The currency tab.

[Shougun]

I'm not a programmer, so anyone can correct this next part, but I am about 90% sure you would still need to send the whole string of data that corresponds to the value every time, even if it is zero. If it had a max of 15, and you had 15 items in there, it would send 1111, if you had zero, it would still send 0000. It is the same amount of data being sent regardless of how much you actually have.

As for my previous post, I never said it couldn't be done, I merely highlighted how many things could be considered a currency and whether it was worth using up data to track it all for things that could be trivial to obtain.

You do need to send data, maybe not every time, but sure you do. But picture this, a website- like maybe this one. SE sends you all the images and text. Now it isn't a word document but think of your last word doc, how big was it for thousands of words? Less than a mb probably. How about images on the website? Probably 500kb to maybe some mb. This is done, at least once, for all the many visitors. Not just one or two words, or images, thousands of them (sometimes), and often optimized so only what is needed is loaded right away.

There is a lot of the backbone done already so its not a great example, setting up this stuff is fairly easy these days (and if you wait a few seconds, oh well). Yet conceptually the data being sent happens thousands and millions of times, some of them many times larger than sending an entire string of the game would take*, it just works (tm).

In a game setting its worse because of how it all has to be ready to rip, and the game is trying to minimize overhead. But, is this idea do-able? Hell yeah. Will it smoothly work with whatever stuff they have currently or be free for SE to maintain? Who knows, but very probably not.

*There can be optimizations to make it even smaller, but if you only stored "yes/no" for each item, it wouldn't be that large of a file. Of course size matters over scale, which is where server concerns come from. Like that funny "if everyone in the world jumps at the same time at the same point on the planet, does the planet move?", but maybe its like if everyone was a whale and we all jumped (because earth to human size scale is too large for our example).

It's still all very do-able, we have seen these systems in motion many times in many games (and non-games). It's not "impossible", its just "does SE have the ability to invest to make it happen?" (and we can't estimate that because SE could have made a very large black-hole for themselves if they're in 'tech debt'). Personally I think we should not ever try to be SE's accountants, just ask for what you want and treat the employees as humans. If they don't do it, and it means enough to you (royal you, not specifically 'you' lol), leave the game as they don't "deserve" your money (they earn it, cause they're a business).