It is time to get a 3rd free Retainer

[Claviusnex]

snip

It might be built on a horrible base but at some point the amount of time and frustration of trying to build more stuff on top of it out weighs the perceived savings. They also don't have to change everything at once. Take glamour for the sake of argument. They could build a glamour table for each character store each piece of gear you obtain in it. When you cast glamour on your gear it goes to the database to build the list of items you can select from. The retainer could be handled in a similar way since it is a limited availability interface. As the database could be shared across servers it can handle the locking and record management removing the need for passing locks around between servers. This would allow SE to also change over the regular inventory. My guess is there is common code handling the inter-server communications you describe so would be a logical place to switch over. However as I said previously I don't think SE will really do anything unless they see it affecting their revenue.

[Dark-Saviour]

It might be built on a horrible base but at some point the amount of time and frustration of trying to build more stuff on top of it out weighs the perceived savings.

Which is why the general mentality seems to be "Don't do anything that will cause us to encounter that frustration. Add new content that allows us to operate in a business-as-usual manner and forego system changes that amplify or magnify the problems."

The inventory increase with SB was probably the first major thing I believe they did where they had to confront this, and it seems that was more of a "We're within acceptable limits for performance. Let's see if we can increase it further without hitting the redline." rather than a major change.

[Claviusnex]

Which is why the general mentality seems to be "Don't do anything that will cause us to encounter that frustration. Add new content that allows us to operate in a business-as-usual manner and forego system changes that amplify or magnify the problems."

The inventory increase with SB was probably the first major thing I believe they did where they had to confront this, and it seems that was more of a "We're within acceptable limits for performance. Let's see if we can increase it further without hitting the redline." rather than a major change.

But what I was getting at is eventually, if they're not already past it, it gets to the point SE can't do anything without hitting the limitations and waste resources trying to work around it. In the end that takes more work than sitting down and figuring out how to fix the underlying architecture.