3k Bulk Vault Space is not Enough!

[Ikfel]

I'm not going to try and justify the 3K bulk limitation (though I'm also not saying it's unjustified), but I will mention some ways unlimited vaults reduce fun:

* Extra system lag from all the inventory everyone hoards: lag is not fun.

* Having 100,000 bricks in your vault breaks realism and seems too easy.

* Everybody saves every little bit of old equipment and hands it down to friends and newbies: ruins the lower end market, which is not fun for beginning crafters.

* People stockpile resources and rarely need to buy anything on the open market: reduces player interaction.

* When they collect a large load people hang on to the excess rather than selling it off: this reduces the goods on the market.

* Keeping everything means never having to decide what to keep, this reduces the challenge of the game and a certain amount of fun from choosing correctly.

There are probably other subtle ways that huge vaults hurt or help the game. But my main suspicion is that it has affected the economy and trade adversely. Now, I still feel that the builders need some relief now that the vaults have shrunk, but I think there are other ways to address that.

[Onkyo]

I'm not going to try and justify the 3K bulk limitation (though I'm also not saying it's unjustified), but I will mention some ways unlimited vaults reduce fun:

* Extra system lag from all the inventory everyone hoards: lag is not fun.

* Having 100,000 bricks in your vault breaks realism and seems too easy.

* Everybody saves every little bit of old equipment and hands it down to friends and newbies: ruins the lower end market, which is not fun for beginning crafters.

* People stockpile resources and rarely need to buy anything on the open market: reduces player interaction.

* When they collect a large load people hang on to the excess rather than selling it off: this reduces the goods on the market.

* Keeping everything means never having to decide what to keep, this reduces the challenge of the game and a certain amount of fun from choosing correctly.

There are probably other subtle ways that huge vaults hurt or help the game. But my main suspicion is that it has affected the economy and trade adversely. Now, I still feel that the builders need some relief now that the vaults have shrunk, but I think there are other ways to address that.

I probably shouldn't even bother to reply on this thread, but what the heck.

lag: I've seen people bring up this before. Do you really mean to tell me you've seen a performance improvment since the vaults were taken away? puhleeze. Besides, if we can't put it in the vault where do you think we'll put it? That's right - consigners that are locked down to guild only and silos. Guess what - those ******** database entries are STILL THERE. You're not removing them, just changing the container field from vault to to silo or consigner. So the whole arguement about easing the database load is BS.

realizm: "having 100k bricks in your vault breaks realizm". Oh, and being able to magically stack 1200 bricks on a floating disk that is 4 foot in diameter isn't? Come on. I'm not evening going to elaborate more on how the whole purpose of an MMO is to get AWAY from reality and have some FUN.

saving old equipment: What do you think the new guild house storage is for? Yes, we're still saving every old tool, armor etc. The T5 guild house is great for that kind of junk.

stockpile resources: This I'll give you credit for. I can't speak for other people's play style, but my wanting for a large vault is for TEMPORARY storage. I like to quarry as a Mason (best stats & capacity) for a few hours, then switch to a different class to cut & craft. If I could have 200k bulk that only lasts 1 day I'd be happy. I'm not trying to store mass resources for months - that's what a silo is for.

large load excess hoarding: Once again, I can't speak for other's play styles but I don't do that. If I have left over, I either craft & decon some tools, or craft and pawn the tools. Any 'long term' type storage I would use a silo for. If it was a tiny amount, I'd stash it in the guild house storage.

keeping everything/making choices: I don't quite understand how this makes the game more challenging. If I really wanted to, I can still keep all the tools, armor, tech parts, etc - just slap them in housing, guild only connies, etc. It's a matter of CONVENIENCE and FUN. I understand it's a time sink - they want to slow us down as best they can to prolong our leveling. I can see the logic in that arguement. However, you need to maintain the fun/grind ratio delicately. Look at other MMOs as an example. In SWG, you could stack bulk resources easily. I could put 50 stacks of resources in the bank. That's probably equal to about 5 million bulk in Horizons - 5 times what we had as temporary. You never see people in SWG complaining about storage like people here do, and they don't have any issues with people levelling too fast like the 'fear' here is.

Some other people complain about the item count - they like to keep tech parts around and can't do that very well currently. That's different than me - I'm happy with the item counts. My need is bulk. And my need is only temporary. I would LOVE the idea of charging me an 'over the limit fee' daily if I exceed my bulk use in the vault. That would give them a money sink, and still allow me to temporarily store resources as I craft.

[Ikfel]

lag: I've seen people bring up this before. Do you really mean to tell me you've seen a performance improvment since the vaults were taken away? puhleeze. Besides, if we can't put it in the vault where do you think we'll put it? That's right - consigners that are locked down to guild only and silos. Guess what - those ******** database entries are STILL THERE. You're not removing them, just changing the container field from vault to to silo or consigner. So the whole arguement about easing the database load is BS.

Are you arguing that reducing the item count hasn't helped lag, or that the change hasn't really reduced the count because people just shuffled things around to new locations? A locked down consigner only gives you 10 or 20 extra slots to store things in. And forget silos, those are only good for a bit of bulk. Those are nothing compared to the 200 or 300 item slots in a vault.

Most of my arguments pertain more to item count than bulk. I found the increased bulk limit very handy myself, my vault still has over 300K bulk in it. But notice that while the large vaults increased the bulk limit from 2,000 to 1,000,000, a factor of 500 times, they only increased the stack limit by 100, a factor of 0.5. So the item count changes have been fairly trivial. I expect this is exactly because they fear adverse effects on DB lag. No, I can't point out any direct lag effect this has had, but the changes have been fairly trivial, and people haven't really cleaned up all that much, just shuffled things around, as you say.

It's reasonable to expect that at some point item count would bog down the database engine. We already see it lag at times, it obviously is close to the limit already. Would it occur at 300 items per character? Well, no we already had that and continued running. So where would it happen, 500; 1,000; 1,000,000 items? Who knows, but it very well could be a problem if item counts were increased as much as some might want.

As to the other more subtle negative effects of hoarding on gameplay. I believe they do exist and make the game a bit less fun. Whether they are enough of a factor to justify the current vault constraints is hard to say. The list is in response to Kulamata suggesting that the limitations made the game "no more fun for any" implying that there were no positives at all.

I was rather surprised when after the merge the consigners were less useful than ever. I was expecting that with more players on the server using only the NPC consigners that things would sell better and be easier to find. That didn't seem to be the case. My suspicion is that the increased vaults lead to hoarding and a less healthy economy. It was probably a godsend to guilds with a closed economy, but I've always been skeptical about the effect of insular guilds on gameplay as a whole.

[Onkyo]

"Most of my arguments pertain more to item count than bulk"

Ok, I understand where you're coming from. There seems to me that there are two basic groups of people complaining about the vaults. 1) Those who want more ITEMS (for tech parts & stuff), and 2) Those who want more BULK (resources)

I am 100% in the BULK group. If I had a vault that was limited to TEN ITEMS, but had 1 million bulk, I'd be happy as a pig in doodoo. I'd use that for my temp resource storage, and put all the other crap ina house or guildhouse.

But, I can completely understand the needs of the other group who would like to be able to keep various tech parts, trophies, tools, and whatnot on hand.

And yes, you did have a point that locked down consigners are limited to a certain amount of items, you neglect to include in the equation that we have all these structures that can store items now that we didn't have before. So, my point was that if people can't stash stuff in the vault, they'll spread it out among things like connies, houses, guild houses, tents, etc. So, those 'item counts' will still exist somewhere, just in a house instead of a vault. All that does is add to the tedium by having to port around more. The client performance is so horrid that any way we can avoid porting around is wonderful. If the devs would fix the ******** performance issues then maybe some people wouldn't complain so much about the storage & porting needs.

Also keep in mind that when things don't sell they fall into the vault. So, if someone wanted to overfill their vault, they can use a locked down consigner to do that. Sure it takes a week, but if you're in a guild that has a dozen of them, you can put 10 on each every week. They removed the ability to disable a consigner so that people could not immediately dump stuff into the vault using that method, but the original rule of 1 week is still in effect.