"Identify All"

Anyone else think there should be an "Identify All" function? This could work several ways:

- Instead of purchasing an Identification Kit from a Merchant, the player could pay the Merchant to identify all the items in the player's inventory.
- Or the player could use the Identification Kit on a container, which holds the items the player wants identified.

I think Anet would rather not spend an hour, pleasing the lazy people, who can't double click a couple times.

aka Cain the sage? from d2?

heh

That wouldn't work. If you were not aware, IDing any item will give also give you the price it sells for at the merchant, whether it was originally non-magic or not.

Actually ID'ing white (common) items often increases their value - they'd sell for less unID'ed, so it usually pays off to ID every single thing you received save for monster-specific drops and possibly salvageables. That usually doesn't involve double-clicking 'a couple of times', it involves a whole lot of double-clicking every time you reach town.

Being able to identify everything at the click of a button would pretty much remove the entire point of hiding the true value/characteristics of items however, but I've never seen the point of that in the first place other than to make offloading your items more of a pain - the identification kits definitely aren't a viable money sink lateron, and basically just clutter up an already small inventory.

Wasn't Guild Wars originally designed for the so-called "lazy" people?

Agreed.

well there is plenty of lazy people on here, people who are too lazy to unlock everything so they whine, people who are too lazy to get enough gold for things and so they whine, etc.

Other way 'round buddy

Inaccurate. NCsoft, headquartered in Seoul, Korea, is the parent corporation. NCsoft North-America's subsidiaries include: a) NC Austin, the primary NCsoft North-America game development studio, b) NC Seattle (known as ArenaNet) was acquired in 2002 and provides the multiplayer network (like Battle.net) and manages Guild Wars, and c) NC Interactive, which performs the role of a production company.

I think ID all would be a great idea. I often have a backpack, belt pouch and 2 extended bags full of items. I do ID everything, makes the gold recieved better (at least past a certain point in the game, probably past ascalon haha). Anyways, an ID all equivalent to the price of an ID kit regarding the number of items you can hold. (45 I think?). So since 25 ID kit costs 100, it would cost just under 200? Maybe 175. It wouldnt really be relevant until you start raking in the massive drops later in the game.

What is wrong with just ID'ing everything yourself, it doesn't take long and you can get a better look at the items.

Saves quite a bit of time when you have 30+ collectors items you want to ID to increase their price. And its well worth it, because collector items in the last part of the game sell for 125 gold, but once IDed they can go up to 280+ gold.

1. Most of the time, I really don't care what items drop since I pick up everything and sell to a vendor.

2. Identifying every item in a 44-slot inventory is neither fun nor desirable nor needed when a simple single-click "Identify All" function would suffice. Manual identification of a large assortment of items reminds of me of a restriction a newbie programmer would provide in a barely functional game built in Visual Basic.

3. Identifying 44 items does take a long time and it's a boring process! Games are meant to be fun.

I think it's a good feature. Use the inexpensive id kit in the feild, pay slightly more in a town. I'd also like to add, could we have an option to salvage everything in a stack? If I'm trying to salvage 10 hides for the furs/leathers, I'd like to be able to click once and salvage them all (option, not guarantee).

Actually, when I usually notice that I have an unidentified item in my inventory is when I'm selling items to the merchant. It'd be nice if they just added an "identify" button to that dialog, and charged 4gp for it (1/25th the cost of an ID kit).

Not exactly a high priority feature, though...

that idea is better than the rest of them.

I think they should add either an ID all option at Xunlai or an ID as you sell option at the merchants.

ID Kit 4g per use
ID All 5g per use
ID Merchant 6g per use

not that a piddly 2 or 300 gold will make a difference, but separating them in this way makes it more interesting.

I like this idea too.

I don't like that idea. Identifying all your items shouldn't cost any more gold than using a normal Identification Kit, and the developers shouldn't need to add more content to make this work. This is purely a functionality issue. The idea is to add functionality to the Identification Kit (or Merchants/Loremasters) that should have been there in the first place.

"Identify All" using an Identification Kit would be limited to the Kit's remaining uses. So, if you had 30 items you want to identify, only 25 would be identified given posession of a single new Kit. If you had two Identification Kits, you would have 50 total uses, and identifying 30 items would leave you with one Kit of 20 remaining uses. You would "identify all" by using a Kit on a container in your inventory.

"Identify All" using a Merchant/Loremaster could cost more gold by adding a minor percentage of the total real value of the identified items to the total cost of Merchant/Loremaster-based identification. The extra gold paid would act as a fee for the Merchant/Loremaster's services.

In the original Diablo, Cain charged 100gp per item. That was slightly exorbitant given that some items identified were pure junk. In Diablo II, Cain and other major NPC merchants would identify all items for free (that's what I remember anyway) if the player completed an early quest. In addition, there were Tomes of Identification which could be recharged. Command+clicking on a Scroll of Identification to purchase from a merchant would fill a Tome if the player had enough gold. This is the type of functional automation that Guild Wars sorely lacks. Game designers should strive to eliminate boring repetitive processes that contribute little or no entertainment value to the game.

Now that is an idea I like!

This is a good idea, but it is most likely very low on the list of features.

What woul you rather have?

A. This idea in GW

or

B. A new area to play in, in GW.

Which do you think people will pick?

The problem with that approach, arnansnow, is that the players do not decide which features are implemented. Feature requests typically pass through a chain of command (from specification to production) which basically evaluates the need for the feature, how the feature benefits the interactive experience, how the feature affects gameplay and balance, how much the feature would cost to implement, and how much paid time would be required for completion of implementation. The latter two issues are often the most important to the final decision-maker if the feature passes gameplay/balance inspection.

"Identify All" eliminates a boring, repetitive process that contributes little or no entertainment value to the interactive experience, inherently enhances the user's experience, improves gameplay and does not affect balance, and would cost less than development and implementation of a new playable area.

What about a 1 Use expert ID kit for 400 gold that would id anything in inventory, that way it costs more to do then buying 4 id kits for a 92 usage when the max you could get was 45 out of the expert ID kit

this isn't a "this feature vs. that feature" thing. I mean certainly they don't have a single team of 4 code monkeys who handle everything in a game. A well made game such as this can take hundreds of people working on all different sections. If one team was working on small features such as storage/selling/identify etc, an entirely different and (relatively) unconnected team would be working on mapping, quests, etc.

There is a gauntlet of acceptance testing which features have to survive before they even reach the developers' ears. Even during the design stage, features are compared and contrasted, and added and removed. You are apparently forgetting a major decision-making factor: money. There are monetary costs associated with employing programmers, artists, level designers, and SQA testers. In addition, time is also a factor when budget schedules and project schedules do not allow for certain post-production support activities. Assume NC Seattle is working on an expansion. What makes you think they have the time and budget to recycle the process and redesign the expansion package to implement unresearched and unprocessed player-suggested content? The following statement from a friend in game development sums this issue up simply: "The easier it is for me to implement, the quicker and more likely I am to jump all over it."

I 100% agree with this statement, and see it as a goal that GW is striving to attain. An ID all function wouldn't detract from anything. The individual ID packs would probably still be used by some of us. Even with Cain in D2, I still would have an ID book with me in case I needed to determine what I wanted to keep in the case of choosing between one item and another. The same is true in GW, or would be if we had a "Cain prototype" in it.

Good idea Adraeus, now to see it get implemented!

now if they actually put in an options to identify everything at once then what next??? would people complain cause they cant salvage everything at once? or maybe because they have to pick up everything one item at a time, or that you have to click on an enemy to attack them, it really does not take that long to identify things, you people are just extremely lazy

And you just came here to flame around.
Either say you like it or not and give a reason why. But flaming people for their opinion is just trollish. Though it is common use in this forum and encouraged by mods as it seems.

However:
I'd like to have it implemented. It is no question of lazyness but a thing of common sense. What is the repeated ID Clicking contributing to the game? Any good? Any bad?
I don't see anything good about the massive ID Clicking to identify your inventory. But on the other hand i see the bad part about it - nailing you to a place for several minutes.
If people were lazy they would just sell it to the merchant unidentified.