Auction house slots 7

[Jedicrew]

I believe now is the time for SE to give us more then 7 slots for auction house
Please allow the 3 extra slots on the auction house also allow extra time listed on the auction house I don't want to keep on coming at the mog box to c it full because it don't sell, Allow us to list it more then day 3-5 days and tax us since we are helping the economy xd

http://i58.tinypic.com/2myn8tk.png


adios amigo...

[Demonjustin]

Ya know... showing your items would've only helped them to sell... hiding them served no real purpose I can think of.

[Sfchakan]

Definitely a repeated suggestion I can get behind.

[Grekumah]

Increasing both the amount of items that can be listed on the Auction House and the length of time items are listed on the Auction House will directly increase server load.

With that said, there are no plans to implement these requests, but if the dev. team decides to do so, it will only be one of the suggested increases and not both.

The development team would like to look into these requests very carefully because each one would increase the server load, which would also cause an increase in the time required for the Auction House to load.

[Bluestar2kx]

No offence, but the AH is a bit slow as it is.
Not as slow as accessing your items after zoning, but slow enough.

I'll pass on extra items, or length of time if its going to enhance an existing problem (however small the original was, little things add up faster then one might think.)
and stick to storing them on alts to sell later.

Better to focus on speeding up access times, then worry about if we can expand current systems.

[Shirai]

Agreeing, expanding inventory has slowed several things in this game enough as it is.
If increasing the AH capacity increases load times even more, I'll gladly pass on it myself.

I've been living with the 7 item capacity limit for the last decade and certainly don't mind it now as high ticket items end up being bazaared to avoid tax anyway.

[Catmato]

Increasing both the amount of items that can be listed on the Auction House and the length of time items are listed on the Auction House will directly increase server load.

How did the AH servers handle the load in the past when there more than 12 players on a server?

[Raydeus]

Yeah, loading times are long enough as it is. So having the AH loading even slower isn't something I'd like to see.

[Ramzi]

How did the AH servers handle the load in the past when there more than 12 players on a server?

This is what I was wondering. Servers are dead. How old and weak are the server PC's if they can't handle the demand of a dying MMO? Nothing should be slow to load - this is 2014.

[bungiefanNA]

FFXI has 8 AH slots per character at launch. The inventory windows are hard-coded to display 10 lines, regardless of what the limit is for displaying items. They reduced the number of slots to 7 after a month or two because of AH instability, but then there were way more people using it constantly at launch. I would expect with hardware upgrades, decreased population, and less variety of items on the AH now that the servers would be more likely to be able to handle the increased load of the original 8 item slots.

The more realistic problem is that the code for that is so old, and the churn of employees through this game, means that there isn't anyone left on staff that is familiar with the AH code to improve it. Older content in the game is being consistently passed over for improvement, and I would wager that it is from the original staff having moved on and the current staff not being familiar enough to tweak things. This is a pretty huge game, and all the improvements made over time must be quite intimidating to comprehend.

Speaking of, I wonder if they're ever going to list the current staff... PS2 installation had the staff credits roll by during installation of expansions, PC install didn't. I'd be curious to see how few names are now on the list compared to Promathia. Of course, they would also still credit people that worked on the game before, like Uematsu.

[Trumpy]

Weird how a game like WoW had at its top 10 million subscriptions and lets you put up all the items you want on auction (for variying amounts of time) as far as i can tell. this game has no where near that many players but can barely handle 7 items at once.

[Shirai]

I wish people would stop comparing this game to newer MMOs...

Yes, FFXI is 2 years older than WoW, Blizzard had several more years to learn from older MMO games.
Besides that WoW works on a completely different infrastructure than FFXI and has a budget that dwarves almost every other MMO budget out there.

[Ramzi]

^ Make all the excuses you want, but getting the server load response for an 11 year old game with a low subscriber base leads me to believe they haven't upgraded their servers in a long long time- maybe never.

[Dragoy]

It does somewhat seem like they have actually gone down in terms of server power during these modern days, but who knows, perhaps the fewer players being around has made it possible for them to implement all the inventory goodies we've been getting, and as such, the stress levels on the servers have remained around the same.

In the end, it's all about the Playstation 2-limitations, right?

I believe one might actually think that having the items stay in the auction house for a longer period of time could actually be lowering the stress (users querying the database less often, but I guess the amount of stress might simply shift around to another point in time?).

Meh. I don't know the numbers, but that's just something that was fed to my thought. ^^

[FrankReynolds]

Kick starter project to fund new FFXI servers. Who's in?

[Malithar]

Last time Kick Starter was even mentioned, we had like a 10 page derail about the expectations of a company that already operates a functional subscription based product, that has a history of funneling funds to other projects. Was mildly entertaining/thought provoking, until it became the same posters posting the same opinions back and fourth for pages on end.

I'd support it simply because I know too many people who have too much disposable income and have no doubt it'd hit the goals needed. :3

[YosemiteYogorockBlondelle]

Well I'd support it for various reasons: #1. As I don't have the real life cash flow to flush it down the toilet on additional character's to not even have them be played-with in which they just sit there all day doing nothing but bazarring and leaving your system/system's running until god for bid your system/system's that's been running 24/7 for your additional bazzaring & storage only char.'s purposes either stops functioning or becomes fried from the non-stop always on usage.

Um..back on topic, well sort of. #2. I'm always moving my 2 characters around & even when I have bazarred the items on those characters they take up room and don't sell fast enough to alleviate the spaces back open again on my inventory slots even when at times I lowered prices lower then ah and compered other's bazzaring prices.

I had other reasons but have forgot them again on what they were.
I'm pretty sure I might of started this thread created by Jedicrew some-how by posting my idea's on another forum thread in an alternative not Necessarily directly attached to the ah but is kind of hooked into the ah in totally another way method such as we are P'Cs that play a normally would be a npc character that is all ready created in the game that was allowed to expand our inventories but statements here on lag if you could call it that well might not work as well as I had hoped for my ideas of a work around thinking outside the box method and I've posted it in this forum here:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/39537-Suggestions-Quality-of-Life-Stuff-and-other-suggestions

[Roja323]

How about we compare it to everquest, an older game than ffxi that lets you sell 80+ items...

[Alhanelem]

Last time Kick Starter was even mentioned, we had like a 10 page derail about the expectations of a company that already operates a functional subscription based product, that has a history of funneling funds to other projects. Was mildly entertaining/thought provoking, until it became the same posters posting the same opinions back and fourth for pages on end.

I'd support it simply because I know too many people who have too much disposable income and have no doubt it'd hit the goals needed. :3
Don't even go there.

No kickstarters for an already-running game by a well established company that has no need to raise funds in such a manner. Ever.

[Ethereal]

Or we could get with the times and refresh your server hardware :) Since you know, it's running on a lot of years without a refresh? God knows what OS they are using. Unless this is already known, I don't venture the boards a lot. At my company, we refresh our hardware every 3 years, and this is 1000's of physical blades/discretes.

[Alhanelem]

Or we could get with the times and refresh your server hardware :) Since you know, it's running on a lot of years without a refresh? God knows what OS they are using. Unless this is already known, I don't venture the boards a lot. At my company, we refresh our hardware every 3 years, and this is 1000's of physical blades/discretes.
actually they've updated or modified their server hardware a number of times over the years. there have been all day maintenances for it in the past.

[Roja323]

The issue is not hardware. Its core coding. When they say it will put too much strain on the server, they mean the code would slow down everything and not the actual hard server can't handle it cpu/ram wise.

[Ethereal]

/creates_code_that_will_lock_you_into_2002_forever

[Traxus]

The issue is not hardware. Its core coding. When they say it will put too much strain on the server, they mean the code would slow down everything and not the actual hard server can't handle it cpu/ram wise.

They also said that about increasing maximum inventory space and adding additional inventory bags, both of which they've since implemented.

[Alhanelem]

They also said that about increasing maximum inventory space and adding additional inventory bags, both of which they've since implemented.
They did this by adding seperate inventory bags. Note that none of them have more than 80 spaces, which was said to be a limit due to technical limitations.

In other words, it was a workaround. We'll never have more than 80 spaces in any one bag.

[Traxus]

The maximum inventory space was 60 when they originally said it couldn't be increased due to server load.

[Alhanelem]

The maximum inventory space was 60 when they originally said it couldn't be increased due to server load.
No, it wasn't.

That's aside from the fact that they were only able to give us more inventory by adding new seperate inventory spaces (versus adding more slots to one single inventory space). They wouldn't have made the sack/satchel/case/wardrobe for you and storage and locker for moghouse if they could have just added more slots, as it's not a

Also its highly likely that the load issues they are referring to are bandwidth limitations. FFXI was designed at its core around a dial up connection's speed, packet sizes, etc. It really shouldn't take like 30 seconds plus with modern connections to load all our inventories but it does. The netspeed for every client is set to a specific value in the game code. This is done with good intentions to ensure a consistent experience across clients, which is particularly important in console games, even though few play this game on a console anymore (at least, not the PS2). Increasing this value means screwing over people who were previously able to play fine with slower / crappier connections, which is probably something that SE doesn't want to do. Even FFXIV has to wrestle with these issues, because the more data you have to transmit when loading, the longer the loading process will take- it has resulted, even in that game, in some things not being implemented or taking longer to implement than planned because they don't want the transmitted character data to grow too large.

Often the technical limitation / server limitation issues are really not a case of "its impossible to do" but rather 'it requires developer resources that aren't available" and / or "the only people who have knowledge of how X Y Z systems of the game work are no longer SE employees." The latter of which I have experienced first hand in various game development projects, where a feature or bug fix can't be implemented due to the person who originally worked on it no longer being at the company- The resources (time and money) required to hire or have another employee study and learn the implementation ends up outweighing the cost of not doing so.

[bungiefanNA]

The maximum inventory space was 60 when they originally said it couldn't be increased due to server load.

That was only for the Gobbiebag when WotG was new. Safe started at 50, but then had expansion quests added within the first few months of JP launch. Storage from furniture was added about 3 months in. Locker was expandable to 80 in short order of ToAU release.

80 is the maximum per bag because of PS2 RAM limitations.

Many of the system limitations aren't on the hardware of the server, but on limits of the core program with how it was designed and implemented. Think of it like a 32-bit program on 64-bit Windows, it can run, but it can't use more than 4 GB of RAM no matter how much you have, because the program can't address more memory. You have to rewrite the program as a 64-bit program. They would have to rewrite FFXI to achieve some of these changes, and the original programmers are not available for various reasons. How easily could you go back and look at something you did over 10 years ago and fully understand it? I don't know what a bunch of my old French homework from high school says anymore because I haven't used the language frequently enough afterward, but I recognize my handwriting in those binders. Now try to figure out something like that that someone else, who you can't talk to, was doing 10 years ago just by looking at it... Unless the code was highly commented, it's not going to be self-explanatory. It may also use a form of code not widely used anymore.

[Roja323]

Everquest had the exact same issue (with bag size limitations due to initial code), and it took them basically releasing a mini expansion for 10 bucks where the main focus was on quality of life type additions. One of which was increasing bag size from i think 12 up to 80. They basically had to justify hiring some people full time to do the additional work of entirely reworking the code for inventory management, and just to justify the amount of work it would require to get past this hurdle.

I personally would be all for 'buying' a mini expansion/addon that focused entirely on storage (in house an out) if it ment i didnt have to use storage slips, and could cary more gear (255 slots per bag please with all these side grades/gear sets).

/insert Fry meme of 'shut up and take my money'

[Kawar]

Increasing both the amount of items that can be listed on the Auction House and the length of time items are listed on the Auction House will directly increase server load.

With that said, there are no plans to implement these requests, but if the dev. team decides to do so, it will only be one of the suggested increases and not both.

The development team would like to look into these requests very carefully because each one would increase the server load, which would also cause an increase in the time required for the Auction House to load.Yes it would make more server load but we do not have the same level of people on each server as we did when ah was made.

I think even adding 1 more item on the ah to be listed would only help. With the fact that so many people have mules so 1 more slot would matter greatly and you would not stress the servers that bad i would think.

Or am i wrong?

[YosemiteYogorockBlondelle]

Yes it would make more server load but we do not have the same level of people on each server as we did when ah was made.

I think even adding 1 more item on the ah to be listed would only help. With the fact that so many people have mules so 1 more slot would matter greatly and you would not stress the servers that bad i would think.

Or am i wrong?

So I'm Just curious, Does this mean that your system and internet connection speeds can handle and multigate device..er..I mean multigate the server's lag and loading problem's on your playing system better then most players by the way of your post? Really Curious, thanks!


Edit bump: Btw. I found these two Wikipedia articles very interesting, Let me know what you think of them in comparison to the storage limitation's and coding that's been discussed here. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multigate_device & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law