Bits from Jessica : Content, information and undocumented features

[vinnyq]

woa woa woa!

(well, thanks for that Jessica, appreciate you getting to the bottom of this).

But before the devs decide that they want to remove restriction on inventory to unlimited capacity, you might want to poll the players first to see if this would be a welcome change. I know I would love to see a bulk increase, or even have the bulk upperlimit be tied to a player attribute, like strength for instant, but not a limitless bottomless bag.

[alibasil]

Thanx for the reply Jess

Do you mind if I/we call you Jess?

[sehracii]

I think she meant just no "slot" limit so your bag contents were solely determined by bulk alone. Hence the reason EVERYTHING needed at least some bulk, otherwise you could eventually have thousands of tickets and your bag would just be to cumbersome digitally for the server to deal with

I think this is a good explanation, and look forward to the full A-D process happening int he future

[mmatto]

Jessica, does your inventory database need more storage and resources for stack of 2 tickets than stack of 1 ticket? If yes, you should fix that implementation issue as it probably causes 90% of load on your inventory db. If not, your explanation does not hold water.

Stacking of bulky tickets is useless as players won't have more than 1 ticket to each location (bulk means a lot in this game). Why to implement stacking at all for tickets? You could have just added bulk to tickets and players would have deleted duplicate tickets.

[vinnyq]

Stacking of bulky tickets is useless as players won't have more than 1 ticket to each location (bulk means a lot in this game). Why to implement stacking at all for tickets? You could have just added bulk to tickets and players would have deleted duplicate tickets.

This is not true. I usually have 2 or 3 tickets for each popular locations.

Although I would rather see a wallet system or some interface tied to the map instead of the tickets.

[mmatto]

This is not true. I usually have 2 or 3 tickets for each popular locations.

I would say that couple of duplicate tickets to some popular locations is irrelevant for server resources and usability. In fact, I would find my popular tickets faster if there were duplicate tickets of only those

Agreed on better interface to tp, though.

[micrix]

Jessica, does your inventory database need more storage and resources for stack of 2 tickets than stack of 1 ticket? If yes, you should fix that implementation issue as it probably causes 90% of load on your inventory db. If not, your explanation does not hold water.

Stacking of bulky tickets is useless as players won't have more than 1 ticket to each location (bulk means a lot in this game). Why to implement stacking at all for tickets? You could have just added bulk to tickets and players would have deleted duplicate tickets.

Now my humble knowledge of SQL

2 stacked items are only one row. 2 not stacked Items are two rows in a db.
999 stacked ambers are 10 times less load on the db then 10 stacks of 99.

Am i right ?

This all is not about tickets and bulk but performance and stability

If slots where removed completely something weird could happen. Some really bored players could start to fill their bags with crystals. Terrabillions of crystals. This would bring down performance to zero and raise cost of rented discspace.

This is nothing you or me would try to do. But this is something a dev has to think of. Its Murphis law

[mmatto]

This all is not about tickets and bulk but performance and stability

True, but selected way to prevent problem was not the only possibility and it has quite nasty side effects for normal game play.

[helbreat]

OK, so I've been talking to people here about why the ticket bulk change was made. As is usually the case in the situations, it resulted from the effects of another change and was done with the best of intentions. Where we fell down was in neglecting to discuss it with the players beforehand, because the change makes a certain amount of sense when viewed in context.

Briefly:

This patch expanded the inventory slots available, as 250 was too few (as you told us more than once, ). At the same time, tickets were made stackable.

Thus, instead of having 250 slots for 250 total items, the expansion of inventory blew that out to 500 slots of stackable items, with a limit of 999 per stack.

At this point, we hit a dilemma… and this was where we made our mistake. There has been some discussion internally on whether we could and should remove the inventory limit entirely. The problem with that is, if we did it, everything would need to have some bulk, if just to prevent us having to buy 100 terabytes of storage to hold everyone’s inventory and slowing the game to a screeching halt as the server loaded it in and saved it back.

So, in case we decided to remove the limit entirely later on, we slapped some bulk onto the tickets and moved on to other patch items. Unfortunately, the change was not broadcast out internally or to the players, so there was no discussion about it.

What should have happened was:

A) We realize everything needs some bulk to keep our options on removing limits open for the future;

B) We post that on the web site and discuss it with you, so you can point out things we might have missed or overlooked;

C) Once we’ve seen all the debate, we make a decision;

D) We tell you what that decision is and implement it in a patch.

In this case, we skipped steps B) and C) and about half of D). On the bright side, we got step A) 100% correct <grin>.

Seriously, though, one of our challenges as a development team is obviously to intercept these knock-on decisions before they are implemented and get them posted for discussion. The four-step information process posted yesterday for discussion is a good start, I think.

its amazing that after this long you still think we were worried about the ammount of slots we have in our bag....

unlimited slots wouldnt make 1 blind bit of notice to any of us the bulk is what needs to be addresed we have the same bulk limit from newbie starter islands till lvl 250 in melee. surely all that training and stregth should enable us to carry more?

if i had the choice between the new ticket bulk or the old slot limit with mats still stackable to 999 ill take the final option thank you

[micrix]

True, but selected way to prevent problem was not the only possibility and it has quite nasty side effects for normal game play.

True. But Jessica commited. Commited with grin but commited

In this case, we skipped steps B) and C) and about half of D). On the bright side, we got step A) 100% correct <grin>.

If players would have had the chance to comment, they surely would have said: "well, if bulk is needed ok, but plz 0.1-0.2 or give us some bulk more to compensate".