Deletion after 29 days means its not unlimited....

ok, your comments are becoming more generic, and it's becoming more apparent that you're just spamming your own website. quit it.

I'm sorry that my comments are not 3-5 paragraphs long. My opinions are sometimes short and I do not feel the need explain myself on every comment I make. Also, I am not "spamming" my website. I am a blogger; I post comments on blogs with a tag. Most bloggers now-a-days will post with a tag. Posting comments with your name and website is NOT new and many bloggers will post a link to their blog with their name in the footer of the comment.

This website does not let me create a designated name to which someone could click my name and see my blog (such as Blogger and WordPress). If there is a way for me to do this, please reply with a proper link to a registration page (not a homepage) and I will do so. Until then, I will post my name tag.

-Aticus, http://www.paladintales.blogspot.com

no, I get why you're posting you're link, that's not the issue- self promotion on a website where you're supposed to be contributing to a community just rubs me the wrong way

I suspect he meant RAM, which does get kinda pricey at the server level, but still, yeah. This isn't a very good reponse from Drysc. He would've been better off just saying "We're looking into it, no promises" like he always does.

If he means RAM then the argument about alts does not apply.

Definitely bullshit.

100%, totally bullshit.

The only real issue might be the looming size of the database tables that holds the information, and running queries on that large database, but even then we have to remember that there isn't a single items_database, but rather, at least one table for server, and probably one table for each faction to keep things small and running smoothly.

As for space, that's totally bullshit. You know what is kept in the database?

Your userid, and the itemid. That's it. Each item is going to have a simple, 16 or 32 bit id. We'll say it's probably 32bit or 4bytes per item.

We'll say each player has an average of 4 characters with 20+20+20+20+20+16 = 116 slots. We'll double that for average bank usage (232) then round it up so the naysayers will hush (250) items per character. 1000 items per person, 10,000,000 players. (Even though a large percentage of those players don't have 4 characters with 250 items each, like me for example).

10,000,000,000 (roughly) items held by players. (Ten billion)

Each item ID is 32bit or 4bytes each, so thats 40 billion bytes. You know how much harddrive space that is?

37.252903 GB.

Yes, a single 40GB harddrive could hold over ten billion items held by players. (At least, the unique ID that the database would see).


So, I think the argument is total bullshit.

The expanding backpack was from a fake set of speculative patch notes. It's a nice idea, but really, four more slots isn't going to make or break the storage problems this game currently has.

As to storage taking RAM/hard-disk space, I don't buy it for the opposite reason. I have a guild of bank alts, each with their own guild bank and 6x16 slot bags each, because that's cheaper and more storage space than 20-slotters for the rest of my main's bank slots. It's now also possible to mail yourself pages and pages of mail with 12 items in each. You can't tell me that all these workarounds aren't as bad or worse for data storage than letting us have more storage space on a single character would be.

The real problem right now is soulbound equipment. Crafting materials I can send to an alt, or sell. I don't bother to save gear for possible twinks anymore - it it's something an alt I already have can use in the near future, fine, otherwise I'm better off selling it (or the DE'ed pieces). But soulbound gear you're stuck with, cause there's no way to get it back if you change specs or find out that certain stats are more valuable than you thought they were (especially with the ever expanding number of stats on gear these days).

I've also done the bank alt guild thing with a shared guild bank between all my alts. I'm loving the extra space. I used to have the large profession-specific bags in each character's extra bank slots, but I too have gotten to the point where soulbound gear has overrun my individual toon banks. I hold onto a lot of drops and quest reward gear that most people would have sharded because a given piece is the highest of a certain stat available in the game (at least that I've encountered so far). Most people I know get a purple for a certain slot, then shard every piece of blue and green gear they have for that slot. When you're trying to min/max a given stat for different situations, you don't have that luxury.

...
Krick
http://www.tankadin.com