Shrink shared stash, add character stash space?

General Discussion
21

You have source where they mention that “memory space” is the issue for not having more stash space? The only reason I’ve seen so far for not being able to provide more is “synchronization”.

Why did they limit stash space for consoles? Don’t consoles keep “memory space” on the console?

They did intend to give us more space and it was on the PTR so I don’t buy that server space is an issue unless you have source.

" In addition, we encountered a lot of technical issues with increasing overall stash space for players. Unfortunately, as these issues caused significant degredation of the overall gameplay experience, we ultimately had to take a step back on this quality of life improvement and table it for now."

And the degredation was loading all those “actors”.

"Q: What are the technical limitations preventing us from adding more stash tabs?

To explain this, we have to start with the foundation on which Diablo III is built.

Seriously, where in their explanation of “preventing us from adding more stash space” do they talk about server space?

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22

Companies pay data centers a limited annual budget if they can increase it without limitations that’s their call. That’s their budget. A quick google search about where diablo 3 servers may give you answers.

If you want each character to stock up to 10 mb of data instead of 2mb for hundred thousand client potential, which makes it 120-150 mb each, company have to pay for extra space to the data center for maintenance. Each stored item, will result in extra memory space, which adds up among hundred thousands.

I’m not sure if your suggestion would be the solution to anything, as synchronization is only one aspect of the problem plus, mass resetting realm is something they tend to avoid.

Servers of consoles handled by a third party still it has to offer the same features as PC. Consoles have multiplayer function too.

I’m not sure, if you think spared limited memory is magic or not. Data centers get paid to keep servers alive and they charge by memory space as they also host other massively multiplayer or multiplayer master servers in the same center. Most data centers are not dedicated to only hosting one server.

23

I understand this but in their explanation they never once said it was server cost. They gave an actual explanation pointing to performance issue.

If memory space was an issue, why even drop the carrot on the PTR to give us 5? I’m sure they knew how much space they could offer.

Also, game is old, if they offered more space, how many players will actually be using it now days? Not as many compared to how much was originally sold, that’s for sure.

As for actual server cost and how much memory is needed for one extra tab, give me some quotes/sources.

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24

How can they explain that? It’s talking about company budget.

If you go back to the times when Nev was a CM, once they tried that in the PTR. Giving good news to everyone that they will be giving 5 free stash spaces, just to retract that up to 5 additional stash spaces gated behind seasonal rewards. Then, even without these news getting cooled, suddenly Nev had to announce that they only can give one additional stash space gated behind seasonal rewards.
If this doesn’t translate as memory space, I don’t know what would.

25

It did not translate into memory space being the issue. Again, I’m sure they knew how much space they could make available before offering it based on their active player base.

They gave an actual explanation for why it had to be retracted and it was the “synchronization” issue.

"Q: What are the technical limitations preventing us from adding more stash tabs?

To explain this, we have to start with the foundation on which Diablo III is built …

How can they not explain it? Many company talk about the reason certain features not being implemented due to cost or they don’t give a reason at all. However, in this case they DID give a reason and it wasn’t space.

And you were the one that brought up … google D3 servers… and now you’re saying there isn’t anything on it because it’s business. /shrug

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26

The point is learning how data centers process and price their services. Big companies have annual budgets to skim on. Googling D3 servers won’t give you much information besides afew data center locations that are active or not used anymore.

Google searching for annual data center cost brought something like this for the ownership:

" The average yearly cost to operate a large data center ranges from $10 million to $25 million. A little less than half is spent on hardware, software, disaster recovery, continuous power supplies and networking. Another large portion goes toward ongoing maintenance of applications and infrastructure."

Regarding this, the annual cost of renting some memory space can be measured in a few million dollars per year. Companies don’t tend to bang the cash on the table without planning. By memory space, if you cut a chocolate bar to twelve pieces you’ll have the same amount, not more.

27

Define Large.

Even better, prove that D3 requires a Large data center.

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28

You can’t prove anything but give a wild guesstimate about their costs. I said it’s the ownership of a data center, rent values differ by data center and varies by memory space.
When you dig deep into the data centers, you’ll see they only do hosting for 2-3 different master servers and they have to profit off from that as well.

If you don’t wanna take memory space as an excuse that’s understandable as I don’t tend to believe anything written by another but do my own research.

29

That doesn’t answer the question because it doesn’t offer the cost for size of server. And there is no source for how much it would actual cost to increase storage per tab.

Seems based on your quote, a lot of the cost doesn’t seem to go into space, which I gather to be just the “hardware” portion if what’s listed.

  1. They initially planned to offer more space
  2. They clearly stated that the issue was due to " Synchronization"

I’m unsure why you refuse to accept the explanation they provide because in all honestly, the answer would have been better if they said it was cost. They way they explained it pretty much equates to… well the loot of D3 is just too great we couldn’t build a system to contain it!

30

Not even if it’s written by Blizzard themselves? I did my research and quoted the sources.

If I was to talk hypotheticals, I would say I don’t think they would store any graphic assets that would take up lots of space. I would guesstimate they break all items into a few character strings and storing characters relatively don’t take up much space.

They were thinking of offering 5 more stash tabs, so I’m guessimating, they must have known it was something they could do. They pulled out of it after testing and pointed to technical issues, which they explained and I quoted.

31

$25M/yr * 10 years is $250M.

Out of 30M sales of D3, that would be ~$8.33 per sale to run all of Blizzard, not just D3, for 10 years.

I doubt Server Memory is the issue.

32

Do you spend all your salary at one place? I may like chocolate, but I won’t buy chocolate bars with all my earnings, that’d be absurd.

Money is not entirely an issue, sure, but they have to profit off from that. They ought to manage company resources and they have a limited annual or five year budget. Companies work on budgets and limitations to manage and sustain their resources.
No, they won’t spend their entire earnings that year to a data center but they have to shift the resources between studios, subsidiaries, start advertisement campaigns to media outlets and pay salaries to their workers too.

Sad to say, but yes. It’s better to do your own research to come to a conclusion yourself. You are free to not believe it because Blizzard officials haven’t mentioned such thing even once but what I’m saying is not far fetched from logic of how things worked so far.

33

Who said their entire earnings came from D3?

A Large data center will host D3, Hearthstone, WoW, PeopleSoft, CRM, ERP, payroll, etc. …

The budget for the data center does not come from D3 alone. $8/sale will cover the entire data center for 10 years; not just D3’s portion. At $8/sale, that still gives you $15 (current price of $25) for other expenses.

34

Why yes. They still have to do a budget plan though. Whatever you mention, subject there is increasing the memory space up to 5-10 times if you were to give each of the 12-14 character slots 5 stash tabs each.

35

I wouldn’t have an issue reducing shared stash by 1, then having 1 character based stash. Could help organize character class specific items. Realize though hardcore players would be adverse to such due to disconnects and this season’s clones reflect damage issue.

36

By 14 characters that means 13-14 more characterized stash tabs. There are 13 stash tabs if you buy everything, and 14 character slots if you were to have D3+RoS+RoNec DLC together.
Math doesn’t entirely add up, you can only get a smaller stash tab per character and this does not alleviate the situation of players using mule characters at all. Smaller stashes will cause player to juggle between characters to find something.

According to Nevalistis each realm reset will request a seed from server that will add burden to the server processing. I failed to believe this bit from Nevalistis, as people have been using mule characters for ages; you don’t have to believe it either but it’s clear they don’t want to encourage player to switch back and forth between characters than it already had.

Whatever you request, simply translates to free extra stash space, which means tens of more items to be stored in memory per stash tab. Apply this to hundred thousands of players -which includes free-to-play players in China and long forgotten players who quit as their accounts never get deleted- and you have an issue at hand.
You splitting them for synchronization issues, does NOT mean server memory forgets about them once they’re away from sight and they don’t occupy memory space anymore.

If such thing were to apply, they have to draw a line and filter very old users from such benefits but still, they will end up overpaying for players who would never return to the game ever again. Another issue is smaller shared stash tabs, will force them to send the items by item mail to the user which server won’t hold for long, over 30 days or so. Besides the server memory, drawing the line is another issue.

If it was any practical I do believe Blizzard would perform such twist already but they always end up surprising me. Maybe by the end of this year they decide it’s enough and overhaul the whole core game code to add such features.

37
  • Server memory or disk space?
  • Why would you load something into server memory that isn’t going to be used?
    • Something similar to Row Level Security should be applied to Disk2Memory copies

Even more perplexing with your logic:

  • why was a feature implemented, got as far a PTR, without being budgeted?

If memory was an issue, the budget for the neccessary upgrades should have been approved before the feature got implemented, and well before we saw it in PTR.

38

Company have to buy the potential disk space regardless of current server memory and engagement to the game. As I said, drawing the line somewhere is a weird measure.
If you want less shared stash space to have more personal stash tabs, then old accounts who never got in would have to be filtered out so they won’t lose their items but where exactly you gonna draw the line? 2 years? 3 years? 10 months? 5 years? People who never own the RoS? Who could guess?

Assuming that you refer to that 5 free stash tabs once promised at a past PTR; it was perhaps a miscommunication or a miscalculation on their part?
There’s only a max amount of 5 extra stash tabs you can get from succeeding the 5 seasonal journeys. Perhaps a miscommunication on their part. I wouldn’t know. Maybe they thought it’s good to go but either memory space requirement or synchronization issues stopped them.

If you really insist on synchronization is the main issue and it has nothing to do with money, the interview quoted up above clearly says…
https://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topic/43149-patch-265-stash-space-clarifications/

This issue on console is particularly difficult because there is a limit to how much system memory we can access. PC is more flexible in this manner, which is why we’re able to add more stash space there.

Synchronization is not entirely an issue on desktop computers, as known as personal computers. What else possible obstacle you got? I say, server memory.

PTR crowd is much more smaller than the real audience crowd most of the time. If they tested it upon a small example there can be promise of 5 new stash tabs just to break it later. They hired new personal to take care of servers at that time I remember.
Also besides synchronization, they appear to not want a mass request of realm restarts on the servers by character switches back and forth. This also brought to the table by Nevalistis back in the day.

To address the gated seasonal journey reward; they use extra stash tab as an allure to create engagement to their unmonetized game. So they can reflect the monthly numbers on their quarterly report. There’s an average engagement for each of their games, and presuming something is not hard.
Sure they buy the extra space sometimes as they have to host game for many countries but they’re aware how much engagement RoS expansion pack sales get too. Server space not only for stash and items but character information go there as well.

Extra free stash spaces were never freely given along the history of the game. It always came with a small fee and each small fee filtered some of the existing player base. Issue here is, your numbers don’t add up and if they add up, it doesn’t really change anything.

39

So, I fired up Task Manager, and looked at how much memory Diablo III Retail was using…

Me in a solo game, stood in town = 1528 MB

Me in a public Bounty group, stood in town = 1948 MB

Now, as Blizzard told us that when we join a party, all members of the party synch their Stash contents with each other, this would suggest that the other three players’ Stash contents were, at most, 1948 MB - 1528 MB = 420 MB

Of that 420 MB, a large amount of that will be as a result of having to load up character models, meshes, class ability animations, and so on, i.e. it’s not all the Stash synchronisation. But, even if we said the synchronisation data’s half of it, that’s 210 MB for three additional heroes, i.e. 70 MB each player, for 13 stash tabs worth of gear. That’s under 5.5 MB per stash tab, per player.

If we assume Diablo III has 500,000 players, and they all have 13 tabs, and they granted everyone two more, that would be 500,000 * 2 * 5.384 MB = 5,384,615 MB = 5,258 GB

I highly double the issue is that Blizzard can’t afford to pay for under 6 GB of hosted server disk space.

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40

Sad to inform you that your random access memory is way different than your HDD. Your items are not stored in your own HDD but accessed from server via your client.

Math is faulty from the root as no one can guesstimate anything about how much a stash tab or single item occupies server’s memory from their own random access memory. Also the quoted part only mentions synchronization of memory being a wide issue at consoles, but NOT at PC. The activity you see is most likely caused by keeping the game online and decryption of assets.

I just pointed out how it’s hard to draw a line sometimes as that 500k active players can be 350k for consoles and 260k for PC for one season, roughly 610k active. You have to estimate a large margin else you have to filter returning users before season even starts. You may have to draw a line else some people somewhere will lose their items from a smaller stash space.

What give you that idea, Meteor? Estimating memory from RAM activity doesn’t sound a good measure to me. RAM removes and adds any feature that needs to be rendered or brought in to the client actively, in micro seconds. Memory holds everything you may ever need.
If I want more RAM, I don’t think you can download it either. If you truly believe your own math, I have no idea what to tell you. If you made a joke, I missed it. Sorry.

They have spared costs along the years already and they have planned all. You’re asking them to get ahead of their schedule of increasing costs without paying them in an unmonetized game.