Hello.

This is a bit longer newspost that concerns the change mentioned
in the topic, announced on 'tunes' channel on 31.3.2022.
My intention here is to explain these changes, one of which has
been considered perhaps unwelcome by at least one player.

I would recommend that you read this whole post for the explanation
of the issue and my rationale for changing the functionality to
how it is now. But the TL;DR is that:

Stackable items no longer merge (e.g. go into same stack) if the
keep status of both items are not the same. Aka if you pick up a
rift spark, it will not magically go into the stack in your
keeplist because the picked up item was not in your keeplist.

Stackable items include things such as ammunition/arrows,
herb stacks, mage reagents, rift sparks, etc.

Anyway, the longer explanation follows ..

Starting from boot of 1.4.2022, fixes to the behaviour of stackable
items were deployed. There were two fixes, both concerning how
stackables interact with 'keep' status.

The first change is pretty straightforward and should be non-
controversial - there was a bug how the keeplist was checked
which under some circumstances caused stackable items in 'keep'
to become (temporarily) considered unkept. Basically this occured
when player did something like 'get stackitem from rig;drop all'
or such.

...

The second change is to how stackable items "merge". These items
item will every once in a while attempt to merge to a stack, and
there are many checks to make sure that the items are "similar
enough" before such merge can go through.

S)end news
R)ead news
For example, if you pick up a herb handful or arrow or so, or
put it into your rig, drop into a room, etc. these checks will be
performed in a moment and if all checked "attributes" match,
the items will merge into one stack.

The issue was that these checks did NOT included the keep-status
of either of the items. This caused the previous behaviour that if
you picked up, say, a rift spark, it would "merge" into your 'kept'
spark stack.

However, the reverse was also possible, though rare: if the internal
order of items was such, it was possible for the 'kept' stack to
merge into the 'unkept' item/stack, the resulting stack becoming
'unkept'.

This, obviously, was not a desirable behaviour.

Now, while working on this issue, I did actually come to think about
whether some people had come to expect and rely on the "positive"
outcome of things magically merging into their 'kept' stacks.
I had a long-ish discussion about this possibility with one arch,
and neither of us could really (or so I believe) come up with any
other solution that'd be "correct" and also to cater to such
people (expecting the "magic" behaviour) in all the cases.

So the final solution was to make it just "correct", e.g. the
stackable items that have a different 'keep' status no longer merge.

The problem is that while in SOME situations, SOME players might
prefer the "feature" of "oh, I picked up item and it went to my keep",
it is possible to think of various counter-examples.

1) You pick up or are given a stack item that you for some reason
do NOT want to merge to a stack in your keeplist. Perhaps you
are a merchant and juggle around piles of reagents, or ammunition,
and wish to keep things separate.

2) Some other player interaction .. you accidentally pick up or
are given something, and oops .. it's in your keep now. Then
you have to 'keep remove arrows; give 60 arrow to foo' or
so.

And so on. I'm sure someone more clever than me could come up
with more examples. And someone could come up with examples of
when this kind of behaviour would be convenient.

The point is, you can't have both. I chose to implement the logical
fix because I consider the alternatives to be ultimately more
confusing.

And I am tired.

--
Ggr