The reason wards with a time limited lifetime do not stack in players inventories

bolt

I purchased 6 demon wards and six demon slayers from my stronghold they all stacked in my inventory as a stack of 6 in for each different ward. I randomly equip one of the 6 in for the first boss of mDWP. What I noticed was that on after any use in combat the slayer or the ward no longer stack so after using 4 in random order for boss fights they all had different lifetime remaining before they expired and they did not stack any more but the 2 of each that I had not used at all which each had the identical full 2 hours remaining lifetime did stack. (see attached photo)

So my hypothesis is that the bit of code that decides whether wards should stack not only looks at the unique item id/name and the item type (e.g. Bound Character or Bound Account) but is also looking at the time remaining before the item expires and if any of these characteristics are different the items will not stack. I have also found this to be true for other wards like those gained from Hellpit that have a time based duration.

I believe this classification of items as different (and therefore not stackable) if they have differing lifetime remaining to be a bug. The hypothesis should be easy to test and if it holds true home in on the code causing the issue

bojangls

This isn't a bug, its intended because about 6 months ago they used to stack no matter what and when you would unequip one it would restack with the rest resulting in the time to reset. This essentially meant that you could infinitely use the overload so long as you had another to stack it with. Obviously this isnt intended so they fixed it and now once used and unequip it becomes it own independent overload with its specific timer.

bolt

Thanks bojangis, I now see the issue the devs were trying to address but is it the best approach? The fix in place results in unnecessary use of player limited inventory bag space. Since the current code apparently records lifetime remaining on wards why not simply keep the stacking criteria as it was based on unique item name and item type (bound account, bound character etc) and write code to specifically prevent the timer reset when a stacking event occurs? On the face of it this would be a better solution than making what are essentially identical items, in terms of name and type, non-identical , and therefore non-stackable, by introducing lifetime remaining a criteria for uniqueness? Just seems like there is a better solution to investigate