One of Bhagpuss’ topic starters for Blaugust touched on inventory management, something near and dear to my heart, if only out of sheer desperation at not knowing how to do it correctly and rarely having the inclination to invest the time to do it properly.
Seeing Endalia’s lament and screenshot of their own “Inventory Full” issue in GW2, it’s a little comforting to know that I’m not alone in this matter.
Here’s an appeal out there to all those triggered by messy, chaotic inventories to do a sharing on tips and strategies on just how they manage.
Heck, I’d like to hear speculative ideas on just how MMOs and other games with uncontrollable item drop spam could help those on the “hoarder” side of the tidy spectrum through better game design and inventory management systems (e.g. deposit all collectibles in GW2 at least helps me manage crafting materials/resources.)
In case you think I’m exaggerating for effect, here’s my main’s inventory in GW2.
It gets cleared periodically out of necessity, but a few days of play fills it right up again.
As for every time a festival comes to town, well… *sigh*
The bank has 15 tabs full of something similar to the below. The good news is that we have been allowed 17 tabs, so I have some expansion space if I ever decide to convert gold to gems when desperate; the bad news is that I really don’t want to wind up with two more tabs looking like the other 15.
I have two solo guild banks, into which I’ve taken to storing non-account bound materials, such as extra crafting resources that would block the ‘deposit all collectibles’ limit – which I’ve already expanded to 1250 over time.
(Expanding to a higher limit seems no longer worth it, as many of those slots -e.g. cooking materials, gemstones, etc. – do not really exceed 500-1000. Only the common crafting materials do. Yet, I can’t very well sell mithril on the TP when Astralaria is a long term plan – have you seen the -amount- of Deldrimor steel that needs? GW2efficiency’s crafting calculator says 7200 mithril ore needed in total.)
The problem is serious. Send help.
Why I Game 
I’m off to work in ten minutes so I can’t reply at length. I have three days off after this, though, so I’m going to try to get a post or maybe two up about this topic.
I don’t, unfortunately, have any magic answers. My inventories in GW2 look like yours and my solutions (personal guild banks) are similar. Since I don’t have any intenti on of ever making a Legendary anything, I don’t have the mats problem. I keep a full mat bank on three accounts and everything else I sell. It’s a nice, steady income.
I also have my bags displayed as individual bags, which allows me to sort things to a degree. I have all my stuff I know I’m going to keep in the first and last bags and I use a self-sorting consumable bag and a safe box towards the bottom, which puts most of the drops, quest items and so on in the middle where I can see them to get rid of them.
It ‘s not efficient at all, though. Also GW2 is probably the very worst MMO I have played in a decade for inventory spam. I do believe it’s intentional, a lever towards cash shop sales of inventory expanders, permanent salvage etc.
Anyway, no time to write any more but I will be back!
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Lots of good tips from wonderful GW2 bloggers on this post I wrote on this very topic, here: https://gamingsf.wordpress.com/2018/03/18/inventory-is-full-again-gw2/ Hope it helps!
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ESO’s craft bag (similar to the craft bank in gw2 except the amounts are unlimited) goes a good way to helping inventory / bank space – I still manage to cram it full. Actually, I think I’ll copy Bhagpuss and write a post in reply 🙂
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LOTRO now has the ability to “filter” items, which means you can specify that you never want to see selected items if they drop. This is reasonably useful, though it would be better if less useless junk dropped in the first place as well. (There are plenty of items whose only possible use iis being vendored for coin. Why not just drop the coin instead and be done with it?)
Apart from that a lot of common resources which you do want to collect and keep now stack to 500, which also relieves some of the pain.
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I somehow always managed to keep my inventory mostly empty. Probably because I mercilessly dump everything that I don’t deed necessary. It’s a mindset I guess, my GF never had a single empty slot despite we were doing the exact same content together.
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