Private Account Exchange - PAX–System – v1.1

[Thoosa]

After counting my mules due to a thread in the General Discussion Forum I want to propose my idea of item stashing in this forum:

Features:
- Copy/use your Auction house code to make a new “Private Account Exchange (PAX)”. You already did that for the shard exchange, so this should be doable.
- Each account gets it’s own PAX (per server). Every char of the account has access to the same PAX
- You can deposit/withdraw stuff there for a fee. Let’s say “100 plat x itemlevel” for withdraw and “10 plat x itemlevel” for deposit. In my opinion we will get a new useful Platinum sink, which is a good thing for the game economy.
- We can use the level search and category search to find our items e.g. Show me my robes level 1-5.
- You will receive your items per Mail
- Unlimited storage! (Cap at x*1000 items?)

How SSG can make some additional money:
- Initial opening of the PAX
- Access your PAX with an DDO-Store item during a quest
- Removal of BTC from an item added to PAX

It would be great if a Dev could tell, if the PAX feature is doable without too much effort or nearly impossible to implement.

[systemshaker1941]

You really shouldn't need a dev to tell you this is nearly impossible.

[Xgya]

Given just how hard it sounds to add search features to the bank and TR cache, this sounds like an undertaking beyond awful.

They added a cap on mail because people that could use that as a sort of infinite storage did, and that added to the server's load, which obviously does not need the extra stress. Adding an unlimited storage would do that yet again, even with a cost to put in and remove items.

Frankly, what you're looking for that isn't unlimited storage (which they can't and won't do) is something that I'd actually support. A search function similar to the Auction House's in the shared bank.

That uses existing infrastructure and server capacity calculations (shared bank), but adds to its functionality.

[systemshaker1941]

The devs have commented several times that the big problem is all the BtC storage and items. Apparently BtA causes much lower overhead than BtC, but the shared bank is still a problem. Basically, they need to rewrite the inventory system from scratch - and that's going to take a lot of work.

[Thoosa]

I was thinking about a cap ( x*1000 items ). With “unlimited” I was referring to a UI solution without a grid or some visual limitations.

@Xgya You said it: They have already a cap on the mail system and as far as I know the mails will get automatically deleted after some time.
If you don’t grab you item from your mail and the mail is gone it is your own fault.

Why should this be near to impossible?
If I’m allowed to make a guess: The important thing missing is the player-account-key in the “Shard Exchange”-Itemtable but maybe that’s already in there. Most of the other logic is already implemented in the shard exchange system and has been tested over some years.

[systemshaker1941]

Replace CS with "game design" and you get the idea.

[Xgya]

I was thinking about a cap ( x*1000 items ). With “unlimited” I was referring to a UI solution without a grid or some visual limitations.

@Xgya You said it: They have already a cap on the mail system and as far as I know the mails will get automatically deleted after some time.
If you don’t grab you item from your mail and the mail is gone it is your own fault.

Why should this be near to impossible?
If I’m allowed to make a guess: The important thing missing is the player-account-key in the “Shard Exchange”-Itemtable but maybe that’s already in there. Most of the other logic is already implemented in the shard exchange system and has been tested over some years.

There used not to be a cap, and mail containing items weren't deleted.
They had to add a cap AND that automatic deletion because people abused the system and used it as storage and had a few thousand items waiting in limbo. (that's the "x thousand" you're talking about above)
Note that it wasn't done by a lot of people, just a few major abusers, but the presence of those slowed down the server noticeably enough for the devs to have to intervene.
The "important thing missing" is server capability.

[systemshaker1941]

Its not so much "Server capacity" as it is system architecture. DDO's inventory system was not designed with long-term and scalability in mind. When the game was first conceived, they weren't expecting it to last 13 years, include 4 reincarnation mechanics, and have thousands of unique items. No one ever conceived that a single character might actually accumulate 4 million platinum(though, frankly, after having run Asheron's Call for 7 years, they really should have).

So the inventory system was designed around the notion that cap would be 20, and didn't take into account the TR cycle(since it hadn't been thought up by then) - you'd simply level to 20, then focus on slowly accumulating the very best gear available, throwing out old gear as you wouldn't ever have opportunity to use it again. The inventory system worked fine for that game.

Then along came TR, and everything went to hell.

So, really, the modern inventory fluster-cluck is a time bomb that started ticking when Heroic True Reincarnation was released, and is just now finally going off.



Basically, the back-end of the game runs on a relational database. The actual size of the data isn't the problem, its how fast you need to access which parts of it. Specifically, the issue is BtC storage - since this has to be tied directly to the character, it causes a lot of system overhead everytime you need to access it. The fix is ultimately to re-write the inventory code from the ground up in such a way that BtC doesn't need as much overhead. But that will take time, resources, and above all great care and delicacy to keep you from losing that eSoS you needed 5,000 runs to get.