Quote Originally Posted by Eldaena View Post
I blatantly said having an AH feature on top of the MW one could work and be good for players wanting that. That is what Airlea practically said as well. They didn't say get rid of the physical rendering in the wards at all.

Also. can you tell me what is unstable with the system in it's state now? Also, what sort of scalability are you looking for?
I apologize then, I skipped that section. Yes, an AH/counter/text/whatever-based system in addition to MW would be great. But if SE and others insist on sticking with just MW, then we can't have rendered retainers.

The system was massively unstable a few weeks ago because of overcrowding. That should be a good hint of what will happen when and if this game ever becomes more popular. This system is not designed to be able to take even 1000 retainers in a particular city; that's support for a max of 500 players. There's no way in hell this system is going to be able to take retainers from 2000+ people, which is on the LOW END of server populations for MMO's. The average now for MMOs is like 6000+ per server.

And here comes the scalability issue.

The MW sits on a (or multiple) separate machines that -- in addition to processing item transactions and storing inventories, posts, etc -- need to process and store graphics information, zones, and a bunch of other stuff from both retainers and PCs. It's an extreme amount of overhead, which is why wards are limited to 200 retainers (and even though they're increasing the retainer limit, there will still be one). They CAN add more zones, but that means you either place a bigger load on a machine, or you acquire additional machines, which quickly become expensive to purchase and maintain.

The more zones and retainers you have, the harder it is to be able to organize the MW. You CANNOT force retainers to sell only what their ward is for, or to limit where you place retainers based on the items they sell, because practically everyone sells 2 or more items from different categories. If these retainers were never rendered, there would be no need to organize them based on zone; all organization would be done on the buying end through the interface.