This was totally a foreseeable problem. Of course, like anything else in the game that yields rewards, some players will take it as a personal challenge to get ludicrous levels of it. Was that also really that hard to incorporate into the PP2 design mechanism? Or at least preventing a hard crash when trying to redeem rewards?
It doesn't even need a ludicrous level of reward. There are 100 ranks on the main track, and if you end up with unclaimable materials in all those reward packages (if you don't have the Odyssey expansion, you'll have at least 24 partly unclaimable packages just by reaching rank 100) you'll already be in trouble.
- auto discarding reward mats that are > than max storage
I'd be absolutely fine with that! By definition the ones that are > max storage are the ones I have little use for anyway. I'd far rather they just disappeared (or at least there was a "discard all" button to do it) than have to shuffle around material traders every few ranks and visit the bartender to sell off a bunch of assets I have no use for.
And the obvious solution to create ludicrous levels of mat storage will likely never be implemented because of previous FD discussions about increasing player account storage size would prohibitively increase their storage capacity/costs.
No it wouldn't.
For ship engineering materials, they're stored as a counter per material already, so the ones with a 300 cap must already be using at least a 16-bit integer (which can go up to 65535) and the others would only take an extra byte to promote to that. There's about 80 materials which would be affected so that's an extra 80 bytes per CMDR, and there's from Frontier's last official figures about 15 million accounts, so that's just over a gigabyte of extra storage costs. Basic AWS storage costs 8 cents per gigabyte month, so this would cost Frontier about a dollar a year in additional storage. They can afford that. (If they've not prematurely optimised and are just using a 16-bit integer for
all material buckets to make the database coding much easier, they're already paying that dollar!)
For Odyssey assets the calculation is slightly different - we have a thousand asset slots total, each of which can contain one of 33 types of material. The efficient way to store this is still as a separate count of each, so we could go up to 256*33 storage here for free (probably capped at 250 to stop it being obvious why), or again up to 65000 of each for another half-gigabyte of storage. (I'm assuming that an insignificant fraction of the 15 million accounts have Fleet Carriers with Bartenders to double their storage)
There are currently
gameplay implications for Powerplay for allowing indefinite storage of Goods, and were until about ten days ago implications for indefinite storage of Data, so they might want to keep those limited for that reason. Those two are also partly location-aware, which means they can't just be stored as a count of the type of item, though in most normal cases this won't necessarily be adding a huge amount to the storage requirements.
The only bit of player data which takes up significant size - multiple terabytes across the player base - is going to be the exploration database. Everything else is tiny by comparison and will remain so pretty much whatever Frontier does. Keeping Legacy up with its separate exploration database costs Frontier unimaginably more - though still probably only a few tens of thousands a year, which even now ongoing console sales will cover - than any fiddling around the edges of non-exploration data will, in terms of data storage.
(EDIT: okay, I'm not counting backups and live mirrors to different servers of this data here. Let's say ten dollars a year, then)
issues.frontierstore.net
