How Storage spips SHOULD have been implemented

[Fail]

I can never understand why, when we have all these NPCs to store sets of gear, we were given these Storage Slips.
Couldn't SE have just updated the NPCs to hold single parts of a set etc rather than needing full sets in most cases, allowing players to free up 27 slots of inventory?

[Isola]

Your name perfectly describes their ability to do anything properly.

[Gwydion]

I can never understand why, when we have all these NPCs to store sets of gear, we were given these Storage Slips.
Couldn't SE have just updated the NPCs to hold single parts of a set etc rather than needing full sets in most cases, allowing players to free up 27 slots of inventory?

The situation you describe is because storage NPCs existed before storage slips. Server-side, it is probably like that storing an entire site 5/5, is stored a single bit in a large value, say 1-byte. Each bit in the bite corresponds to a single NPC's ability to store one 5/5 set. (This probably leaves ~8 NPCs capable of storing one 5/5 set; It must be larger than this number because there are many sets that can be stored this way).

Meanwhile, a storage slip can serve the same person and probably have a different volume of items to be stored, depending on the size of the data structure used internally.

TLDR; Storage NPCs probably require smaller storage space server-side, than storage slips, given that the player base was much larger when Storage NPCs were introduced, vs. Storage Slips.