Breakfast Topic: Did Blizzard just solve the “bigger bags” issue once and for all?

It’s one of the most common refrains we hear, year after year: when are we getting a bigger starting bag? We hear it in The Queue, over Twitter, at BlizzCon. The question is always asked and the answer is almost always the same: not now, or just plain no. However, two things happened at BlizzCon on Saturday.

First, we heard in the Engineering chat that a larger starting bag is basically never going to happen. The value for the starting bag is hard coded, and it’s part of several magic values that are written into base code that’s over a decade old at this point, and has so many checks that it would be nearly impossible to dedicate the resources necessary to solve it. As a software engineer myself, I’m sure that Blizzard hasn’t come to this conclusion lightly. Changing it isn’t just as easy as a find-and-replace. This basically means there is a hard no from the coders on changing the bag space, which means it’ll never happen.

Second, the new transmog system was unveiled. Wardorbes are going to move all the gear that we’ve been collecting over the last ten years into a separate account-wide tool that will let us use anything we’ve ever found. And yes, that includes quest items retroactively. With this an important question becomes: what exactly are we going to use bag space for?

Of course there’ll be profession materials, but those are already taking up less and less. Not only do they go into the reagents tab in the bank (and can be used from there), they also stack to 100 (or more) now. Profession mats are just not going to take up a ton of room.

Current expansion gear will be a good reason to use bag space, but even the most dedicated of raiders and PvPers that I know only keep a few sets around. That takes up, what, a couple bags at most?

There’s a few trinkets, consumables, items I’m selling on the auction house, and other junk… but that stuff is few and far between when compared to the massive amount of gear I have sitting in storage. The point here is that with the introduction of the new transmog system, we basically don’t need all the bag space we’ve gotten. Void Storage is going to become pointless soon. Infact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it go away entirely.

But maybe I’m missing something. You tell me, dear readers; is bag space still an issue, or can we all go back to walking around with 16-slot bags again?