April 11 hotfix partially reintroduced a mechanism for Shift + Drag custom splitting of stacks (at least for kbd & mouse players). Initial impressions are that it is not working well.
It took a serious study session to figure out what they delivered, but it has shortcomings.
Default ENTER key seems to not to be useful. Now they offer 2 to 3 buttons, and you have to click upon them with the mouse pointer. Enter should always accept the number and move the inventory into the target where the Drag operation finished. There is no need for a separate Split button, as you should use the target to determine where to place the new items. They seem to have bound Enter to Split instead of Give or Take.
As Enter had always been bound to Accept your quantity, it should continue to function in that same manner. Why is the developer forcing users to Split stacks WITHIN THE SAME CONTAINER with this default key binding, when that is a function that most certainly would be the edge case, instead of the norm. The whole idea of a stack is to consolidate like items. If a user wishes to split one stack into two parts, they would Shift + Drag into an empty space, as it worked before April 2.
Give or Take should just be named Accept. We don’t need both Split and Accept, we just need Accept. The location of the Release of the Mouse Pointer tells you which container the intended operation is meant for.
You can’t drag ANYWHERE in your inventory, you have to choose specific areas, which makes this a horrible user interface. If you try to split your Chest into your Backpack but the cursor ends over any of the 5 rows of occupied content, the requested transfer just doesn’t take place. You have to end over a blank square, or to the left or the right of the items in order for the system to move your requested items.
With the low level of feedback about each operation, the player must scrutinize every transaction requested. Did they press Enter and the contents were Split in the source location instead of moving to their intended Drag and Drop release point? The pre April 2 system virtually guaranteed that each and every operation moved your inventory where you wanted it, or at least the stack in the destination was topped off. Now it is practically the opposite of the desired effect.
Dragging ANYWHERE into the player backpack should be enough to ensure that the requested quantity is deposited somewhere in there. The devs introduced item swapping which broke all of the good functionality that existed prior to April 2. I can’t stress how important reliability of success is when presented with this dialog box.
If the container (chest) is full you are prohibited from using Shift + Click to attempt to transfer an item into the chest, even if the chest has the same stack existing already and is not full. The only way to get items into the chest is using the Quick Stack feature (which forces you to move what it wants) or to specifically find and Shift + Drag the item precisely onto the existing square of the same resource in the chest. This is a huge PITA, vs the old system.
Escape does not Cancel the quantity dialog. Instead it requires 3 consecutive key presses. First it un-hilights the quantity that was auto suggested. Then it does something else. Finally it closes the dialog. This is pretty much useless.
I would like to make this a bug report, so that it had better visibility, but sadly I think this is more of a bad design issue.
Feel free to read my other posts about proper design of Inventory Drop-Downs, and how Heaviest First was working just fine before April 2. Worst April Fools day joke ever…