Playing the Inventory Shuffle
by SealWyf, HSM Editor
Along with some truly interesting features, core update 1.75 added a distressing software bug. As anyone who was on Home during this period knows, it caused your entire wardrobe and object inventory to shuffle each time you entered Home. Items from working inventory dropped into Storage, while other items were coughed up from Storage into the working inventory. This made serious wardrobe or decorating work nearly impossible.
The bug appears to have been fixed, at least for some people, at some times. I’m cautiously optimistic, and have begun the long, slow task of rearranging my clothing and object inventories, one category at at time. With luck, we can now return to normal Home life.
However there are few life-lemons that don’t make decent lemonade, given the proper recipe. And this one was no exception. One of the unexpected benefits of having your possessions scrambled is that you’re reminded of things you forgot you owned. If you have been in Home for a few years, you have acquired hundreds — perhaps thousands — of virtual items, most of which you don’t particularly want to see again. Many of these were rewards — things you got simply because they were available, and because having them was a status marker. But once the excitement wore off, they got dropped into the black hole of Storage and forgotten, unless you happened to notice them while looking for other half-remembered items.
Having these things resurface reminded me how glad we were to get Storage in the first place. By the time it was finally added to the inventory system, we were drowning in virtual goods. Many of us had slowed or stopped purchasing new items because managing our inventory was so difficult. Storage was indeed a blessing, though I personally think it could be improved.
But let’s get back to the Inventory Shuffle.
My first experiment with “shuffle decorating”
Having these forgotten items back in my working inventory reminded me of the fun I had while winning them, and the earlier days of Home. It was like wandering through a flea market, or going through trunks in the attic, sorting through outgrown clothes, old report cards, the pictures I drew in second grade, and a dog-eared photo of a long-dead but beloved cat.
And some of these items are actually quite amusing, even if they don’t fit into my normal decorating schemes. I decided to enjoy the enforced serendipity by turning it into a game: I would take an un-decorated apartment and furnish it entirely with things that had floated from Storage into working inventory. The more bizarre, the better.
My first experiment was to create a grand junk-pile in my newly-acquired Dream Hideaway. I dressed my avatar in “jumble sale” style, with ridiculous items that had emerged from the virtual attic, and set up a photo shoot.
A little more order creeps in
A grand junk pile was fun, but I found myself wanting to create something more livable. So for my next experiment, I emptied out my Summer House apartment and created a living room from the newly-surfaced inventory items.
Although I started out aiming for randomness, I found myself creating themed areas with implied stories — for instance, one whole corner was devoted to toxic waste drums topped with festive helium balloons. The Coffin Couch got paired with an old tombstone. A collection of tall, tubular lamps was joined by a Festivus Pole. I realized that I was unable to face chaos without trying to adjust it and tell stories about it. In my imagination, my random living room was now the council chamber of a group of chaotic trickster gods, a surreal Valhalla.
(Seriously, I think it could make a grand meeting room for the Homeling Generals.)
All of this has gotten me thinking. Now that the Inventory Shuffle bug has been repaired (maybe), how might the inventory system be improved? Because, frankly, it has once again become unwieldy. For those of us with hundreds or thousands of items, simply having a working inventory with a few Favorites floated to the top and a vast, undifferentiated Storage is not sufficient. There are items in Storage that would be fun to play with if we remembered they were there, and it was not so hard to find them.
One suggestion I have often made is that Storage have two levels — Shallow Storage for objects that don’t fit into the Working Inventory, but are still potentially useful, and Deep Storage for the items we never, ever want to see again. Like all those old Tester tee shirts, for instance. Who ever wears those? Having a deeper layer of storage would help reduce the clutter of normal Storage. Sometimes wading through the Storage tiles reminds me of the shows about compulsive hoarders, the ones who keep ten years of unread newspapers in bundles in the living room.
A few of my Pinterest boards
But what I would really like to see is a system of user-assigned categories — a way to create our own collections of items and call them up when we want something for a particular effect. I think it should be modeled on Pinterest, the popular application that lets people collect and organize images. I have over 11,000 images in my Pinterest collections, organized into 188 “boards”, and I can usually find the one I need.
If we could divide up our inventory, one category I would create immediately is Christmas items. Every year we get lots of great seasonal items, from Christmas trees to wrapped packages to figurines, not to mention the occasional Hannukah or Kwanzaa item, or the silly Festivus Pole. But for most of the year they return to the boxes in the attic — or in our case, undifferentiated Storage, where they clutter up the place when we are looking for something else. If we could tuck them away in a custom album, life would be much simpler.
Another useful category would be Plants and Flowers. Often, when I’m decorating, I think, “This spot could really use a potted plant.” I have lots of them, but most of them live in Storage where they are hard to gather and compare. It would be great to be able to pull them all up, and select the best candidate.
“A Still Life for Forgotten Home”
Another huge category is Food and Drink. Just think of all the great food items and beverages we have accumulated on Home! But most of the time I use the same few items, because they are the ones I have in working inventory. I would prefer to be able to review them all and select the best ones, when I’m setting up a table.
I would also create categories for Statues and Trophies, Fountains, Toys, Walls, Books, and Magical Items. If items could be filed under more than one category (definitely desirable), I would also classify items by historical period, material, color or pattern: Modern, Victorian, Ancient, Metallic, Leather, Red, Black, Floral. There would also be a category for “Junk” — the items I really never, ever want to see again. Really. We all have some of those, don’t we?
Of course this would take a core update, and probably a major one. But it would make our inventory system much more usable. Perhaps we can hope for this when Home moves onto the PS4. Because even under normal circumstances, without a software bug to battle, digging through Storage feels like a ramble through a flea market — or a grand game of Inventory Shuffle.
March 9th, 2013 by SealWyf_ | 12 comments
SealWyf is a museum database programmer, who has been active in online communities since before the Internet, and in console gaming since the PS1. In games, she prefers the beautiful and quirky, and anything with a strong storyline. She is obsessed with creating new aesthetic experiences in PlayStation Home.
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I would love to see at least some category system created to ease the clutter issues, and a “deep six” storage area for those things we don’t want at all. I thought my storage bug was fixed, and it was for a day then I bought something new and voila it is back again. My clothes and furnishing are back to being jumbled, and after reorganizing them three times already I think I will wait until an official word from Sony that the patch is in, if it ever comes. I hope so and soon, there are a lot of upset customers out here waiting for them to fix this. I own quite a bit but I have friends who own way more than I do and it is getting very frustrating for them.
It took a new form for me on Thursday night. EVERYTHING was in Storage, and the main working inventory was completely empty, at least for the categories I checked. At that point there was nothing to do except lean back and laugh.
Meanwhile, my Pinterest collection is approaching 12,000 items. Every time a category gets too large, I sort it out into smaller categories — for instance, Birds got thinned by filing Crows, Owls, Chickens and Hummingbirds separately, and I’m considering new boards for Parrots, Penguins and Flamingos. Self-classification is open-ended, and you don’t have to guess what categories people are going to want. I’ve seen people who lump all living things and landscapes into “nature”, and specialists who classify down to the species. You can create boards on the fly for special projects and delete them later. The only thing I wish they would add is a way to sort items within the board. But this is good enough. Something like this would REALLY work for Home inventory.
Yeah my newest version has all of my stuff starred like it is new and still mixed up. This is the weirdest bug I have ever seen in Home the way it comes and goes. I have a friend who never even had it happen to them so I guess it is a random bug, but seems to be affecting most people I know in some way, and they are starting to get angry about it from some of the comments I am hearing. These people are the “whales” of Home, Sony needs to get this fixed ASAP, or they are going to alienate a lot of the customers that keep Home afloat. Some aren’t buying right now either because it causes what happened to me.
I’m pretty OCD about things being organized. Everything should have its place, right? The wardrobe/furniture juggle bug is enough to make me go round the bend properly. And it’s just another reason I’m waiting to jump back into Home. I’ve been reading about a lot of people not receiving their purchased items too, which would make me mad.
I’m glad you can glean some fun from it Seal, you must have a great temperament coz I’d just end up cursing to the Sony gods if I had to deal with such disarray!
Here’s hopin’ for a fix…
I have sorted and resorted because of the storage glitch… Brings on a new meaning to storage wars huh. I equate the cloud storage miss fires to renting a car instead of owning one. Instead Park your car in your driveway every night, you turn in your keys and hope that you get the same car or at least a similar one to the one you had yesterday. With data storage moving more and more toward the clouds, I fear there might be more twisters and storms to come till all the bugs get worked out. I am all for and even excited about the new innovation on the horizon but I am guilty of being frustrated as well. In West Texas, where I live, clouds can mean a few things… temporary shade from the cooking rays of the sun…. much needed rain that help fill in the cracks in the earth… or damaging storms with hail, high winds, flooding, lightning and, oh to often, tornado. Im not scared of the new cloud technology but I am keeping a watchful West Texas eye towards the “sky” and hoping for a gentle cooling rain.
I really just want a return policy..I would be happy to accept a discounted by back..Give me store credit..
I’ve often thought this would be a great idea. I would suggest that the older an item got, the less of a percentage return you would receive. This way you could get almost all your money back on a new item that you realized was a mistake, but if you kept something, say a month, you really wouldn’t get much of anything back. It would make more sense to keep it until it became a “classic”.
Another strategy I’ve suggested is an “item exchange”, where you could trade unwanted items for limited-edition virtual goods. For instance, turn in ten unloved tee shirts, and receive a stylish developers-logo leather jacket. It would probably be hard to implement, but hey, it’s a fantasy.
YES!!! as exchange program, BRILLIANT!!!
Yes, my wardrobe is a mess and I’m not shopping until Sony fixes it.
I have actually stopped shopping awhile ago..just looking for that special purchase now..