Using different catalogs per item type, Good practice or bad.

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Angelo Del Rosario Pogi asked Aug 13, '19

Using different catalogs per item type, Good practice or bad.

Hi playfab community!

I am in the middle of developing a game with multiple item types.
After spending some time reading documentation and forums, it is apparent that the design of a catalog is collection of all in-game items. I wanted to go with this implementation of putting all my items in a single catalog however, the only filter or segregation I can see is item class and tags.

I have a list of items inside an Excel sheet and would like to group them in playfab the same way in excel... by table. Found out that this is possible with drop tables, just adding them up in their own drop table
For example: Weapons_Table -> Contains all weapons, Items_table-> contains all other tables

However, this feels too much of a hack to me and i would rather group them by catalog and just get an item in a catalog via cloudscript.
For example: Weapons_Catalog, Spells_Catalog, etc.,

will there be any bumps I will encounter in the long run if I went with the Segregation by catalog pattern? I am fairly new to playfab so a little help from the experienced would be so much appreciated.

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Answer 1 · 2019-08-13T07:46:17Z

Sarah Zhang answered Aug 13, '19

Putting different types of items in different catalogs currently may cause some inconvenience. As far as I know, if we would like to use Apple store In-app purchases we only can bind Apple store items with PlayFab items that in the Primary catalog. So if you put your items in different catalogs based on their types, it may be a problem when you want to use iOS In-app purchases. You can try to segregate types of items by catalogs if you totally don’t have such need.

Another thing is that drop tables are not suitable for this usage. Drop table is used to "randomly generate inventory items", "and sequential drop tables can provide some randomness to player rewards." This point is mentioned on this doc Drop tables.

If you want to organize your in-game storefront based on types of items, maybe you can learn about Stores. Stores are the best way to let players purchase items in your game in different ways. You can put all items in different stores, let them still in one catalog. Stores serve a subset of Catalog Items. It can be used to easily organize your in-game storefront.

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Angelo Del Rosario Pogi commented · Aug 13, 2019 at 08:09 AM

Hi! Thank you for replying!

Hmmm, I see, so drop tables are not meant to be treated as tables.

Will it be a better solution to segregate my items using the store? Some items will not be neccesarily included in a store.

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