When we say they are expensive what we mean is that they create a lot of memory overhead. When you see another player in game you load them and their entire stash filled with all their items. This is what teams are working diligently to improve so that we can have more asap.
Basically this isn’t a storage concern it’s a performance concern.
Copied from his twitter. Have fun!
sounds like the issue is I have to load other players stashes, and the game is coded incorrectly. Not that it is expensive. They built it wrong, and don’t care to fix it.
WHY?
Isn’t that the same issue D3 had.
Why on earth would they make it so my character load another characters stash into memory.
When you see another player in game you load them and their entire stash filled with all their items.
Sounds like a developer that doesn’t know how to code properly. I wonder how MMOs are able to load other players in game without loading their entire bank and cosmetic collection? hmmmm, must be magic, I guess… 
literally makes zero sense. I never see their stash. so don’t load it for me. lol
Indeed if only…
Oh, pop down the hall and ask the WoW team how they manage those pesky big raid thingies
Or those massive open world events…
This…seems like a terrible technical decision.
Wasn’t this the same problem preventing them from expanding stash tabs in D3?
I’m no software engineer but this seems ludicrously inefficient, why on earth would we need to load peoples stashes? Inventories makes sense, but stash as well?
It’s truly embarrassing to watch. D2 modders even figured out how to do this. Indie companies did without issue. But Blizzard cannot. Nor did they have the foresight to program so this could be done – something that is so obviously needed in an ARPG.
They didn’t build it wrong. They didn’t build it at all. They used the same code they used for how it worked in D3. It’s to be expected when it’s on the same engine as D3. The problem is it doesn’t work well when you’re constantly running into new players in the game.
It really depends what you are trying to optimize for, load times vs memory, etc. Programming isn’t always one-dimensional, correct choices today might not be tomorrow. It might also be related to the engine, we’ll never know.
I am thankful for the transparency.
Wonder what else we are loading of the other players that we’re not told?
Could explain the memory usage and the burning of graphics cards.
This game is really not built well.
Makes the people advocating for single player mode make more sense
I mean, isn’t this the same problem that D3 had? Because it sure seems like it is and that the code they knew was problematic was copy/pasted to D4 or something.
No hate on copy/pasting perfectly good code, that’s a smart move that saves time as long as it’s good code. But copying…this code that’s already being a problem literally within a bit over a month of launch?..yeah
What possible reason could there be to load another player’s stash information just because they’re within spawning distance of you? It’s not a memory or optimization issue. It’s an incompetence issue.
I remember the d3 devs gave the same excuse.
How can they design a game like this and think yeah 3 tabs is plenty, now let’s make adding additional tabs the most difficult thing possible
They designed the most inventory heavy ARPG in history and didn’t noticed this might be a problem. I don’t even have the words really. But that’s becoming a lot of things.
So the issue is, console
I am not very familiar with D3, it’s not my type of game. Didn’t know this was an issue there as well, good to know.
Its the only way youd be able to trade just fyi
So basically they just admitted the game will be limited by what consoles can process.
Hmm this gives me something to think about.
Why would stashes be anywhere related to trade?
But hey, if trading is to blame for yet another issue, it only confirms that whole thing should simply be closed down.