Infinate Slots in Storage?

[Llywar]

While there might be 500+ items in this game, about half of those are books. Do people really stock up on so many books? With the number of newbies walking around they shouldn't be that hard to sell, although that is a matter of price.

 

Volume of trading is good for the game economy. Limits on storage do help promote trading - since people are less likely to hoard stuff "just in case" for two years.

 

The key is just making sure that the amount of store doesn't become a major annoyance that keeps people from bothering to manufacture - since that is bad for the economy as well. I'm not sure we've crossed that threshold yet.

 

My store is only 50% used, and I am levelling alch, potion, manufacture, magic and summon. Granted I'm mid-level on all of those, and I focus on making stuff that are either super-high-demand (HEs,SRs,etc) or are bought by an NPC - so I don't get stuck with stuff that takes months to sell.

[LilBear]

I agree Learner - we shouldn't have unlimited slots and you should use some strategy however at one point in time it was felt it was ok to have 200 slots for a time when there was maybe 300 items in game, as we are now hitting 600 in game then a rise in sto slots even if small is justified...

 

That's pretty much what I think. Strategy is definitely good, but as the number of items increases, so should storage slots (IF server space allows it). I usually have somewhere around 160 slots used, but I have no books, and virtually no armor, and definitely no weapons. What do I keep? Plants, potions (not all of them either), essences and the ores and minerals needed for them, bars, and so called misc items like rare stones and bones etc. Even if you're not a generalist, each skill gets new items all the time. Recently potioning got 7 extracts and 2 "super extracts" so that's 9 slots right there (not to speak of the 21 flowers plus vial you need to make them). It adds up because the game is getting more complex (which is a good thing). I bet most people do at least harvesting and alching, plus another skill, so that's at the least three skills that require storage. Anyway, slight, proportional increases seem to be the logical thing to me as the game evolves. Again, IF server capacity allows it.

[Vanyel]

I just have one question. Why should we keep every single item in the game in our storages? Is there any logical reason for such?

[neildog]

While there might be 500+ items in this game

 

Try 700 with new update

 

I just have one question. Why should we keep every single item in the game in our storages? Is there any logical reason for such?

 

No one is asking for that, people want an increase to reflect the increase in items in the game - not a slot for every item (though I suspect there are many out there who would like this!)

 

You can see how old this original thread is:

That's why food e.g. will never become storeable.

 

Ahh how El progresses....

[Beaverhunter]

I only got some harvestables and misc and so on stored, pretty much no armor or weapons and such... and still somehow I have 149 occupied slots out of 200 right now...

 

You have to remember that EL is suppose to be classless, so this "strategy" you speak of, is it to make ppl have to choose only to work on a few skills? That's what I would call forced classes.

 

To remain classless there need to be room for every skill for every player... Then how you utilize your time, money and pickpoints should determine if and when you can use all skills. Not a limit of unique items in storage, that has no decent logic in it.

 

A storage limit of 300 would be totally possible and not to any advantage except for that you then can have enough resources for ALL skills, thus sticking to the goals of EL.

[Vanyel]

I would rather say that strategy is about planning your developing self and not to do everything at once, but rather firstly gather ingredients for some essences, then coal and iron for bars, then make swords (armour), then mine some hydro, then make some hydro bars and them high-end armours.

Ingredients for fire essences take 3 slots, while essences themselves only one. Ingredients for iron bars take 3 slots, bars only one, etc. etc.

[Beaverhunter]

I would rather say that strategy is about planning your developing self and not to do everything at once, but rather firstly gather ingredients for some essences, then coal and iron for bars, then make swords (armour), then mine some hydro, then make some hydro bars and them high-end armours.

Ingredients for fire essences take 3 slots, while essences themselves only one. Ingredients for iron bars take 3 slots, bars only one, etc. etc.

 

lol... if you use this strategy I can predict a future of slow progress in skills for you, that's for sure. I have my own strategies and they work fine, but as I said... so far I don't even have armors and weaps and such... just harvest+misc pretty much...so I will be very limited to going further after I start a/d training for real.

 

Maybe your "strategy" works if you only "play for fun" and don't care about progress, but many don't do that, me included, sure I play for fun in a way but without progress there is not that much fun in my opinion.

 

No one is looking for 10-50 items, they always want BIG quanties.. and just because one product requires just a few slots, why should there be a limit to variation of your production?

 

Some people want to plan ahead and be able to do "everything" whenever it's needed... not "Can you get me some HEs?" "Yes, wait a week and I have 1k for you after I have trashed/sold some other products and got enough storage slots..." The market is always hungry for items, and if your going to make money, you better have products that the market wants, and those can vary alot... and the same time you need things for yourself... and there we go... full storage... limited from using the whole game...

 

I have seen many who just try and get rid of tons pretty usable items just because of the limit, so I would call this a problem.

 

Also about your "why store everything" comment... have you thought about that most items are used in some way in EL, so why would anyone throw items away? Most units require lots of time to get.

Edited May 22, 2007 by Beaverhunter

[Knuckles]

I'm a pure fighter(magic ofc) and I usually have ~200 items in storage.. With normal armours, and magic armours, I have had up to 40 peices of the stuff in storage, and thats armours, not to mention all the rings you need, potions, swords, capes.. I think adding maybe 300 spaces may be that little better.

[Acelon]

So you say we need strategy...to be honest, this game shouldn't be all strategy.

 

I don't train often, but when I did, I didn't want to train the same thing everyday...that gets boring. I switched it up between fighting, alchemy, summoning, etc. Of course that was pre-cooldown, so you didn't really need to be at a storage as long as you knew the right spots.

 

But now, storage work is basically required. It's lame to force people to choose what skills they want to store items for... Now I'm not saying that we should have infinite spots, but a simple 50 or 100 space increase would be a nice gesture.

[conavar]

I dont think anyone is asking for unlimited storage space, but an increase to compensate for the large amount of new ingame items would be nice

 

maybe it should be a percentage 600-700 items ingame storage space to only fit 50% of them 300-350 then you would still need the strategy players think we need

[darkguy]

maybe something like a on our stats windows there could be a part called storage and it could be like this

Storage: 0/6 = 200 storage slots

Storage: 1/6 = 250 storage slots

Storage: 2/6 = 300 storage slots

Storage: 3/6 = 350 storage slots

Storage: 4/6 = 400 storage slots

Storage: 5/6 = 450 storage slots

Storage: 6/6 = 500 storage slots

You use 1 PP to increase the storable item amount by 50

You can use 6 PP's at most = 300 storage slots.

Maybe add something like +300 slots now but they will be available to you as you increase the storage using pp's.

[Scorpius]

what would happen if youre 6/6 Storage and your storage is full and you reset?

[Beaverhunter]

Chimeran Wolf:

That's quite good, I was about to suggest a similar solution but with gc as a renting fee... But... There's a problem with dynamic storages and EMU.

 

What should the client/server do with the items that you can no longer hold after you placed like 300 slots into storage but then you stop paying or reset and go back to 200 slots... What should happen to the overload of items? Should 100 items get randomly picked as unavailable? Should they be removed? And so on...

 

A start and a fair start for everyone is an increase as Acelon mentioned, +50 or +100.

 

And as Knuckles has strengthen my point, even if only focusing on one skill the storage will limit the use of other skills when eventually you want to progress in them, and to force the player to get rid of maybe hard earned stuff, is wrong, in my opinion.

[cho-yun]

what would happen if youre 6/6 Storage and your storage is full and you reset?

 

you'll start with -6 overall?

[LadyReni]

I use 160/200 atm, so .. 40 slots for rent, anyone?

[bkc56]

what would happen if youre 6/6 Storage and your storage is full and you reset?

The same thing that happens if you are carrying a full load of stuff in your inventory and reset: you can't add anything until you drop enough stuff to be under the limit again. For inventory, that's an EMU limit. For storage it would be a slots-used limit.

 

It would also add an extra dynamic to reset preparation as most people tend to collect LOTS of stuff to mix for reset recovery. You'd be in a real bind if all of a sudden you found yourself 65 (for example) slots over your current max.

[heu]

But now, storage work is basically required. It's lame to force people to choose what skills they want to store items for... Now I'm not saying that we should have infinite spots, but a simple 50 or 100 space increase would be a nice gesture.

 

I totally agree with that. The way I see the evolution of the game, we're having implicit classes being forced... Other than some factors that are off-topic here, currently, with the amount of new items it's not really about strategy, it's about giving up on skills to be able to make progress on others.

[Entris]

I know that if we get more storage space i would fill my storage up with even more junk then i have now, if i would clean my storage out i would probably be able to get about 5-10 slots free without a problem.

 

I'm not a high lvl crafter manuer so i have no idea how much stuff i would need to make armors or weaps etc but if i go by what Trollson said 95 slots would be occupied for making the items he had in his example but after all those are made there would be alot of free spaces again so a bit of planning and bulking up to be sure you get a nice amount of the items you need would be a strategy itself.

[Happy_G]

personally i agree that half of the number of items in the game is a good number for storing things, with the addition of h-bags there are somethings i never have in my storage anymore (soon im hopeing to never have iron or coal in my storage anymore) and im always running out of slots, and when i look through i rarely want to get rid of any of it.

 

i am an Allrounder, with my main skill currently alch and fighting (with manu to suport the alch) once engineering is here i will be an engineer fighter, but ill still be doing alch manu and summoning, id like to be able to get into crafting and do some pots (my overall goal is lvl 60 in every skill) but i dont have room in my storage to have everything i need (even after i work alot of things purely from h-bags) i dont have hardly any flowers in sto anymore and few minerals and ores.

 

the 50% of the number of items in game would put storage at 350, i think 300 is enough to be a sufficient allrounder, and 350 would make it little trouble to be an alrounder.

 

Edit: i NEVER want to see infinite storage (altho it would be nice )

Edited May 24, 2007 by Happy_G

[kailomonkey]

I would appreciate an increase in slots, especially with all the new items being added. However, I understand that increasing every characters number of storage slots, even to 300, will require a great investment in additional server hardware.

 

Maybe some day eh?

[Llywar]

I would appreciate an increase in slots, especially with all the new items being added. However, I understand that increasing every characters number of storage slots, even to 300, will require a great investment in additional server hardware.

 

How is storage implemented? Isn't it just a database table? If so how big could it possibly be?

 

What is a few hundred thousand records between friends?

 

My mythtv tables have 1.5M records and I'm hardly running on server-class hardware...

[ttlanhil]

How is storage implemented? Isn't it just a database table? If so how big could it possibly be?

file per player AFAIK, data in those files for storage. and to quote myself (which is part of the issue about people searching):

sorry, maybe I wasn't sufficiently clear when I wrote it... by slots I mean what the server records, not what's seen when you use #sto. if you want to put a quality 1 item and a quality 3 item in the same slot and have it only take one server slot, then you're gonna lose the quality from the 3 one. and you can't have anything not use a slot unless it can't go in storage

the only ways around this are to make swords/armour sufficiently uncommon as to fit the small number you have in storage (which is not a bad approach, but doesn't suit with the mass-manu situation in EL) or to have a huge number of storage slots, which won't happen

having a quality for an item also means more data saved per item, so you use a lot more disk space... right now, I imagine it's something like [quantity 20, item ID 6578], which might take 6 bytes per storage slot = 1200 bytes per player account = 116 megabytes of space used for people's inv (using the figure of 101k players, in this thread)... that may not sound like a lot, but that takes time to load from disk... and imagine if EL's player base were to grow a lot...

saving a single quality number instead of quantity might keep it at the same disk usage... any more complex info being stored means more space (even if it's 200 x same sword with different qualities)

it does add up. and the server probably doesn't have (or need, ATM) a huge hard disk

 

remember that most accounts will be people who rarely play, so it does add a lot of wasted space... and EL is growing in player-base size... how large will it get? how large an array would it need if everyone had a huge sto?

[Llywar]

remember that most accounts will be people who rarely play, so it does add a lot of wasted space... and EL is growing in player-base size... how large will it get? how large an array would it need if everyone had a huge sto?

 

Well, I can't speak for how it is actually implemented, but here is an estimate.

 

Assume 10k accounts (identified by a 32-bit number). Each account has 1k slots in store. Each slot can hold a 32-bit number of items (thats 4 billion). Each item has a 32-bit item ID.

 

You need an array containing:

32-bit userid, 32-bit item ID, 32-bit quantity. That's 96 bits per row, or 12 bytes per row.

You have 10k accounts * 1k slots per account. That's 10M records.

 

So, 10M * 12 = 120MB of storage for that array.

 

I'm not a database guru, but figure another 120MB for indexing. Other than indexing by userID I'm not sure you really need anything else.

 

Sure, 0.25GB isn't a trivial amount of space, but it isn't a huge amount of space either. Since most accounts are infrequently used you don't need most of it in RAM at any given time.

 

Now, there might be something I'm missing, and it might be that the storage system was implemented differently and wouldn't be easy to change at this point. But at least in theory it isn't a major problem.

[jamincollins]

And using your figure for per storage slot data size (6 bytes), let's be ludicrous for a second and say that the number of storage slots tripled to 600 and the number of players increased by five times with no player purging.

 

6 * 600 = 3600 bytes per player

3600 * 505000 = 1818000000 bytes = 1.69 G

 

This is trivial in terms of drive space and more than possible in terms of server class system memory to hold the entire item in memory. If cost is an issue I'm sure that more than a few players would be happy to donate toward server hardware.

 

Buying two dedicated drives for a mirrored storage volume and 2 Gig of additional memory for a server class system would come in easily under $800.

 

Disks:

http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product.asp?sku=...amp;pagemode=ca

Memory:

http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product.asp?sku=2552875

 

I know single players that spend more than this on EL in a month at the EL store.

[ttlanhil]

don't just consider disk space, though, also consider the extra time to load from disk... most players don't see that because you don't do a lot that's disk intensive (except when you run out of RAM), but if there's a lot of people logging on/off the server, then more time to load info (and the hard disk is, what, thousands of times slower than RAM) will slow things down... from what I've read, I/O is already one of the things that takes a fair bit of time on the server (although that's in networking and such too)

 

ed: just like to clarify... I'm not saying it's a hard problem, just that it's an issue. I think the RP/strategy/whatever side is probably the bigger issue

now, I'm not against increasing the number of slots, but I wonder just how needed it is... I'm an all-rounder (apart from summoning since my reset) and my storage is currently 161/200. that's with half a page of flowers for all the potions and essences and all that as well. if I processed all the stuff I had now, I could probably get it under 100 pretty easily

I like to be able to do whatever takes my fancy at the time. so I like to have large stocks of a lot of things. but apart from storing a few dozen types of books from drops, I'm not sure how it can really be that hard to keep the number of slots down

Edited May 25, 2007 by ttlanhil