Development Cycle Archive

Andar, you wont have to worry about us supposed exploiters. When this goes live you will have those major towns planets all to your self. If you havent noticed the population drop already you certainly will with this change.

The good news is there will still be these boards for you to get your much needed attention.

Frankly its probably a blessing to most of us that have thought WOW what potential, you know they almost had to work at making it fail.

One outstanding thing they did fromt he start, they didnt show you how many people were logged into each server (REAL NUMBERS). Guess they figured we wouldnt know noone was one from the empty friends lists or the tumble weeds blowing thru theed.

You also wont get and answer tell the next billing cycle is passed, Again a good business move, they get at least one more month.

I really cant understand how the database can still be an issue, the servers are half what they were at launch.

Limit the schematics to 1000 and that will work for most people, I think.

However, if you do decide to reduce factory schematics to a maximum of 100, will you PLEASE make factories create things at least 10 times faster than they do now?

With mission difficulties completely borked for those of us with combat ability, but no weapon skills. (CH/Doc, or similar) the only way for me to make decent money is to sell stim B's. If you limit factories to 100, and do not increase the speed of manufacture by _at_least_ a factor of 10, I will be perpetually broke until missions are designed that actually allow me to make more than 2000 credits per hour.

It is highly frustrating that I can create (Fully Experimented) items BY HAND more than 4x as fast as my factory can create copies of said items. The only offsetting advantage that factories have is that they operate for as long as that have power, money, and requiredmaterials - even if I'm not logged on.

Cheopis

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Andal wrote:

I'm really not interested in yet another self-serving illogical explanation that essentially boils down to "I'm mad! And I hate hearing the truth."

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Andal wrote:

It should be obvious that if it wasn't considered an exploit, it would not have been eliminated.

But rather, the default value for schematics would have been changed to 1000 so folks wouldn't have to be browsing discussion boards to learn how to employ this non-evident "feature".

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So now all "bugs" are exploits? Guess everyone's exploiting the game then..

Holo, we are a community of intelligent people that can grasp issues having to do with databases and code. I understand that you may not want to get into specifics but please explain how the database is affected by the number of items a single schematic can make. Please correct me if I am wrong but, if a schematic can make fewer items then there will be MORE unique serial numbers not LESS. This means the database will have MORE information in it not LESS. I cannot see how the number of items for a particular serial number can make the database bigger unless you just think that the particular serial number will not be removed from the database because its still in game because someone made 1000 items of it instead of only 100. But I believe you are wrong here. Only difference is that instead of having 1000 items for a serial number you will have 100 items for 10 serial numbers and hence your database could theoretically have 10 times as much item information in it which I think at this point could be disasterous. Having more unique component serial numbers will increase the number of unique products based on those serial numbers as well.

Don't take me the wrong way here when I say this because I am trying to be constructive, but unfortunately the development team has shown in the past that they do not think things through clearly and consider all of the ramifications of their changes. Just look at the previous harvesting nerf as an example of how someone failed to understand how this would affect the player community. Don't make the same mistake here again and try to be proactiveand think very hard about the ramifications of this proposed change. I understand that this thread is an attempt to gauge how this change may affect their profession. What I am asking is for you to think very hard about how it will actually affect game performance as well. This proposed change may not give you the database improvement that you think it will.

I notice that 'db reasons' is given as a reason for many changes and I don't buy it quite frankly. I've also noticed many allusions to storage per player... I make a living workign with database schemeas that exceed a thousand tables and work with tables with hundred of millions of records... I imagine that you are trying to find an effective way to limit the average number of database rows per player. So I'm gonna take a slight diversion and examine that possibility for a second...

How many people have noticed that if you want to maximize storage for a player, buy a large house is not the way to go? A medium house get you 150 storage and a large house gets you 250. The medium house uses 2 deed slots and a large house uses 6... What about a factory? ! deed slot and you can store 100 items in the input hopper. You can also store 100 things in the output hopper, though you'll need a schematic or several to use up that slot. So for 1 deed slot you can store 200 items... Though you might have to work at it a bit.. You can store 150 items with a small or medium house for 2 deed slots... *Hmmmmm* Perhaps this is why one fighter that I know of uses 4 factories for storage... I imagine through reports the developers are noticing that quite a few objects are being sotred in factories... A players could easily have over 2 thousand objects in the game by using factories... If houses are to be used as a guideline of what developers would like to see... I'm guessing they would prefer the average to be closer to 400 objects... If you could solve the factory storage usage, player could still purchase multiple small houses to get large object storage... Still, I think reducing the amoutn of objects associated with factories would be a good plan, so lets explore that idea...

One way to reduce object overhead are factory crates... Basically for the cost of 1 object you can represent several. However, currently the way factory crates are represented, they only take up 1 inventory slot. Thus they do not effectively reduce the # of objects a player can store. I assume as a way to combat this you reduce the # of items in a crate of a certian type. i.e. 10 powerups per crate, 30 stimpacks, etc... Why not make factory crates behave more like containers or resources. In which if you have the same item you can combien them to make facotry crates and add/split, etc... Though isntead of making the inv slot 1, make each item you put into the box have a default usage. Lets use powerups for example. Make their defualt inv usage .1. A single item always rounds up. Thus a single power up uses 1 inv slot. If you put 10 in a crate, their combine inv slot is still 1. Put in 11 powerups in the crate and hte crate now uses 2 inv slots. You have now created a way to reduce object counts, yet still using up a player storage capacity. Various items can have different weights. Take kimo sclaes for exmaples... Most crafters and quite a few non crafters would put those sclaes in a crate jsut to make it easy to use, regardless of whether it uses less inv space. However even if putting 13 kimo scales in a crate only reduces your inventory usage by 1, it would still be a huge incentive to still use the crate. Also if the game automatically made the crates for you, it would make things quite a bit easier as well as automatically reducing object count as well! This would be similar to hte behavior of harvesting hide, meat or bone. It would also be nice if getting resources from harvesters also worked this way! I also suspect resources are limited to 100k stacks because of inv space as well... Give them weight as well! That way you can have that single object representing your 505k of steel, but it still takes up 6 storage spaces. Reduced object count, easier for players to work with it and it still uses up the invisioned storage space!

On another note... If all schematics just made 1 factory crate per schematic run, you can limited to output hopper to just 1 or 2 crates (regardless of slto usage), further reducing object counts for a player with factories. I would also be smart to come up with an effective way to restrict what can go into the input hopper. An easy fix would be to only allow items that are needed in a schematic to be placed into the input hopper. Of course, then people would jsut swap schematics to stuff lots of things in... So you would have to enforce that either the input hopper be emptied before swapping a schematic, or that all of the current input items can be used in the new schematic... I don't know enough of the schematics to know if you can reduce the input hopper size as well... I'm guessing that if players can make factory crates themselves, you might be able to reduce the input hopper size to 50 or even maybe 25 items as well...

If you could implement all of the above... You would reduce the maximum object count per factory from 201 to 31 or 56... Either number is a rather impressive improvement. As well, with many of the hoarding crafters, if they're anything like me, you would also reduce their number of objects by 50-55 as well...

Anyways... Something for you to think about if large object per player averages are still giving you nightmares...

p.s. I retain no rights to this idea, so feel free to use it.

Limiting Schematics to 100 is like paying for a new car in full, with pennies.

There is no good reason to do this, aside from "we're jerks and hate you". Im soundinghatefull and rude, but thats honestly what some of these changes are to me. Its just a flat out.. bad thing to do to us. Besides, naturally occuring Resource shifts SHOULD naturally limit schematic longevity. I say leave the players out of your problems with resource databases.

I would likea straight answer Holocron - ARE SCHEMATICS GOING TO BE LIMITED TO 1000 WITH THIS NEW UPDATE?

If this change goes through I would like to know a few days in advance, so like 90% of crafters out there I can finish my last resources and quit crafting altogether.

Oh, and one last thing - if this same update limits rifle speed to 3 seconds without at least doubling the damage, there is a 100% probability that I will cancel my account.

Thank

Eugene

6 (six) identical items required for some tailored items. so at least 600.

things done in the past to keep database size workable:

1. made items in nonequipped containers take up space

2. made survey tools and stims only take up 1 inventory space instead of 5

3. increased max stack size for raw resources from 250 to 100,000.

4. dropped storage space of input and output hoppers of factories to 100.

5.made factory crates take up 1 inventory space instead of 5.

so what next?

* How about making crates stackable, if they have the same serial number? Make them stackable and splitable, like raw resources. That way you can have one single stack/crate show up in the output hopper, and the creator can then juggle them around into sellable piles as needed.

Along with this, increase the max size of a factory crate. Right now some items max at 10, some at 25, some at 50. Make them all 1000 (or whatever the factory run limit will be), and solve that problem at the same time.

* Make same-type fishing bait stackable.

* Make same-typecreature samples from lairs stackable.

Not sure what other items there are that don't seem to have any stats and could be stacked without ill effects, but I'm sure there are a few more.

* Is medical forage still in the game and still only giving you one single item per forage?

* get a bigger & better database?

A change to 100 isn't only stupid its asinine. What kind of a lousy programer/software, do you guys have when something can only handle 100 because your database is getting too big. Get a new **edit** database.

This is complete stupid.

Take a hint from EQ or AC or UO or any other game out their. None of them have had database issues like you are stating. Hell even and old UO house, which you were the **edit** lead programer of could handle more items then the ones in SWG and UO is what like 5 or 6 **edit** years old.

100 = NO

1000 = YES