A physical limit on bag space
by Mike Schramm 
Feb 14th 2008 at 3:31PM
Just the other day, Adam suggested that more bag space was always a good thing, but now Drysc tells us that's not exactly true-- even though 20-slotters are more common than ever, Blizzard has no plans to let us replace the normal 16-slot backpack anytime soon. And the reason he cites is interesting: it has nothing to do necessarily with ingame limits, but more to do with out-of-game limits. WoW has 10 million players, and if each one of those players has easily 10 alts average and each alt has a bunch of 20-slot bags and even more items in the bank, then pretty soon you're starting to talk real amounts of physical computer memory.We don't know what that limit is (and of course it depends on how Blizzard stores their information), but Drysc tells us that it's there. And that also gives you a little hint into just how huge their operation is-- nobody else has even come close to dealing with the problem of handling inventory and stats information for ten million players and countless numbers of characters. But Drysc says Blizzard is working on it as always-- despite the technical headaches, we may see bigger backpacks soon.
Filed under: Odds and ends, Blizzard, Economy, Hardware
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
BillDoor Feb 14th 2008 3:58PM
Yet we can store an unlimited amount of crap in our mailboxes? I don't buy it.
Lucas Feb 14th 2008 7:47PM
Deletion after 29 days means its not unlimited....
Aticus Feb 14th 2008 4:03PM
I'm pleased to see that someone has an answer for this. Good to know that they have considered it.
-Aticus, http://www.paladintales.blogspot.com
Xeren Feb 14th 2008 6:46PM
ok, your comments are becoming more generic, and it's becoming more apparent that you're just spamming your own website. quit it.
Aticus Feb 14th 2008 8:21PM
I'm sorry that my comments are not 3-5 paragraphs long. My opinions are sometimes short and I do not feel the need explain myself on every comment I make. Also, I am not "spamming" my website. I am a blogger; I post comments on blogs with a tag. Most bloggers now-a-days will post with a tag. Posting comments with your name and website is NOT new and many bloggers will post a link to their blog with their name in the footer of the comment.
This website does not let me create a designated name to which someone could click my name and see my blog (such as Blogger and WordPress). If there is a way for me to do this, please reply with a proper link to a registration page (not a homepage) and I will do so. Until then, I will post my name tag.
-Aticus, http://www.paladintales.blogspot.com
Xeren Feb 16th 2008 2:57PM
no, I get why you're posting you're link, that's not the issue- self promotion on a website where you're supposed to be contributing to a community just rubs me the wrong way
Angry Joe Feb 14th 2008 4:04PM
"nobody else has even come close to dealing with the problem of handling inventory and stats information for ten million players and countless numbers of characters"
Actually, not even Blizzard, since the China (5.5 million players) and Europe (2 million) operations are independent.
Buy more servers!
Ted Feb 14th 2008 4:06PM
I call bull too.
The amount of data "storage" required to record the contents of bags and banks is relatively speaking minimal. SAN storage nowadays is getting ridiculously cheap for a company pulling in the kind of profits Blizzard does... and that's assuming they put us on high end storage. My guess is they're on near line IDE or something similar which is still blazing fast but considerably cheaper.
BillDoor Feb 14th 2008 4:09PM
I suspect he meant RAM, which does get kinda pricey at the server level, but still, yeah. This isn't a very good reponse from Drysc. He would've been better off just saying "We're looking into it, no promises" like he always does.
nav Feb 14th 2008 6:26PM
If he means RAM then the argument about alts does not apply.
Chris Feb 15th 2008 8:11AM
Definitely bullshit.
100%, totally bullshit.
The only real issue might be the looming size of the database tables that holds the information, and running queries on that large database, but even then we have to remember that there isn't a single items_database, but rather, at least one table for server, and probably one table for each faction to keep things small and running smoothly.
As for space, that's totally bullshit. You know what is kept in the database?
Your userid, and the itemid. That's it. Each item is going to have a simple, 16 or 32 bit id. We'll say it's probably 32bit or 4bytes per item.
We'll say each player has an average of 4 characters with 20+20+20+20+20+16 = 116 slots. We'll double that for average bank usage (232) then round it up so the naysayers will hush (250) items per character. 1000 items per person, 10,000,000 players. (Even though a large percentage of those players don't have 4 characters with 250 items each, like me for example).
10,000,000,000 (roughly) items held by players. (Ten billion)
Each item ID is 32bit or 4bytes each, so thats 40 billion bytes. You know how much harddrive space that is?
37.252903 GB.
Yes, a single 40GB harddrive could hold over ten billion items held by players. (At least, the unique ID that the database would see).
So, I think the argument is total bullshit.
rick gregory Feb 14th 2008 4:09PM
Actually I just want things to stack higher. Why can some items stack in 20, others in 5 and still others only in 1? When I was skilling LW and tailoring I needed tons of bag because each item took a slot. Making 20 things to skill up? you need 20 slots. Cloth? 20 items per slot. Bolts of cloth? 10 per slot.
Um... wtf??
Todd Feb 14th 2008 4:16PM
I thought there was talk from Blizzard to allow the player backpack to increase in size as the character levels. I suppose this idea is dead, now?
Green Armadillo Feb 14th 2008 4:38PM
The expanding backpack was from a fake set of speculative patch notes. It's a nice idea, but really, four more slots isn't going to make or break the storage problems this game currently has.
As to storage taking RAM/hard-disk space, I don't buy it for the opposite reason. I have a guild of bank alts, each with their own guild bank and 6x16 slot bags each, because that's cheaper and more storage space than 20-slotters for the rest of my main's bank slots. It's now also possible to mail yourself pages and pages of mail with 12 items in each. You can't tell me that all these workarounds aren't as bad or worse for data storage than letting us have more storage space on a single character would be.
The real problem right now is soulbound equipment. Crafting materials I can send to an alt, or sell. I don't bother to save gear for possible twinks anymore - it it's something an alt I already have can use in the near future, fine, otherwise I'm better off selling it (or the DE'ed pieces). But soulbound gear you're stuck with, cause there's no way to get it back if you change specs or find out that certain stats are more valuable than you thought they were (especially with the ever expanding number of stats on gear these days).
Krick Feb 14th 2008 5:49PM
I've also done the bank alt guild thing with a shared guild bank between all my alts. I'm loving the extra space. I used to have the large profession-specific bags in each character's extra bank slots, but I too have gotten to the point where soulbound gear has overrun my individual toon banks. I hold onto a lot of drops and quest reward gear that most people would have sharded because a given piece is the highest of a certain stat available in the game (at least that I've encountered so far). Most people I know get a purple for a certain slot, then shard every piece of blue and green gear they have for that slot. When you're trying to min/max a given stat for different situations, you don't have that luxury.
...
Krick
http://www.tankadin.com
Sylythn Feb 14th 2008 7:05PM
@1 Ever notice the 500ms or so delay when you click on an item in your mailbox to get it into your inventory? It's especially apparant when you've got lag across the whole item server. It's the same (or similar) delay you get when you loot a container or body.
I'm willing to bet what shows up in your mailbox or in a loot container is just a pointer to an object description. It isn't until you click on it to get it out of the mail that the server actually creates the object, binds it to your character inventory and stores it in your account. That would explain why you're able to have infinite mailbox storage (they're just pointers to creator methods), and you have storage problems with your inventory (they're actual copies of data linked to your account).
This is all assumption since I don't have visibility to Blizz's code, but it would explain the issue at hand.
theRaptor Feb 14th 2008 8:59PM
No. Unless Blizzard programmers are completely retarded then every item in the game is just a few pieces of data (characterID, soulbound, enchants, creator for crafted goods) and the rest is a link to the basic item data. Copying the basic data to each character makes no sense, it is quicker to just cache all the basic item data and link back to it.
MechChef Feb 14th 2008 4:36PM
I don't have 10 alts. Only 3 of my characters have much of anything on them at all.
Nywro Feb 14th 2008 4:42PM
The only reason I have alts is because my only played character is always full due to raiding. I had to fill all my alt slots for my materials for my 2 profession, more raiding materials due to stack sizes and so on until they came out with guild banks.
If stack sizes were bigger I could trim some more alts especially when it comes to how many different consumable items exist as a raider.
George Feb 14th 2008 4:50PM
Read link has to do with the entry how?
Will Weblogs Inc please just drop the whole concept of the "Read" link? There's a reason hyperlinks were created to begin with.
Here's a hint: It wasn't for explicit "click me" links. It was meant for inline.