Quote Originally Posted by REDace0 View Post
The biggest reason for making this difficult probably isn't worrying about storing all the linkshells people make.

Yes, this involves a change to the maximum size of a shell, which means the column in whatever table contains a list of all shells on a server has to change, which means the entire table probably has to be dumped and reloaded. It uses a few more bits after, nbd.
Why would it need to be dumped? you can add columns without reloading, i would say the problem would be with memory management as most of what happens in the game is kept in memory and then dumped periodically to the DBs.