Horizons A very tangible reason for why storage is a bad idea

[Quineloe]

I'm not gonna give much weight to an almost two decade old article about a completely different game much thought. Sorry.

 

[foebits]

No, there is no reason for storage to be bad because "hoarding" is never and was never a problem in any game that allowed it.

 

[eqinox]

Just a silly suggestion, but why not simply cut the commodity requirements for Engineers in favor of data and material, micro managing storage in ship/stations sounds boring anyway? And for module storage, why not allow any engineer modification to be applied after it first has been unlocked so we wouldn't need to store the modules either?

 

[VR Murgle]

I just remembered my micro-economics class in college after I read the following links:



This was posted by Agony-Aunt in response to a request for Player Economy. The coorelation with storage is the link between hoarding and the game's ability to keep running smoothly, i.e. server response time and game lags. The trade off is something one should consider before this is implemented. People are inherently pack-rats. I mean that when we think we are going to need something, i.e. socks for example, we don't buy just one pair, we buy several because, we can't wear the same pair every day. But some people when they need a blank cd buy 50 instead of 10, because they say in their minds that I might need them. This is a hoarding mentality.

The problem with this mentality and a video online game is that there is only so much bandwidth and so much server space and virtual memory (cloud storage) to handle the mass of stuff in the game. When this is compounded with several hundred thousand players all collecting "stuff" and storing it, well... you see instantly where this can lead. The last posted link in the quote from Agony-Aunt is an outline to the paper discussing the Ultima Online economy and the problems that crept in to the game's performance factors. Something to consider.

Back when I still played Eve I have tonnes stuff stored in several stations and it didn't seem to cause any problems. However Frontier's decision to do multi player on a budged is making a lot of things a lot harder than they need to be and don't get me started on game performance because...well,... just don't get me started.

 

[Chrystoph]

I just remembered my micro-economics class in college after I read the following links:



This was posted by Agony-Aunt in response to a request for Player Economy. The coorelation with storage is the link between hoarding and the game's ability to keep running smoothly, i.e. server response time and game lags. The trade off is something one should consider before this is implemented. People are inherently pack-rats. I mean that when we think we are going to need something, i.e. socks for example, we don't buy just one pair, we buy several because, we can't wear the same pair every day. But some people when they need a blank cd buy 50 instead of 10, because they say in their minds that I might need them. This is a hoarding mentality.

The problem with this mentality and a video online game is that there is only so much bandwidth and so much server space and virtual memory (cloud storage) to handle the mass of stuff in the game. When this is compounded with several hundred thousand players all collecting "stuff" and storing it, well... you see instantly where this can lead. The last posted link in the quote from Agony-Aunt is an outline to the paper discussing the Ultima Online economy and the problems that crept in to the game's performance factors. Something to consider.

Using an article written in 1999 as a foundation for your position is a straw man at best and a red herring at worst.

Storage space in 1999 was around 20GB for a large drive. You can buy a 5TB USB hard drive in this day and age. Data centers routinely use petabyte storage arrays.

Processors have followed a similar progression. At the end of 1999, single core Pentium III processors had not reached 1GHz, and my current desktop is an 8 core 4GHz processor. That is a desktop, not a server. That ignores virtualization, blade technology and every other method of server side optimization. It also doesn't take into effect the improvements that come from moving from 32bit to 64bit architecture.

RAM limitations have yet again followed this path. 32bit windows in 1999 was limited to 4GB of RAM.

I can go on and on with this, but the point is, computing has followed an evolution specifically to handle things of this nature, and that leaves aside programmed limits to prevent hoarding. You don't have to allow 10k white shirts in the inventory.

Finally, I find it hilarious that you could believe that Frontier can document the geography of every landable planet in a 400 billion star galaxy in a persistent fashion, but that they could not put a Relational Database system together that maintains an inventory for players without taxing a server.