Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Test Center Update Notes Mar 5, 2004
/agree
Allow someone to look inside the pack if it's a problem with people getting scammed. A vast amount of merchants use packs for custom orders or to sell complete packages of goods, ie armor, buff packs, wound packs...
Rogue_5 wrote:
Commodities Market/Vendors: Fix to no longer allow people to sell bags that are not empty on vendors.
Commodities Market/Vendors: Added error messages for attempting to sell items in trade windows, non-empty bags, and un-tradeable items like goggles and light sabres.
DeQuosaek wrote:
Ha. Probably a landspeeder, like he says.
Dubolom wrote:
Rogue_5 wrote:
New Vehicle: Added sounds for the new landspeeder.
New Vehicle: Fixed engine effects on new landspeeder.
Huh!??? Really? NEW VEHICLE!????? What is it?
But we ALREADY have X-34 landspeeder. Are they adding the new, additional one? The only other landspeeder I could find in a StarWars database was V-35. So is that the one they are adding?
Strange if they actually were adding a vehicle I'd expect them to make a big deal out of it like they did with new mounts... So what does this statement from Rogue_5 mean exactly?
Commodities Market/Vendors: Fix to no longer allow people to sell bags that are not empty on vendors.
Mohr wrote:
Kevm wrote:
Do you have any idea the database capacity that would be needed if there weren't limits placed on storage? I'm against not being able to sell loaded bags on my own vendors, but there are needs to limit the amount of things everyone can horde.
This wasn't addressed to me but lets put some math to this....and assumptions of course which might be wrong but its an approximation anyway right?
300,000 Registered Users....lets assume 10,000 active accounts on a given galaxy. Each item is described by a set of properties that are all typically numeric. Lets say each "item" has a max of 50 numeric properties, an ID to a picture, database ID, OwnerID, LocationOwner & Coords (if in a house), item name (50 characters maybe...never checked this). So estimating high...each item we work with is maybe 500bytes. Lets say an "average" user might have 500 items....a mega-crafter might have 5000 items? So lets assume an average of 1000 items per active account. So average item storage in database is going to be 1000 * 500bytes = 500KBytes. OK...so 10,000 users * 500Kbytes = 5Gbytes per Galaxy for item storage. So...even if I'm off in any of the above by a factor of 10 we are still talking 50Gbyte and I would hazard to say most of us have a hard drive in our personal computers that are at least this size.
I don't know what SOE is using in their server clusters but 5Gbytes is not "BIG" as far as commercial databases go. Please feel free to comment or point out where I might be mis-estimating.
I realize vendors and factories could throw a wrench in some of my numbers but having been a crafter (WS) for a while I can't imagine I ever had over 5000 items including all my houses, vendors, factory inventories, etc. I also think most "casual" non-crafters have a lot less than this (even if they kept everything they ever touched).
Now that you've had a nice discussionon storage. Keeping in mind the melon nerfs and such.... now get this..... Thunderheart wants crafters to create and whord as much stuff as we can so we can be "smart" and somehow be less impacted by the HUGE crafting nerf going thru......
Do the devs not realize that 9 armor pieces on a vendor separately and 9 peices of armor onn a vendor in a bag take more database space?
So you sell a bag on the vendor, it creates one sale entry for that bag.
you sell the 50 items in the bag separately and it makes 50 sale entries one for each item.
This increases database usage by a potential 50x
AND
Reguardles, the items are still going to exist causewhether they can be placed on the vendor or not I WILL still make my items AND I WILL still make those bags!
)Please don't nerf the bags, they are a life saver to someone who can't play 24/7 (actually more like 19/7 with the server down time.
)
As an architect that does customer orders I am appaled at this "fix". We sell items that are a pia to put up individually, and in order to keep the order in any sense of order must be placed in a bag.
When I have some one order a complete furnishing for their home, do I expect them to paw through all the other items on my various vendors to find those special items that I have made for them? NO
Devs, what the hell are you smoking this week? instead of attempting to fix the problem (i.e. possible scams because you can't inspect the bag before purchace), you nerf one of the most useful tools at our disposal.
If I took this approach to a know issue in my job, I would be fired on the spot. Use common sense that god gave you and find ways to FIX a problem instead of creating many more!
This "fix" to stop the sale of packs containing items will cause so many problems for my business ingame. I'm a tailor and often make up custom orders for people. I keep a private vendor where I place packs containing orders with the person's name on. In the whole time I've been running this system I've had only one problem and that was my mistake forgetting one item from someone's order.
Sure this is open to abuse but so are many parts of the game. I'd say the abuse is such a tiny proportion that you're causing good businesses more harm than preventing the abuse.
One main reason the current system is so good is precisely because people can't see into the packs. If someone wandered in and checked my order's vendor and could see I'm selling a special BE item for 2000c to a friend/as part of a deal/as a gift, they could easily buy it and mess up my order. Also they could "demand" the same deal. There are so many downsides and problems that will come out of this one little change I don't want to even think about it!