am not opening yet.

I am also pretty sure my numbers are low. Others have many times more stored away.

So why not remove that cap?
What positive game mechanics does it provide?

Open the crystals and sell what you don't need, if you can easily replenish the crystals then it shouldn't be a problem replacing them.

Kyuff

If you see crystal openings on YouTube it is common with players hoarding thousands of crystals. Why?

Do you? Why?