Merchant Archive
Thread: Database Fixes that we would LOVE not nerfs!
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thegadgetmaker
Sun Aug 08, 2004 4:30 pm
#1
I love the idea about the # of items in a house determines the maintenece cost! Run with that 
.....Of course that means my maint would be 500 cr/hr lol...
.....Of course that means my maint would be 500 cr/hr lol...
Redfyree
Sun Aug 08, 2004 6:50 pm
#2
I am in a small guild but without exception every single member (about 17 of us) own at least 2 houses. I personally have 9 that I use (friends placed on their empty lots). I have 12 factories. (well between myself and my chef guildy). I also would love to be able to actually decorate a house, but I am unable to do that when I have to use every available house for storage of my crafting supplies.
Now say that you implement ONLY the house maintenance option I mentioned above. Everyone uses ONE house.
On the LOW side say everyone has 2 houses (very few people only have one, and many people have 5-10 so this is lowballing the number of houses everyone owns/uses).
By letting us store everything in ONE house, that one change alone will free up 50% of the housing database on the server.
FIFTY PERCENT!! One ONE programming change.
Change stacks of resources to be 1,000,000 instead of 100k. Most crafters that need a specific resource mine the heck out of it when it spawns. Say people get 200k of each of the resources they use. By making that ONE stack of 200k (or in my case I have 3-700k of certain spawns), they again reduce the resource database by 50% minimum!!!
I'm only glad that the Dev's got into online gaming and not the medical profession IRL.
Patient goes in with a hangnail and instead of reaching for the $1.50 pair of nail clippers and snipping it off, they admit the patient into the hospital for a week and amputate his hand for a cost of $10,000.
Until SOE makes SANE and relatively EASY changes to improve their database problems, then I for one will not tolerate a change such as this which will hurt everyone. (crafters AND customers)
Now say that you implement ONLY the house maintenance option I mentioned above. Everyone uses ONE house.
On the LOW side say everyone has 2 houses (very few people only have one, and many people have 5-10 so this is lowballing the number of houses everyone owns/uses).
By letting us store everything in ONE house, that one change alone will free up 50% of the housing database on the server.
FIFTY PERCENT!! One ONE programming change.
Change stacks of resources to be 1,000,000 instead of 100k. Most crafters that need a specific resource mine the heck out of it when it spawns. Say people get 200k of each of the resources they use. By making that ONE stack of 200k (or in my case I have 3-700k of certain spawns), they again reduce the resource database by 50% minimum!!!
I'm only glad that the Dev's got into online gaming and not the medical profession IRL.
Patient goes in with a hangnail and instead of reaching for the $1.50 pair of nail clippers and snipping it off, they admit the patient into the hospital for a week and amputate his hand for a cost of $10,000.
Until SOE makes SANE and relatively EASY changes to improve their database problems, then I for one will not tolerate a change such as this which will hurt everyone. (crafters AND customers)
temptres
Sun Aug 08, 2004 7:06 pm
#3
I agree you guys have offered some good ideas!
woo hoo now if devs will read.
temptres
Kryxal
Sun Aug 08, 2004 8:41 pm
#4
Khristen wrote:
<snip>
If they push this vendor cap through as is--or possibly even at all--they're going to get lots of free database space in the form of cancelled accounts. People will be left with nothing. Combat is delayed. GCW is delayed. JTL is still months away. They'll have nothing left but the Jedi carrot dangling in front of us, which seems to be the direction they're heading anyway. And whether anyone believes it or not, there are lots of players who would much rather be a crafter with their own store than a Jedi any day.
Remember, "A jedi cares not about possessions". Clearly, this is supposed to apply to the rest of us too...
Be0Wulfe
Sun Aug 08, 2004 8:46 pm
#5
If the responsible parties at SWG & SOE were capable of carrying out any form of statistical analysis or even were in touch with what was going on with the game, they would have been closer to identifying what the problem with their systems are and correctly design a solution to the problem instead of addressing symptoms.
For starters, increasing stack size and charging a variable amount of maintenance for container entities (factories & houses) are good ideas.
On the other hand, these folks have KNOWN - or I should say should have known - that people can take merchant, grab vendors, and dump merchant with no negative affeect since release - that's what, over a year? These same folks set the requirements for common weapons - jawa ions & t-21's - to have a component requirement of 5 & 10. These same folks set requirements for a full suit of armor to be 10 peices and for the best armor to have many layers. The requirements with other crafters all point to an obscene level of complexity - the subsequent resource requirements that most crafters need requires enough storage to choke an elephant.
I can't even speculate on the database design, but certain issues I've encountered and read a about are indicative of a certain lack of forethought and design.
For starters, increasing stack size and charging a variable amount of maintenance for container entities (factories & houses) are good ideas.
On the other hand, these folks have KNOWN - or I should say should have known - that people can take merchant, grab vendors, and dump merchant with no negative affeect since release - that's what, over a year? These same folks set the requirements for common weapons - jawa ions & t-21's - to have a component requirement of 5 & 10. These same folks set requirements for a full suit of armor to be 10 peices and for the best armor to have many layers. The requirements with other crafters all point to an obscene level of complexity - the subsequent resource requirements that most crafters need requires enough storage to choke an elephant.
I can't even speculate on the database design, but certain issues I've encountered and read a about are indicative of a certain lack of forethought and design.
Dasyra
Sun Aug 08, 2004 11:00 pm
#6
Be0Wulfe wrote:
If the responsible parties at SWG & SOE were capable of carrying out any form of statistical analysis or even were in touch with what was going on with the game, they would have been closer to identifying what the problem with their systems are and correctly design a solution to the problem instead of addressing symptoms.
For starters, increasing stack size and charging a variable amount of maintenance for container entities (factories & houses) are good ideas.
On the other hand, these folks have KNOWN - or I should say should have known - that people can take merchant, grab vendors, and dump merchant with no negative affeect since release - that's what, over a year? These same folks set the requirements for common weapons - jawa ions & t-21's - to have a component requirement of 5 & 10. These same folks set requirements for a full suit of armor to be 10 peices and for the best armor to have many layers. The requirements with other crafters all point to an obscene level of complexity - the subsequent resource requirements that most crafters need requires enough storage to choke an elephant.
I can't even speculate on the database design, but certain issues I've encountered and read a about are indicative of a certain lack of forethought and design.
I agree. The database issues don't make sense as they must have designed crafting with it in mind.
When designing the system especially with the rare resources and the constant resource cycletheyknew what would happen. If it is such an issue slow down cycle time on standard resources cycling in and out, have rare ones cycle in and out in the normaly weekly cycle while standard resources cycle over months. Really they are creating the database problems, and players are just doing their best to play the game. I doubt having several stacks of the same resource is as much of a problem as having a huge amount of different resources that never leave the game.
So this merchant change hits on multiple issues. SCS, storage space for crafting professions based on resource requirements to ply trade, ability to sell as a crafter without merchant skills, limited skill points, every characterhaving access to harvesters instead of a specific profession, inability to loan/rent lots for time periods, resource cycles being almost weekly instead of a more reasonable monthly change, huge amounts of world objects placed merely for storage of these resources and probably a few more I am forgetting.
Right now merchant is pretty much just a tag along skill that has no value in it's own right. There is no reason to play a merchant unless you are a crafter or in a guild and manage venders for the guild. It's not really fun as much as a means to an end to sell your items or store them. Merchant does not stand as a profession on it's own, but crafter need a way to sell their items or store them.
Simple question for merchants: If you could sell your items without merchant profession while offline would you keep merchant?
Lets say you had 300 slots on bazaar at no price limit? I would take that any day over merchants, only problem would be cycle time on bazaar and delivery of items to player.
MonroeThanes
Sun Aug 08, 2004 11:05 pm
#7
allow identical serrialed loot items to stack. weaponsmith and armorsmith is a looted component nightmare. noone seems to realize just how worthless NS shards are.......
Redfyree
Mon Aug 09, 2004 12:38 am
#8
The proposed changes to the vendor limits is "supposedly" due to controlling the data base in the game.
We ALL know how much stuff we have and can understand the issues SOE must have to deal with.
However, there are many ways to decrease database size AND make the players happy with those very changes.
This post is for you to list the items you currently have and how much would be reduced if they implemented some of these changes.
1. Have factories create ONE create of product up to a crate of 1000 items.
2. Have resources stack up to a Million units, not 100k
3. Have houses hold as many items as you want but set the maintenance fees in accordance to what the person would have to pay to have many houses with the same lot storage. (Ie: say I have a medium house that holds 150 items, but my house is holding 300 items, then I would pay double maintenance on my ONE house and not need to have multiple houses).
This is how MY account would free up database size alone
1 med house - 4 full runs of 20 crates of bios, 80 crates total - would reduced to FOUR crates
4 partial runs of bio crates, 26 crates total - would reduce to FOUR crates
1 med house with buff crates, approx 60 diff crates - would reduce to about 20 crates
4 full runs of med component crates - 80 crates - would reduce to 4 crates
1 med house full of janta blood, rancor bile, crafting clothes and other odds and ends. approx. 120 items that would reduce down to about 80 items (not a huge saving but still a saving)
3 med houses FULL of resources. Approx. 400 stacks of resources. Make stacks 1,000,000 and that would reduce to about 100 items.
12 factories, with full and partial runs of crates for myself and my chef guildy. Approx. 1000 items (in output and input hoppers) would reduce to probably 100 items.
I won't even get into the stacks of resources I have in my bank but I think it's pretty clear that making even ONE of these changes would easily free up way more than double my current database storage needs to their server. If you consider my database storage needs currently at 100%, these changes would drop that to probably 15% of the total. That right there is a 85% SAVING on database storage.
Not only that, but not having to run between 8-10 diff houses or 12 factories to find things, not having 20 crates of the SAME items, not having 6 stacks of the SAME resource would make my game play BETTER.
Instead they are proposing to make our game play WORSE by making changes that won't impact their database storage even half as well.
We ALL know how much stuff we have and can understand the issues SOE must have to deal with.
However, there are many ways to decrease database size AND make the players happy with those very changes.
This post is for you to list the items you currently have and how much would be reduced if they implemented some of these changes.
1. Have factories create ONE create of product up to a crate of 1000 items.
2. Have resources stack up to a Million units, not 100k
3. Have houses hold as many items as you want but set the maintenance fees in accordance to what the person would have to pay to have many houses with the same lot storage. (Ie: say I have a medium house that holds 150 items, but my house is holding 300 items, then I would pay double maintenance on my ONE house and not need to have multiple houses).
This is how MY account would free up database size alone
1 med house - 4 full runs of 20 crates of bios, 80 crates total - would reduced to FOUR crates
4 partial runs of bio crates, 26 crates total - would reduce to FOUR crates
1 med house with buff crates, approx 60 diff crates - would reduce to about 20 crates
4 full runs of med component crates - 80 crates - would reduce to 4 crates
1 med house full of janta blood, rancor bile, crafting clothes and other odds and ends. approx. 120 items that would reduce down to about 80 items (not a huge saving but still a saving)
3 med houses FULL of resources. Approx. 400 stacks of resources. Make stacks 1,000,000 and that would reduce to about 100 items.
12 factories, with full and partial runs of crates for myself and my chef guildy. Approx. 1000 items (in output and input hoppers) would reduce to probably 100 items.
I won't even get into the stacks of resources I have in my bank but I think it's pretty clear that making even ONE of these changes would easily free up way more than double my current database storage needs to their server. If you consider my database storage needs currently at 100%, these changes would drop that to probably 15% of the total. That right there is a 85% SAVING on database storage.
Not only that, but not having to run between 8-10 diff houses or 12 factories to find things, not having 20 crates of the SAME items, not having 6 stacks of the SAME resource would make my game play BETTER.
Instead they are proposing to make our game play WORSE by making changes that won't impact their database storage even half as well.
MaDAssassin1
Mon Aug 09, 2004 12:42 am
#9
Its so simple I want to throw up...
Ontop of that, they should make it so when u drop a resource of 100k or more, for every 100k inthe stack it should add another Box sitting next to the originle...So if there is 1mil in the box, when ud rop it, it looks like there are 10 boxes stacked next to each other, like stacked up in a 3x3 fashion. This gives the illusion theres alot, but in reality its only one object..just makes it look its size!
MaDAssassin1
Mon Aug 09, 2004 12:50 am
#11
I think they need to rethink the vendors anyway, i think you should be able to upload a crate and have people buy per quantity...then set CPU pricing and bulk pricing....
Khristen
Mon Aug 09, 2004 12:55 am
#12
While they have pretty vehemently stated that they will not increase resource stack size (so people can't horde, even though they do just fine anyway), this would help a LOT.
Crating items in larger stacks (or actually start crating some of the architect items like deeds and ore mining units that currently come out as singles with identical serials). Tie this into the resource stack size increase and fewer people will be storing the materials because they'd be able to make large runs and be able to store them. But, again, I don't think they want this.
Get rid of the crap loot drops like ugly clothing, broken items (like the viewscreen and stuff that I suppose you're supposed to sell to the junk dealers that no one bothers with), one unit of a resource, and crappy weapons. No one wants them. Newbies litter the bazaar with CDEF pistols that they think they can sell for 1k because they looted it. They don't know any better. Why drop ugly and useless clothing when a tailor could craft those items to sell instead? Why have junk in the game other than to give the junk dealers a purpose other than loot kits? Why drop crappy weapons when a novice artisan could make the same or better quality for people to use as slicing fodder or grinding combat xp?
Clean up the cancelled and deleted accounts. I know this has had a lot of unpopularity in some areas, but honestly if someone has been gone for 6 months are they really coming back? And if they are, why should they be able to just pick up where they left off? It's a whole other argument, but there is a lot of database space tied up in abandoned houses and abandoned character's inventory.
Go ahead with the vendor clean up of "illegal" and abandoned vendors. There's a ton of database space there.
There have been lots of other suggestions made, too, like an actual revamp of the merchant profession by giving better stocking and restocking options. Why not try these things first and see what you've got?
If they push this vendor cap through as is--or possibly even at all--they're going to get lots of free database space in the form of cancelled accounts. People will be left with nothing. Combat is delayed. GCW is delayed. JTL is still months away. They'll have nothing left but the Jedi carrot dangling in front of us, which seems to be the direction they're heading anyway. And whether anyone believes it or not, there are lots of players who would much rather be a crafter with their own store than a Jedi any day.
Jagged-F3l
Mon Aug 09, 2004 8:28 am
#13
You have to understand that making these "simple" changes would mean changing fundamental database schemes. It's not an easy task to change a database scheme, and there are always scalability issues that need to be explored with every change.
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