So if more bag space would cause resource issues for Blizzard, then why not increase stack sizes? Why not stack cloth to 250? Why not stack ore to 100? One could easily argue that Blizzard is responsible for people needing so many bag slots because they have made stack sizes artificially small.

They shouldn't complain about resource constraints when they could reduce the number of resources needed to store materials by simply increasing stack sizes.

The storage space arguement on severs is *slightly* crap. I am not bashing you Byron, you just brought up a point that bugs me

The "stuff" you have have (in your bags or bank) is nothing more than records in a database that is mostly just numbers. Yes I am aware of millions of players, but records in a database take up nominal space. I will put out an example of why this is not a good arguement.

One item slot is 1 kilobyte (I EXTREMELY doubt it is that high, but for easy math, it will be). Lets also say an average server has 100,000 players. If they increased the "bank" slots by 100 (so 100 kilobytes/player), that will be an increase of storage space needed by 100,000,000 kilobytes (which in turn is 97656.25 megabytes, which again in turn is 95 gigabytes).

You can't tell me that Blizzard could not afford to add an extra hard drive to their raid array on the servers (no extra programming would have to be done, other than the interface screen, because I am betting the code is designed for "dymanic" amount of items). Now I know they would have to add extra hard drives to the backup servers and replication servers, but still it is doable if Blizzard wanted to.

(If I have messed up the math, please someone correct me)

And changing the stack amount will have *NO* affect on storage space on the servers (record ID=12314124, item number=3534623, stack_qty=20 (or 100 still is the same record and storage space is the same, its just changing a value).

h8rain:

It's not quite as simple as that. To prevent item duplication each item has it's own unique identification number. Stacks have to have the UID for each item in the stack. Not nearly as neat as having your little example at the end, and it does take up more space.

On the other hand, with the number of items and slots that can be made up in the game (amongst bank alts, guild vaults, etc), it's a very lame excuse to blame storage. Blizzard won't let you change your backpack on your character because it's hard-coded in, and most likely too difficult to gut at this point.

My understanding is that the problem is storing items on bags on the character, they have to be actively stored in ram or something. Bank storage can be much bigger, because its more of a passive storage.