Yes, which is why it’s RAM utilisation, not HDD space I listed…
In the thread on the old forums Blizzard went through a number of different excuses as to why it couldn’t give us the extra 5 stash tabs it had originally put in the PTR notes (and went onto the PTR with). First it was client instability, then it was server instability, then it was number of ‘actors’, where they’d tried the extreme that no player would ever do, e.g. every single slot of 13 stash tabs filled with rings, each with a gem in them.
And Blizzard told us, in that old thread, that synch’d Stash contents were held in the local PC’s memory which is why synching lots would cause instability of the client. Of course, they subsequently changed their mind to say it was sever-side instability they were worried about. Like I said, they went through a number of excuses / explanations that are nowhere to be seen in the article you’re quoting, and were omitted from the blog that announced the live patch / season start.
Those of us that saw the PTR blog post (where they announced 5 extra tabs), took part in the PTR (where I obtained those 5 extra tabs), where the PTR forum had a specific stickied thread asking for any reports of issues with the Stash (which received zero reports), then them changing the blog post to saying we’d only be getting one more tab (without advising anyone they’d changed it), to the subsequent storm on the forums asking why we weren’t getting what they’d promised and them going through a gamut of backpeddling.
Oh, and don’t forget, initially the extra 5 tabs were just buyable with gold, i.e. available immediately. Then they changed them to being earned by Seasonal Conqueror, then they changed it to 1 more via Seasonal Conqueror. A video from the time…
As I said, I did do my research and I believe them. Why else would they come up with such a ridicules excuse unless it was true.
As for evidence of your “research”, I am not seeing it. Told to go google it and you yourself comes back with generalization of server cost.
By the way, from your source, which was my source is:
As for the disparity with Console specifically, additional stash space can impact things like game loading time negatively. Console players already have a larger amount of stash space available than PC players, and we found that 140 brought load times to a really uncomfortable level. By lowering the amount of new space, we can make sure console players still get more stash, but that gameplay experience doesn’t suffer from it.
On console, we tried lowering the number of tabs to be added, but there was still an unacceptable rise in latency and rubberbanding. As much as we’d all enjoy the additional stash space, it’s not worth the cost to gameplay.
So loadtimes and lag, not server memory for consoles.
Yeah. That was weird and unexcusable. However, I don’t remember any other word of extending the server capacity or giving a 6th extra stash tab ever again. There are two options for me;
They miscalculated something and won’t spare resources further into Diablo 3 besides its server maintenances, as server space for upcoming sales and additional DLC sales covered annually or so.
They wanted to reward players for sticking around this much but realized they have no other options but put us through a grind to keep engagement for MAU reports, they decided to rescind it.
They never give you the real technical issues behind all this, as there are always more than one reason and more than one excuse to why they refuse to do it. So best you can do is doing your own research and discussing it aimlessly. That’s what we are doing here.
Oh and, about that last bit with 13 tabs filled with jewelry/gems; it’s an extreme measure for sure but if they EVER let a small exploit or glitch cause server issues; they consider there always are people out there who would abuse it maliciously. A normal player wouldn’t do that for sure.
Best you can do.
When you up the stash tabs to the 140 (is it solo or 4player though? seems vague), it’s nothing surprising that it creates load time issues for a client.
When you hit it to the masses, even with Meteorblade’s rough math seems to not uphold it.
Let me try… Let’s bump a client to 140 stash tabs and consider they have 10 tabs at command already.
130 tabs * 5.3 mb = 689 mb difference in RAM loading to cause a clog. That doesn’t seem much. If it’s cumulative stash tab count of 4 players (article don’t mention that but syncronization), you can even split the burden down to 35 stash tabs for each player easily.
However, an old generation console barely have 256-512 mb RAM at best so I assume it’s 4 players split. I don’t know at this point anymore.
When you hit everyone to +130 tabs with 500k active players (apart from millions record sales) in both console and PC version, it hits up to 336gb active data; according to Meteorblade’s take on its math.
They hired all the new personnel for maintenance issues and none of them ever figured something out. Yes, also you have to pay taxes and pay for server maintenance to hosting from data centers, it’s not all about memory space.
Where ever you take it, something is off and there are more excuses than they told us so far.
So each person with 140 items will load (140x4)= 560 items or what they call “actors”. Assuming all 4 players have a full stash + item occupying a single slot.
" That doesn’t sound like a lot at first, but it adds up very fast. The more actors active in a game (like enemies on screen AND items in your stash), the more the game will tax your system’s memory. This issue on console is particularly difficult because there is a limit to how much system memory we can access. "
So PC players are limited by the client’s PC memory and for console, it’s limited to the console’s system memory they are allowed access to.
Active data? You mean data being actively loaded? The OP solution doesn’t load any extra data. It’s the same amount loaded as now or kept “active.” The sum is still 13 tabs just a portion of that is made to be character or class specific, but anytime you load up your hero, only 13 tabs worth of data is being loaded at any given time.
And if Blizzard can make money off selling expansions they would make money selling stash space. It cost less development time. What did the necro pack sell for? $15/$20 and it came with 2 stash space and 2 character space.
If they can do that for the necro pack, I’m sure there will be people buying an extra stash tab at $5 to $10 each.
The whole thing doesn’t make much sense to me. Whether we’re talking about the D3 client’s RAM usage or the server’s RAM usage or the server’s storage space – players can artificially inflate all three of them by hoarding a bunch of jewelry in their storage. So why aren’t we seeing this supposed issue crop up ourselves? They’re TELLING us it’s about quality of gameplay, but that doesn’t track with numerous other problems impacting quality of gameplay. Ex: players are ALREADY seeing significant and negative impacts with Area Damage, but has anything been done to address that problem? Nope.
No, whatever the problem is with adding more storage space, the players are not being told the truth. At least not the whole truth. If quality of gameplay was a reason, steps would have already been taken to address similar problems already in the game.
That doesn’t mean server memory forgets about your shared stash or other stored items. Why are you insisting on “away from eyes, away from heart”? When you cover the moon with your hand, it doesn’t mean every where will go black.
A company like Apple pays amazon 300 million dollars annually for hosting their cloud infrastructure and I’m debating about one guy’s “RAM activity math” to demonstrate memory use. It was a bad example to start with.
Annual payment. It has to be planned and won’t happen spontaneously.
I’m talking about their technical issue which is what they stated as being the cause as to why they are unable to implement more stash space. The technical issue is that items in the inventory are treated as actors and loading too many in game at one time causing client performance issues.
Annual payment? The necro pack isn’t an annual payment. And planning? The game has been out 8 years, I’m sure they could have planned something out during this time if they wanted to.
If you’re talking about storage space, aren’t these forums taking up storage space? How are they paying for all of this? Doesn’t each post add to space usage? Yet, I don’t see cap on how much we can post.
Well, hopefully the servers memory do forget about your other characters stored items. Would seem like quite the waste to keep that information in memory.
Overall it seems like disk space is not a big issue in general. Memory is.
Besides, if data storage was the only issue, then the simple solution would be to sell more stash space to people, to pay for the additional server storage.
While if the issue is technical, then it wont help as much to throw more money at it.
Now, the other argument, about individual stashes resulting in more people switching between characters, adding to the server load, that might be a problem. Hard to imagine it would be a huge issue.
Maybe one way to handle things could be;
in the menu screen, before loading a character, you can access all your characters stashes, and move items around. After starting a game on a character, you can only access their own stash and the small shared one. That way, the game allows for easily switching stuff around, but by separating the cross-character stash management from the rest of the game, there is a lot of stuff it does not need to load at the same time (no characters, no NPCs, monsters, quest status, game world status and so on).
Btw, as far as I understand it, a problem with saving items in D3 is the amount of different item modifiers? Each item is unique with its affixes and affix range. Whereas in WoW for example, all items are static, and each can be stored with a single unique item id.
Maybe unique items being static in D4 might help a bit with that?
I wonder if memory issues is also the reason Blizzard is so stingy with adding more affixes to items in D4
Not a tech guy but I would imagine they can assign a character string to designate the affixes. I’m dumbing it down but for example “A” - could be attack speed, “B” - could be sockets so on and so forth and add a following string to code for the value of the affixes, making it part of the item ID. So it would just be a longer character string.
I can’t say for sure but I think with enough shared space vs personal hero space (keeping max at 13 total tabs) there wouldn’t be a lot of swapping characters to move things around. Often times, the number of shared items isn’t that much.
I would also counter that the current state of the game with people restarting game fishing for GRifts, opening closing game to reset pools, cow level , etc.
In terms of D4, I wouldn’t be surprised if they added microtransactions for extra space and cosmetic rewards.
What do you mean? D4 uniques seemingly are static already.
Or do you mean that them being static is not a performance benefit?
Quite the contrary. I want item ranged to be more or less gone. That is the bad RNG in D3. 250 int on an item that can have 500 int, is always bad. Without exceptions.
Whereas different affixes on an item can always be good, for different characters.
Remove the bad RNG, increase the good/interesting RNG.
Yes, if physical memory is the issue but as far as I know, storing characters or text doesn’t take a lot of room. Or else I would imagine how much server space these forums are taking up. Why I tend to believe the issue being RAM on the client side is what I think they described as being the culprit.
Tight lipped? I mean they clearly stated what the cause of the issue is. And no, it’s not only for consoles… read again.
"That doesn’t sound like a lot at first, but it adds up very fast. The more actors active in a game (like enemies on screen AND items in your stash), the more the game will tax your system’s memory. 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. "
Console and PC memory are the issue but they have more flexibility in being able to access PC memory on the user side.
Yes, I have the necro pack and I haven’t been paying an annual subscription for it.
Perhaps because they don’t see it as a priority and I would agree with D4 coming out. I’m going to go on a wild guess and think the active player base in D3 is shrinking and not growing. It’s not going to make sense to invest time/money into it besides just maintaining it as is.
I believe they totally could have monetized cosmetic and storage space sales but they didn’t (could be due to technical reasons as they described). But regardless, at this point in the life of the game, that boat as sailed.
It’s much more heavy on the console side because its RAM is rather limited compared to PC which can have 16-32gb of it compared to consoles. That’s important in synchronization and handling the burden of rendering and decryption of assets for dungeons to be generated as requested from the server.
Other issues are listed by Meteorblade, they once said it’s the RAM, and at another it was server stability. You can never guess unless you’re working with them.
For me, it’s either they left the game as it is for reflecting it on their MAU just to re-direct resources away or they have to plan a budget for attempting such thing way ahead of its time. Perhaps both.
What? I think there’s a clear miscommunication or you’re toying with me. Big companies pay other companies annually to rent digital data space on their centers, this includes their taxes, maintenance personnel and so on.
For example; Amazon got paid by Apple to host their cloud infrastructure on their data centers, 300 million dollars annually for the upcoming year. I even gave you an example for it. You can NOT guesstimate an example of data center pricing from your own RAM activity though.
What OP’s idea is not splitting a chocolate to 12 pieces, but demanding more chocolate without paying for it when you clearly don’t have materials to make it.
I’m only able to state what they have publicly posted and that’s what I’m quoting.
The question is : Q: What are the technical limitations preventing us from adding more stash tabs?
And the response was for both consoles and PC.
Perhaps. I’m just saying they sold the necro pack for $15/$20 bucks, I can’t remember and it came with two stash spaces and two character spaces.
I’m sure selling stash tabs requires less time to develop than the necro pack and advertising it.
So I’m implying, if they could make money on the necro pack they can make money selling stash tabs at $5 to $10 each tab.
Separate question. Does these forums take up server space? Does each post adds to that space? If space is so costly, why are we allowed to make so many posts?
Most likely, they are storing items (in memory) using a struct (or class). I can only guess the sizeof each item takes.
depends if “memory boundaries” is still a thing. At one time, for performance, you’d want things having a sizeof that are powers of 2. 4 bytes, 16 bytes, or 32 bytes, etc.
In this case, it could be more performant to use 32 bytes instead of 20. (or 8 bytes instead of 5)
note: I use bytes instead of char because I use multi-byte character sets (eg UTF) which do not have a 1:1 relationship between bytes (measurements of memory & disk space) and characters in a string.
“compressing” the data can save space but is done at the cost of clock cycles. Yes, an item could be stored with 5 bytes. But, in order to use its information, you’ll need a few extra clock cycles to decode the data. Either that, or you need to reduce the number of possible items so that an item fits in the 5 bytes (instead of 20).
TL;DR In my expert opinion, it is not a memory storage/disk storage issue but instead with the performance caused by dealing with so many actors. (eg Internet I/O bottleneck synchronizing with the client)
