Never overestimate it, either. Don't just assume that because the playerbase is large that a tiny effect will grow exponentially on the whole, giving it tangible worth.
I'm a program designer and developer by trade. I'm intimately familiar with data sizes, bandwidth, and processing stresses. Part of my trade is considering the effect of data transfer and manipulation when taking into account gigantic user bases. Using this experience, I can tell you beyond the shadow of a doubt that the change in difficulty of crafts causing the decreased necessity of HQ items will have caused an entirely insignificant change to the overall stress of the system caused by inventory management. The amount of data transfered will have decreased almost not at all, well within the margin of error, and so the difference would be almost unmeasurable.
Ultimately, you could be right in that they made the change specificially or in part for this reason, but given the plethora of other, more realistic and effective reasons out there, not the mention the more effective changes they could have made for your reasoning, it's incredibly unlikely.
Don't get me wrong, though. I love that you put so much thought into this. The effect of lowering server stress/reducing need for increased inventory isn't a connection most people would find obvious. It's just important that we don't see an effect of a decision and assume that's the reason for that decision, spreading it around sounding like it's fact when we honestly don't know why it was done.



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