[2020] The Future of Stash Tabs

Today we released some new types of Stash Tabs. Despite them selling well, many players had concerns about the direction of how our tabs are going in the future. We have some Stash Tab QoL features in the pipeline that we intended to announce when they were ready, but feel are important to discuss now so that the context of the new tabs makes more sense.

Tab Folders

You'll be able to create tab folders (for free), which can contain other tabs. This lets you easily group related tabs together, hide empty ones you don't want cluttering the list, and so on.

Tab Affinities

You'll be able to tick a checkbox on one of each type of your Currency, Map, Essence, Divination, Fragment, Unique, Delve, Blight, Metamorph and Delirium Tabs, to indicate that that Tab should receive items that are Ctrl+Clicked from the inventory. This intentionally would not work with other items (such as rares you have picked up), as those require attention to identify and consider them.

We considered whether this feature would result in an unacceptable level of paying for convenience. Because a user could clear their inventory with similar speed by dumping items into a regular tab (albeit in a less sorted/pretty way), we feel it wouldn't give a significant advantage if a user is optimising for mapping speed and provides a similar level of organisational benefit that the specialised Premium tabs already provide.

Both of these features are still on the drawing board, are a while away from release (ideally before 3.12 though) and may be cancelled or changed if problems come up during development.

Future Improvements to Current Tabs

Existing Tabs are being updated as much as possible with new slots for items that should go in them. As I mentioned at ExileCon, we don't want to add a second Currency Tab. You've seen the expansions to the Currency Tab, Fragment Tab and Map Tab over time, and as we continue to add more items in future expansions, we aim to find room for them in the appropriate tabs. This means we've had to make some hard decisions about what items go in what tabs so that there is room for future items to be added.

We understand the usability concerns about having a lot of specialised tabs to manage, and believe that the changes listed above will significantly help the situation. We're sorry that we had not finished or announced these features before releasing the tabs today. It not only had bad optics but also didn't meet the transparency that we usually strive to achieve.