Quote Originally Posted by Jeeqbit View Post
There was. But they addressed all of it they said.

.snip.

They also explained it pretty well. "We rebuilt it from the engine". That means getting a brand new engine and adapting it for an MMORPG.

.snip.

I agree and that's why I tend to think it's more realistic to call it "2.0 spaghetti code" than 1.0 spaghetti code.

.snip.

I think it's more that, honestly. They have all sorts of ideas and misconceptions.

.snip.

Of course, these ideas have shaped how it's all structured and that can be difficult to change, but it doesn't make it impossible to change with data transfers, migrations or bridges.
In my experience brand new engine doesn't mean starting from scratch. It's mostly a marketing thing and it means you've made sufficient changes to how the engine works you feel comfortable slapping a 2.0 or a new name on it. Engines are tens of millions of lines of code sometimes and starting from scratch would be irresponsible.

If it is code written in 1.0, 2.0, or later I don't think it matters to their overall situation. Tech debt is tech debt.

The issue is that there's all these systems built on top of those base data structures. "Bank" inventory mapped to character records and retainer interactions done as trades behind the scenes (I don't know this for sure but I very, very strongly suspect it).
This design, which is now tech debt prevents them from doing unified inventory, craft from inventory, and dedicated crafting storage. I don't know if that system came from 1.0 or 2.0 as I wasn't around, and I don't feel like doing that particular research right now (bad on me). Nor does it matter to me if it's from 1.0 or 2.0. It's the system they have.

They also built the market on top of the retainer system, and they created a financial reliance on them as well. That could be solved by creating a unified storage system that expands as you buy retainers.

The problem with adding the extra storage while keeping the retainers in read-only mode is that they still just doubled their storage costs. Even if the problem would eventually be partially self-correcting -- unsubbed players still expect to be able to come back to their stuff -- there's no end date where they would be able to fully transition as long as it was in players hands.

The alternative to waiting on the players is to do the migration themselves, but they've shown poor bulk update performance. It takes a lot of time to migrate trillions of rows in your various databases, so you'd be looking at multi-day downtimes probably presuming everything went well and a cluster-f@$% if it didn't.

It's not to say I don't think they couldn't do it eventually. I just think the thought probably rightfully terrifies them.