It's true we've been quite hesitant in having too much automation (and you still have to click these on the ground, they aren't automatically picked up), but we have also quite clearly indicated that player feedback is very important for us and should there in the future be a big need for something that at the time wasn't something we were fond of including, we will revisit topics as the game grows and changes. I would describe community feedback as "a seat at the table of decision making", it's not something that we always follow strictly for many reasons but to give one, because it's simply impossible a task to do. Within the community itself there's often quite a big division on any given topic.

There's a lot more item drops now compared to years ago, and especially shards and other material drops have increased in quantity and frequency, requiring players to open inventory and send them to storage more often. These changes have significantly altered our internal views on allowin...

Solo challenge (SSF) is decided upon character creation, but can be then disabled later to become a non-solo challenge character from the settings. There are also 2 different types of Solo challenges - one is a "true character SSF" where the character has no access to shared stash, materials or progression from other characters, and then "acount found SSF" which is what Path of Exile has, where you can move items and materials between different characters but not be able to interact with other players.

What /u/PoorLittlePicklePest mentions below about the Item Factions (Merchant's Guild or Circle of Fortune) is quite a common slight misunderstanding of Item factions, as neither of those have nothing to do with the Solo challenge.

It just happens to be that most Solo characters choose Circle of Fortune (CoF), but you can be aligned with Circle of Fortune and still play with other players and are able to gift items(not to be confused with trading which requires being part of Merchant...

Woopsie!

Technically blessings are items, but they never drop as actual items so players are unable to have them in the inventory. The blessing slots are equipment slots where they are slotted via the blessing select panel.

However, dev tools can spawn them as items and that's what happened here. So no, you won't be having blessings as items like this in Season 2.