Usage of Invariant Items

[leMicin]

Introduction

Opening this discussion to track where we currently use the invariant items for some of our features. Invariant items mean that we use the English language to detect certain items. We then match those items by their index from the API. This is very unreliable as different languages have different counts. It is our current best implementation, unfortunately.

Why we use it

• PoE1 - Show Poe.ninja prices. Poe.ninja uses English item names.
• PoE1 - Show Map Wiki information from the official wiki.
• PoE2 - Detect which items are uncut gems as the way to search for these on the trade site is different than other gems. (Item level vs Level)
• We have a feature that allows users that are using a different game language to still use the English site as it is sometimes faster.

Options

We don't really have options on how we can fix this ourselves. We don't want to start reading game files as that method breaks on almost every update. The fix needs to come from GGG in some way.

• (Preferred) Include an ID inside the API that matches across languages. This is what is done for stats. Stats work wonderfully because of the id field.
• Make sure that the count of items is always the same across languages. This ensures that we can grab the correct English name by the index from the API.