Pay for your inventory.

[Mature]

On a game for which I pay $15 a month plus $40 for the expansion alone?

Sure, it's not like the server you play in its gonna pay by itself.

[Fendred]

Whatever reason they have for not expanding player inventory, it does NOT involve having too little storage. The only reason they'd have storage problems is if they did something inefficient like store character IDs as character strings and not thirty-two bit integers with a 2-3 character length identifier. They should already have an inventory table as a result of the relationship between players and items, and even if they were forced to put a new table into the database schema for the purpose of glamour items they'd need under a terabyte of additional space across all data centers because only a small fraction of the in-game items can be applied as glamour.

Lets say worse comes to worse and they need a new table. The table contains 4 attributes/columns which are the primary key attributes of both the item table and player table. The keys of each consist of a three character long string and a 32-bit integer. For the sake of argument, lets say there are 300 possible items that can be used as glamour, so there are at most 300 possible entries in the table per given players. Let's also assume there are four million accounts. They'd need at most 16.8 gigabytes of additional space distributed proportionally across all their data centers. We live in an era where one terabyte is the new standard for personal computers. For a major corporate datacenter, 16.8 gigabytes is laughably small.

[polyphonica]

Whatever reason they have for not expanding player inventory, it does NOT involve having too little storage.

It's not storage, but the issue they've pointed to is netcode bloat and the flushing of the data to disk, in addition to not wanting to risk upsetting server stability in this time when the servers will be under high strain. But obviously there will be ways to deal with all these issues. The retainer "solution" isn't really a solution, just the raising of an arbitrary cap as a stopgap measure (with money as a way to meter growth, since most people won't pay the premium).

[Fyce]

-Snip-

They update all character information every 15 seconds "juste in case of a crash", in order to avoid rollbacks.
That's the only reason, and quite a silly one.

I would understand why you would need a backup every 15 seconds when releasing progression content (Savage Alex), but during "normal" play, a 15 seconds snapshot of the entire server seems overkill, just to avoid a very tiny misfortune of someone losing something in a 1-2mn timespan.

So, to avoid that, no more inventory space for everyone. Hooray.

[StrejdaTom]

They update all character information every 15 seconds "juste in case of a crash", in order to avoid rollbacks.
That's the only reason, and quite a silly one.

I would understand why you would need a backup every 15 seconds when releasing progression content (Savage Alex), but during "normal" play, a 15 seconds snapshot of the entire server seems overkill, just to avoid a very tiny misfortune of someone losing something in a 1-2mn timespan.

So, to avoid that, no more inventory space for everyone. Hooray.

They shouldn't do it more often than once an hour.

[Fendred]

They update all character information every 15 seconds "juste in case of a crash", in order to avoid rollbacks.
That's the only reason, and quite a silly one.

I would understand why you would need a backup every 15 seconds when releasing progression content (Savage Alex), but during "normal" play, a 15 seconds snapshot of the entire server seems overkill, just to avoid a very tiny misfortune of someone losing something in a 1-2mn timespan.

So, to avoid that, no more inventory space for everyone. Hooray.

Yeah, I was just bringing up the data part of things because some people were saying that the extra costs for retainers were to "pay for server costs." If I built systems like that and got away with it, I would probably retire in my 40's from the ludicrous amount of money I just laundered from all my customers :P

Wait... every 15 seconds? I really want to know what the thinking was behind that design decision.

[Catwho]

They shouldn't do it more often than once an hour.

Considering the frequency of 90002s, that's unacceptable.

"Hooray! I successfully HQ'd this 6 million gil item with a 5% chance! LUCKY ME!" *crashes one minute later* *stuff is back to raw materials*

Successful completion of the crafted item is determined by RNG on the server, but successful storage of that item on your character is handled by the synch process from your character to your server. 15 seconds is actually fairly slow for a database - most SQL applications measure it in miliseconds. But there are 4 million accounts, of which a million are logged in at any time, which is a million read/writes every 15 seconds.

[Fyce]

Considering the frequency of 90002s, that's unacceptable.

We are not talking about individual character crashes, the servers already handle that fine when the character disconnects (they save a character when it disconnects).
We are talking about complete server crashes which would rollback every player on the server.

Wait... every 15 seconds? I really want to know what the thinking was behind that design decision.

Pretty much what I said.
http://www.siliconera.com/2015/06/17...-item-storage/

They just want to avoid server rollbacks as much as possible.

[Ashkendor]

Gaming is dying.

I don't even really have a dog in this fight, but lol seriously where did this even come from?

Hyperbole much? o.O

[Buff_Archer]

Now it finally makes sense to me why the Mogstation logo is a moogle bending over mooning us.