Inventory Limit

[DeletedUser]

It's not about the amount of one or a few items. It's about the number of different items.
If there are about 200 different items in the game, you can store them as 1 byte for the item type and 1 byte for the amount on HDD. But if there is a thousand of different items, you have to use at least 2 bytes for each item type. The space needed in this case doesn't double as character record doesn't contain only items, but it significantly increases.
Assuming items won't be stored like this, it's possible we'll have this record type for each item:
equpmenttype (hat/boots/pants/etc) - color - bonus 1 - bonus 2 - bonus 3 - bonus 4 - bonus 5 - bonus 6

Just try to imagine the space needed for this.

Of course you can set the character record to be fixed. So that the whole one record looks like this:
1 - charname
2 - charclass
3 - level
4 - XP
5 - mot
6-100 - different premiums
101 - number of items of type 1 (let's take red rags for example)
102 - number of yellow rags the player has
103 - number of black rags the player has
.
.
.
76583487569324876 - number of gold guns the player has

Imagine that. Just one player's record grown to 1MB of space that contains many zeros, but who cares, let's plug another 100TB HDD into the server. If only it existed.
And you wouldn't want to limit the number of players on one world, right?

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I haven't seen any other browser RPG that doesn't have an inventory limit. Even singleplayer RPGs tend to have an inventory limit, those that don't have it are pretty rare or don't contain many different items.

 

[DeletedUser]

J The idea is that collections would be stored as "all woolly hats" or "all black shoes" rather than as individual items.

So those of us that want to be proactive and clean out our inventories beforehand, selling whatever we think people will buy on the market and everything else to a shop, will instead be forced to keep those huge inventories until limits are implemented when nothing will be sellable on the market because everyone else is selling everything too.

 

[Noobmic]

@JoxerTM - I play another web based game that has 1000 backpack limit per player and if you are in a guild you have tagged items that can be used by every member of the guild, now there are over 1500 items tagged in our guild and each item can be crafted having 5 types of forge (very poor, poor, Average, excellent, perfect) then another 5 types of crafting (2% increased, 4%, 6%, 8% and 10%) and you can have all combinations but all players try to do items Perfect with 10% bonus. And the game has 9652 unique items (that can be equipped by a player), without components/recipes and much more types of products. So others could manage it to make it work. Also I need to mention that online there are at least 1000 players all the time.

 

[DeletedUser]

@JoxerTM - I play another web based game that has 1000 backpack limit per player

It could be worse than whatever Inno implements. Fallen Sword: the backpack limit is three slots, expandable by purchasing each new slot with premium. The guild inventory is about the same, also expandable.

 

[DeletedUser]

@JoxerTM - I play another web based game that has 1000 backpack limit per player and if you are in a guild you have tagged items that can be used by every member of the guild...

That's what I love to hear. In this game we don't have guilds, we have rudimentary alliances.

But it's a number of possible towns on the map that is actually a fixed number. You can't put unlimited number of towns on world's map. And that's why I've suggested the town warehouse system on the devblog with "borrowable" items.

 

[DeletedUser]

What would be wrong with combining the values of items from a particular sets to essential create one new item from the initial however many there were. which creates a item that is better than any of the solo items used to make it. Take bandanas if I take the highest value of any skills given and keep it for the new item, but do not add each value up of a particular skill so that it becomes greater then the item, does not get too strong. So a new bandana with all the skills of other colored bandana's would have these values;
+3 swimming +1 shooting +1 Tactics + Aim +1 construction + 1 health +1 Appearance

Obviously in this process all colored bandanas would be lost to create the new bandana. And by doing this you could potentially reduce players item inventories by a factor of seven.

 

[Noobmic]

It could be worse than whatever Inno implements. Fallen Sword: the backpack limit is three slots, expandable by purchasing each new slot with premium. The guild inventory is about the same, also expandable.

Yes, you are right with the game that I'm talking about and yes you start with 3, but the power of guild and recall items makes it to work. And also I invested more then $1000 in the game for 2+ years that I play.

Now the main difference is that compared to the-west that game started that way from the start and they had 500 limit initially and they changed last year to 1000 because it was needed.

 

[DeletedUser22575]

That's what I love to hear. In this game we don't have guilds, we have rudimentary alliances.

But it's a number of possible towns on the map that is actually a fixed number. You can't put unlimited number of towns on world's map. And that's why I've suggested the town warehouse system on the devblog with "borrowable" items.

The only way a "borrowable" item warehouse system would work was if the system automatically selected the lowest level multiple item (ie a player had multiple pants for example) and assigned it to the warehouse once the back pack limit was reached. This would in itself encourage players to limit their items on hand in their backpack if they could not select which item went to the warehouse.

Other wise all you will be creating is a new exploit for towns so that players can "assign" items to the warehouse for other members to use to achieve quests, find low drop items, etc. so that their town can gain an advantage over other towns through leveling up faster, finding rare items, etc.

Additionally a system of uncontrolled player selected items assigned to the warehouse would be further to the advantage of large towns and disadvantage smaller towns even more than they are disadvantaged now.

 

[DeletedUser28121]

The only way a "borrowable" item warehouse system would work was if the system automatically selected the lowest level multiple item (ie a player had multiple pants for example) and assigned it to the warehouse once the back pack limit was reached. This would in itself encourage players to limit their items on hand in their backpack if they could not select which item went to the warehouse.

Other wise all you will be creating is a new exploit for towns so that players can "assign" items to the warehouse for other members to use to achieve quests, find low drop items, etc. so that their town can gain an advantage over other towns through leveling up faster, finding rare items, etc.

Additionally a system of uncontrolled player selected items assigned to the warehouse would be further to the advantage of large towns and disadvantage smaller towns even more than they are disadvantaged now.

Actually, every point you listed as a negative I see as a benefit. The warehouse excahange thingy is a pretty cool idea and ofc it will favor the large towns more then smaller communities (pretty realistic when u think about it. Im not a wild west buff but im pretty sure that large towns (back in the day) were better off when it came to, well. survival, than smaler outback communities. And, if u wanted to, you were allowed to share a potato or a shotgun with your neighbour, lol) And if devs decide to take this up i recommend they make it so that only the original owner (the one who dropped it to the warehouse first) can put the item up for auction or sell it in-game. Borrow(ees ) can only use it or drop it back to the warehouse.

 

[DeletedUser22575]

Your points might be true if this was the west and not a game where you are concerned about playability and game balance blackie.

 

[DeletedUser]

The warehouse excahange thingy is a pretty cool idea and ofc it will favor the large towns more then smaller communities.

The core of the town shared warehouse idea is to make towns more important and playing townless less attractive.
It also takes care of the inventory limit since the number of towns is fixed and thus the world towns database with warehouse items has it's boundary that can't be crossed.

And towns are not without a limit, max number of members is 50 (a couple of dozens more only if on gamemastered world with such feature).
If the number of citizens was without a limit, then I'd agree that the town shared warehouse idea has a major flaw. Because of that I suggested a TOWN WAREHOUSE. Not an alliance warehouse. But some will never understand the difference of limited and limitless.
And I believe anyone can fill a town with 40-50 players even without such warehouse and thus I don't see any flaw.

But in any case the idea is on the devblog for all those who don't know what is it about. I hope noone will say after a half of year "I didn't know", "noone knew", etc.

 

[Noobmic]

Today I tested The-West with FireFox 4, damn it moves amazing, even better then Chrome 10, so for those with big inventory (mine has 4500+ items) you should give it a try and you will not regret it.

 

[DeletedUser9470]

Today I tested The-West with FireFox 4, damn it moves amazing, even better then Chrome 10, so for those with big inventory (mine has 4500+ items) you should give it a try and you will not regret it.

FF4<IE9<Chrome 11
end of discussion

 

[DeletedUser]

What about storing items in the bank? In the bank you can put items in and money. That way you can still play townless.

 

[DeletedUser8627]

What about storing items in the bank? In the bank you can put items in and money. That way you can still play townless.

What about the stockyard?

 

[DeletedUser]

maybe a ingame poll? same with golden gun ,its a very small % of players that look or are involved in this forum

 

[DeletedUser25233]

I've got a lot of items and I'm not keen to sell them or get rid of them, but I do see the point made in this thread. I don't mind overly much being forced to reduce my inventory, but would need time to do it (probably a lot of time).

The get-one-of-each=just-one-awesome is a good idea. You could call it 'Multi-coloured' (bandanna or whatever).

Very keen on a warehouse to store my excess items, and it creates a new element to the game that you can only get them out of storage when you're in town - nice, and realistic. Don't mind spending time building the warehouse, but don't want to pay nuggets to have one. Don't mind paying in-game cash (possibly just to store, possibly just to remove). Don't want to have anotherthing you can only enjoy in the game if you pay. People who don't pay add a lot to the game, and I don't want to turn them off it.

Sounds to me like a more efficient code and/or better more efficient servers will help from comments some people have made here. I feel that I've supported the dev.s from time to time by purchasing nuggets, and it'd be nice if they'd use that money to make better code/buy better servers so my/our game playing isn't detracted from (in other words, I expect the good things I'm getting from the game now to at least be there in the future. I'd like bigger and better things in the future of course, but not at the expense of the good things I'm already enjoying in the game).

Another thing that might help the storage/retrieval issue: have more than two levels of storage. So instead of just having your backpack (regular/current inventory) and your town's warehouse, you could have your backpack (small number of personal items) your wagon (larger number of personal items you pay in-game cash for, goes where you go), your town storehouse (quite large storage facility in town, built as other buildings, and possibly needing to be guarded against the possibility of a raid [by NPCs? players? not sure]), and your county warehouse (one per county, pay nuggets once per quarter/half/year for unlimited storage, and in-game cash for retrieval of items).

This system would probably reduce the numbers of things people store overall, and you can have older, slower servers for the stuff in the storehouse and especially warehouse - people would get used to the fact retrieving from there'd take a while, and it would allow the newer/faster servers to be dedicated for more day-to-day stuff, making general game-play faster.

 

[DeletedUser]

I'm assuming, of course, that the problem lies in the number of different items in the inventory. I don't see how there would be a problem with the stacking of items in the inventory (or a warehouse).

I wouldn't object to paying nuggets for an additional ten to fifteen spaces for different items (paying it over and over for additional assorted items, if I desire). Then again, I'm no coder, so there could be something I'm missing.

 

[DeletedUser]

It's not about the amount of one or a few items. It's about the number of different items.

Two posible solutions to the technical problem of storage space
1. create a record per player:
Player Id, item 1 quantity, item 2 quantity, item 3 quantity ... item 1000 quantity
where each item is fixed, eg item 1 = golden gun, item 2 = mustang etc.

so for 1k different items we would need a record per player of about 1 k in size.
there are approx 160k player so total space requirement for the table would be less than a gigabyte (if my maths are right)

2. Create a record per player / item
Player Id, item number, quantity (total of about 10 bytes)

If every player had a thousand items, this would require
160k players * 1k item types * 10 byte record size
which is about 10 gigabytes

There are advantages and disadvantages to both of the above solutions. The best option requiring an analysis on the mix of items per player

 

[Noobmic]

@OldUn - I worked with 2Gb in a table on MySql and I didn't had any performance issues, I worked with over 10Gb in a table on Oracle and I didn't had any performance issues (and when I say table I'm referring to a table not the entire database). So if you do your application architecture and code right then everything works without problems.