Auction house slots 7

[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.

[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