Since profession skills/recipes are now tied to the appropriate expansion, can the same be done about materials? In other words, wouldn’t it be cool if mats were tagged with their expansion name, so when you type ‘Kultiran’ in your bank’s search bar, all the mats introduced in Bfa are highlighted, so you can easily see what you’ve gathered in total in a specific expansion and sell/keep whatever you want.
That sounds more like a job for an addon.
Blizzard has effectively been marking items per expansion since day 1, since the itemids for items are largely sequential. It wouldnt be hard to find the lowest&highest itemid for items in an expansion (on wowhead for example), there won’t be very many exceptions.
In addition to the itemid, some items are more explicitly marked by expansion already, so those are way more reliable, but its not universally the case for every item.
Ark Inventory (bag addon) has some rule system in place that can be used for this. It supports at least 3 things you could use, that i can think of, to identify things by expansion: the explicit expansion marking, the itemlevel and the itemid.
A rule based on the explicit marking and itemlevel may look something like this, i don’t remember the rule name for the itemlevel as i’ve never used it:
(expansion("Battle for Azeroth") OR (expansion(0) AND ilvl(172, 99999)))
and
(expansion("Legion") OR (expansion(0) AND ilvl(138, 171)))
that last line basicly says: if the item is explicitly marked as a Legion-item, or it lacks an explicit expansion marking but is somewhere in the 138-171 item level range, then we consider it a Legion item. The BFA line is similar but i left the maximum itemlevel on 99999 since there is no ‘higher’ expansion yet.
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In ArkInventory you could then use these rules to do whatever you want with those items. Show them differently, show them in a separate bag or area or many many other things, whatever you want. And when i say bag that also can apply to the Bank, Guildbank and any other similar thing.
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Addon:
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/ark-inventory
Some of the info you’d have access to with such rules:
https://github.com/arkayenro/arkinventory/wiki/RuleVariables#user-content-iinfo-in-game-information-about-the-object
There’s an addon for nearly everything. The whole point of asking for this is to avoid all this fuss, because in theory it sounds like a very easy task for blizzard and it will save a lot of trouble, the kind that you talked about. Ever since curse and twitch merged I stopped using addons and I don’t think I’ll ever bother again. Thanks for the suggestion though, someone might find it useful.
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But the whole point of the add on system is that Blizzard realized early on, that they can’t make the interface perfect for everyone.
So they just make a best effort, and allow us to change what we don’t like (within reason and subject to some restrictions to prevent abuse of course).
I’m no fan of twitch either, but there are alternative add on updaters out there. Or you could manually install them, bag addons often work for years without needing an update.
To be fair though, what I’m suggesting isn’t going to affect anyone in a negative way or alter the interface in any significant way. You just type ‘Classic’ and the game shows you all the mats that were added in Classic. The only difference may be that you will see:
‘Malachite’ and underneath it, in the little box, ‘Classic’, when you scroll over a malachite for example.
I’m not suggesting it’s a negative, i agree with you it’d be a nice feature.
They have added the possibility of marking items by xpac on the back end, and they do so for some things i guess, just nowhere near everything. They haven’t added it to the tooltip of items, presumably because that would just spawn questions as to why some items mention it and some don’t, or maybe they consider it clutter.
Too much info on tooltip can be very bad, if you’ve ever installed addons like TSM or Altoholic or the like, you’ll notice they might double the amount of lines per tooltip instantly, its pretty crazy. Obviously this can be configured but still.
But rolling out your idea for everyone would require them to properly classify essentially all items, which is no small task.
Obviously they could do the same thing as i recommended above (going by item id and/or item level), that would give a half-decent baseline, but there are exceptions and irregularities left and right.
Some Legion items require level 120 (stuff in the Chromie scenario) that can be misleading, some old items have been reused in later expansions (like how do you mark Apexis-related itemids that were present in TBC and WoD both), how do you mark timewalking reputation tokens (added/bought in WoD/draenor, but giving rep for a cataclysm faction), what about items that exist in multiple expansions, and timewalking drops (is that ilvl 380 helmet from illidan a TBC or a BFA item, subjective id say), …etc etc… you get the idea.
If it’s an official part of the game then having lots of badly classified items just isn’t that acceptable.
Nobody is going to buy the next expansion because they list “shows the xpac on every tooltip” on the announcement poster, so if they are going to invest a lot of developer time it makes sense to spend that on other improvements that do have more of an impact.
This thing is merely a tiny tiny quality of life improvement. As such it fits much more within the addon model imo. Infact, it’s quite common for someone to make an addon which is just a basic database of this kind of information, call it LibItemInfo or w/e and have people collaborate and improve it over time on github or curseforge.
Seems some other addons also already have a basic implementation of this (though not as a library in this case):
https://media.forgecdn.net/attachments/212/967/sm_gear.JPG
https://wow.curseforge.com/projects/smexymats
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