Every Game Has Figured Out Trash Loot Management Except ‘Destiny 2’

It’s that time again, where every few months I go on a rant about blue drops in Destiny 2 because literally nothing ever changes. This time around, I thought I’d take a different approach, and show how essentially all other looters in this genre have figure out this problem and Destiny 2, now entering year 6 of existence pretty soon, still refuses to do anything to mitigate this junk/clutter/storage issue. It’s beyond maddening.

First, the core Destiny 2 problem:

Blue drops are the lowest rarity of gear in Destiny 2. Unlike other games, you cannot simply ignore them. Any engram you walk over in the game will go into your inventory. Any engram you purposefully avoid will go to your postmaster.

This creates two situations, the constant cleansing of your inventory of blue drops in each slot one at a time. And then blues filling up your postmaster, which is sorted only by recency priority. When it’s full, legendary, exotic or materials items get pushed out in favor of blues, simply because they’re more recent.

So how have all other games dealt with the issue of “junk loot”? In many ways:

Borderlands: This is a game that does not auto-pickup loot at baseline, so you have to manually choose which gear you actually add to your inventory. If you “miss” important gear, rare or above, it will go to your Lost Loot bin. However, from the start, the Lost Loot bin has always prioritized by rarity. Purple loot will push out blue loot. Legendary yellow loot will push out purple loot. So the actual most important things will always stay there.

The Division: The Division also requires you to manually pick up gear after kills, so you can choose what you want or don’t. But it also has a way to quickly mark large batches of loot as junk, so you can then dismantle or sell them all with the single press of a button, as opposed to Destiny’s “hold to delete” every single piece of gear system.

Marvel’s Avengers: This game may have many problems, but it quickly figured out a proper solution to junk loot. At a certain level, lower rarity blue loot simply stops dropping for your character as the game realizes that it’s going to be useless for you.

Outriders: This is probably my actual favorite system that seems like the one that could be directly ported in Destiny 2. There are two things Outriders has here, a single button that deletes all loot of a specific rarity in your inventory. And then a setting that lets you choose the lowest level of gear that is automatically picked up from the ground and added from your inventory.

Destiny 1: Yes! Even Destiny 1 is in this list! Later in its lifespan, Destiny 1 realized that people hated getting pointless green drops in the wild, so it instituted a system that would auto-convert them to materials on pickup rather than forcing players to manually dismantle each one. It remains a great mysteries why this system has not be ported into Destiny 2.

I will complain about this until it changes significantly, but it’s been years and years already, and nothing gets done. I will never understand this.

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