Trial Totems should be a currency for future expansions.

Recently I've been thinking about how the dev team can lessen the inventory bloat for this game and I came across an idea! (I'm probably not the first one to come up with it.) We should have Trial totems (including ultimates) set as a currency and not as an item.

Similar to the beast tribe currencies, we should have a new tab (called ex trials for example) in the currency menu. This would help a lot with not just only inventory but also avoiding the pain of not receiving a totem when the player's inventory is full!

If they we're to implement a change like this, then I would suggest having a future NPC to exchange all the totem items we have in our inventory and transfer them into currency if possible. If there's a better way to do it, then thats cool too.

Feel free to also comment any changes that would help alleviate the inventory bloat in this game lol. It would be a nice change ^w^)9 cant wait for endwalker!!!

adding more data to our characters for convenience sake is precarious at best. they try to keep things like totems out of the currency tab because it's one less thing the system has to worry about checking on.

Ahh yeah that make sense =w=" I didn't take into account how much data each character holds.

This would be a sensible change if totems were not effectively one-and-done currencies. But they don't have enough longevity to warrant a place in the permanent currency structures. The beast tribe currencies aren't really worth the data either, I think, but at least some of those are used on things like dyes.

It might be okay to currency just the totems for the current expansion's trials, but then they'd have to decide if they should be converted back to items or into something like a general all-old-trials currency when the next expansion comes out.

If we converted all the old beast tribes to an all-beast-tribe currency then we could have space in the currency structure to have all of the current expansion's beast tribes and current extreme trials. Just check for the appropriate reputation level for a given tribe vendor before allowing someone to spend universal beast currency at that vendor. As the beast tribes are entirely personal activities, this would not have a notable effect on beast tribe activities within the community. The worst thing that could happen would be that someone would be able to buy 4 times as much of one specific tribe's dye daily as they could now, but I mean if someone really wants that much of one specific dye for their glamour let them buy it.

Unfortunately, the effect a universal old-extreme currency would have an on the extreme trials that people run would be measurably larger; namely, people would spam HW extremes for currency to spend on the most recent old expansion trials. I'm personally not too torn up about this, as by the next expansion those mounts aren't super exclusive anymore anyway. However, I'd bet the devs would disagree because they want people to continue to have a reason to run all the extremes instead of just the HW ones. Of course, ARR trials don't currently drop totems, and HW trials might as well not drop any if they're going to continue to be easy after the stat squish. So maybe something like this would work with minimal objections:

1. Convert all ARR, HW, SB, ShB beast tribe currencies to a universal beast tribe currency. Require people to have a certain reputation with a tribe before they can spend universal currency on that tribe's items.
2. Remove totems from ARR, HW, and SB entirely, as they should be easy enough to farm for outright mount drops at cap.
3. Convert ShB totems to a ShB-wide extreme currency. Require someone to have completed a particular trial once before you can buy items from that trial using the extreme currency.
4. Make EW totems and beast tribe tokens individual specific currencies.
5. When 7.0 comes out, convert EW extreme currencies into a single EW-extreme currency and convert EW beast tribe currencies into universal beast tribe currency. Delete ShB-extreme currency.
6. Make 7.x totems and beast tribe tokens individual specific currencies.
7. When 8.0 comes out, convert 7.0 extreme currencies into a single 7.x-extreme currency and convert 7.x beast tribe currencies into universal beast tribe currency. Delete EW-extreme currency.
8. Make 8.x totems and beast tribe tokens individual specific currencies.
9. etc...

That way only the current expansion uses individual currencies for its beast tribes and extremes, all old beast tribes use a single currency, and the previous expansion uses a single extreme currency for all its trials. We shouldn't really need tokens for trials two expansions ago, because they will be easy enough to unsync and the drop rates will be high enough that we don't have to do them a million times.

The current Tribal currency tab tracks 14 beast tribe currencies. With these changes, it would track 1 universal old beast tribe currency, 3 current expansion beast tribe currencies, 1 recent expansion extreme currency, and 7 current expansion trial-specific extreme currencies, for a total of 12 currencies, and thus a reduction of currency data. Further, the tribal and extreme currencies would never expand beyond this because the recent expansion's beast tribes get absorbed into the one universal beast tribe currency and the recent expansion's extremes become a single currency replacing the previous-recent currency. People would continue to run super old extreme trials for outright mount drops, which should be fine with increased drop rates, and they would continue to run the recent expansion's extreme trials for that expansion's currency, even if they only need to clear each fight once to unlock each fight's shop. And finally the current expansion extremes would function as they do now, requiring each fight be run for that fight's specific currency. So all the expansions' fights would still get run.

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

adding more data to our characters for convenience sake is precarious at best. they try to keep things like totems out of the currency tab because it's one less thing the system has to worry about checking on.

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Is there much of a difference between having all the totems in a currency tab versus storing them all on retainers? They all have to be tracked by the system one way or another.

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Originally Posted by KhevanFarstryder

Is there much of a difference between having all the totems in a currency tab versus storing them all on retainers? They all have to be tracked by the system one way or another.

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the data for inventory slots is already allocatted per character. making it a currency would be extra data on top of inventory that every character has to save

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Originally Posted by QooEr

the data for inventory slots is already allocatted per character. making it a currency would be extra data on top of inventory that every character has to save

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OP, also note that this data QooEr mentioned would also be moved about with all the rest of your character data at all times, and therein lies the bulk of the problem.

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

adding more data to our characters for convenience sake is precarious at best. they try to keep things like totems out of the currency tab because it's one less thing the system has to worry about checking on.

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As someone who has worked with various databases for the past 15+ years, this excuse doesn't add up. Also totems being in an inventory or in the currency tab are still both in a database.

To be honest, can we just get them to move Gemstones into the currency tab instead of them randomly being in Shared Fates which makes no sense and it's annoying to have to go to a whole different tab to check how many you have?

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Originally Posted by Krojack

As someone who has worked with various databases for the past 15+ years, this excuse doesn't add up. Also totems being in an inventory or in the currency tab are still both in a database.

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do you know how the backend of the game works? no.