Servers in Danger of Crashing RIGHT NOW!

[Sylve]

the amount of data of everything you own could fit onto a grain of rice.

Except the problem is less one of storage and more communication.
That grain of rice is multiplied by 500k+, then sent back forth from server to client in a never ending stream.

Analogy!
1 car on the road makes roads seem huge right? Plenty of parking spaces at your destination too.
Now if there 500k cars on that same stretch of road, gets mighty clogged, no?

Servers don't crash when they're storing too much data, they crash when we're effectively DDoSing the servers everytime i we call up a retainer.

Edit, I'd like to also point out the rather extreme amount of free inventory space XIV has given us compared to other MMOs.
450 free inventory spaces between 2 Retainers and our player 'bags'. Not counting the 300 slots in our Armory.
Thats a rather significant number.

[Thyranne]

Except the problem is less one of storage and more communication.
That grain of rice is multiplied by 500k+, then sent back forth from server to client in a never ending stream.

Analogy!
1 car on the road makes roads seem huge right? Plenty of parking spaces at your destination too.
Now if there 500k cars on that same stretch of road, gets mighty clogged, no?

Servers don't crash when they're storing too much data, they crash when we're effectively DDoSing the servers everytime i we call up a retainer.

Edit, I'd like to also point out the rather extreme amount of free inventory space XIV has given us compared to other MMOs.
450 free inventory spaces between 2 Retainers and our player 'bags'.
Thats a rather significant number.

And they mentioned they store everything from server to database every 20 seconds so adding more things to it will slow down everything.

[Sove92]

And they mentioned they store everything from server to database every 20 seconds so adding more things to it will slow down everything.

It's actually every 15 seconds.

[Phenidate]

Servers don't crash when they're storing too much data, they crash when we're effectively DDoSing the servers everytime i we call up a retainer.

My point was to put a sense of scale of the data that would be moved around. So say we're using an outrageous .8KB of data for our bags. Just looking at our bags, and assuming that the server has to tell us every. single. time. we open our bag whats in it anew.

Well first off, I seriously doubt there's 500k players on Sargantas. Is there 500k players playing right now on Hyperion? No. A couple thousand may be on right now.

In addition, I don't think all thousands of players are all opening their bags and closing and opening them all the time are they? I'm pretty sure they're doing other things like fighting and questing and idling in idleshire doing the manderville.

Here's a fun thing: Lets say we hash the inventory. So we now have a number unique to the items in our bags and the order it's in. There's so many ways to do it so pick any one, it's really quite fast to do - computers are great at computing math.
My client saves the inventory info sent by the server - caching it if you will - client and server then generate a hash and check it against each other to make sure that the inventory I've got is the RIGHT inventory. Guess what? That hash number is frickin' tiny. You can fit it in a packet easy.

Now every time I open my bag, I load up my items from the client side, send just the hash to the server and query "hey does this match up with what you've got Mr. Server? If not then tell me what it should be" and we can take it from there.

[Sylve]

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Except you're forgetting that there is more than one server in a Datacenter.
Datcenters do not have unlimited bandwidth in which to cram all the tiny packets into, nor unlimited resources for receiving them.
You have to consider internet infrastructure and the fact that each server blade does not have a dedicated internet connection.

To use the car analogy again, you're trying to get 500 Suzuki Swifts down the on-ramp of a Freeway into bumper-to-bumper traffic.

The internet is, after all, a data freeway. It doesn't matter how tiny you make the packets if the route is congested. With the amount of free inventory space we DO have, the prices on the extra retainers isn't a profiteering move, its to limit the number of people who HAVE those extra retainers to people who genuinely need that extra space.

Ask yourself, would you just have 2 Retainers if you could have 8 free ones?
For the majority, the answer is no. Everyone and their dog would have 8 Retainers, geared up and doing ventures while also storing all manner of useless stuff.

Oh, and before i forget again: The Armoire.
Oh look, even MORE free item storage space!