Thread: Number of Bags

There will still only be a max number of 5 bags? I would gladly pay real world money or these turbine points for more than 5 bags. Please consider this. Thanks!

As far as we know right now yes, only 5 bags total. We don't know for certain, though, what they will have in the item shop - that would make for a nice account upgrade option [I would pay TP for it, just so I can be even more of a packrat]

I think the 5 bag limit is something in the base code of them game that was I believe very difficult to change (can't find reference). It does seem like we could get more shared storage and more vault space also *crosses finger*

Originally Posted by SpankyPenzaanz

I think the 5 bag limit is something in the base code of them game that was I believe very difficult to change (can't find reference). It does seem like we could get more shared storage and more vault space also *crosses finger*

Well the shared storage is confirmed already I think, up to a max of 50 slots (in 10 slot increments - so those of us w/ shared storage now would be able to buy 30 more)

Originally Posted by SpankyPenzaanz

I think the 5 bag limit is something in the base code of them game that was I believe very difficult to change (can't find reference). It does seem like we could get more shared storage and more vault space also *crosses finger*

Yes, you will be able to buy additional shared storage, and there is also a cosmetic item wardrobe that will hold 20 items (it does a couple of other nifty things, but we'll spill the beans on that later this summer. )

Bags are still maxed at 5, for now.

Meghan

And a 20 slot wardrobe so you can move that stuff out of your vault space and save it for things that stack. Looks like you can purchase more than 20 for the players who need an outfit for EVERY occasion.

EDIT -Patience beat me to it, she's EVERYWHERE this weekend !!

Originally Posted by Patience

Yes, you will be able to buy additional shared storage, and there is also a cosmetic item wardrobe that will hold 20 items (it does a couple of other nifty things, but we'll spill the beans on that later this summer. )

Bags are still maxed at 5, for now.

Meghan

There is always hope when someone says "For now"

...

Wait a sec... Other nifty things?! Spill the beans!!! Nao! - I guess I am going to be manically checking my email in box for the next few weeks, cause I know I gotta be getting a beta invite... *sniffle* I know it...

Originally Posted by Patience

Yes, you will be able to buy additional shared storage, and there is also a cosmetic item wardrobe that will hold 20 items (it does a couple of other nifty things, but we'll spill the beans on that later this summer. )

Bags are still maxed at 5, for now.

Meghan

Just kick the can over now with an accidental posting of a spreadsheet and say oops

Originally Posted by Patience

Yes, you will be able to buy additional shared storage, and there is also a cosmetic item wardrobe that will hold 20 items (it does a couple of other nifty things, but we'll spill the beans on that later this summer. )

Bags are still maxed at 5, for now.

Meghan

"For Now", I'll take that as a maybe sometime then. Please do think about it, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would love it! Thanks so much for the responses. The other storage will help for sure but I almost always have two bags full and the other three fill up fast when questing and deeding and then you have to stop and empty them. The nerve! Thanks again!

Originally Posted by Patience

Yes, you will be able to buy additional shared storage, and there is also a cosmetic item wardrobe that will hold 20 items (it does a couple of other nifty things, but we'll spill the beans on that later this summer. )

Bags are still maxed at 5, for now.

Meghan

(sad panda) on the bags maxed at 5.

Oh well, I am looking forward to the extra shared storage and the wardrobe. Add that we can add more slots to the wardrobe also, just like the shared storage. (at least that is what the chart says). My assumption is that it will be a max of 50 also. I hope the wardrobe is accessible as part of the UI and not at a Vault or house though.

Originally Posted by carlosjuero

There is always hope when someone says "For now"

or dread... (there are no current plans for lotro to go F2P, for now...)

/sorry, had to play devil's advocate
//still on the fence, very hopeful, doing a wait and see...for now...

Originally Posted by Patience

Yes, you will be able to buy additional shared storage, and there is also a cosmetic item wardrobe that will hold 20 items (it does a couple of other nifty things, but we'll spill the beans on that later this summer. )

Bags are still maxed at 5, for now.

Meghan

do any of those other nifty things include Narnia?

Originally Posted by Patience

Yes, you will be able to buy additional shared storage, and there is also a cosmetic item wardrobe that will hold 20 items (it does a couple of other nifty things, but we'll spill the beans on that later this summer. )

Bags are still maxed at 5, for now.

Meghan

I'll continue to struggle along with 5 bags.

Very interesting that the wardrobe will have more features than just storage... hmmm. maybe a "dye all" one click so you can make everything in there turquoise at once. heh.

/signed

More bags please!

Love the idea of more Shared Storage space (will definitely be pumping that baby up to 50 - love it!).

Originally Posted by Patience

cosmetic item wardrobe that will hold 20 items

Can you be a bit more specific on how "cosmetic item wardrobe" works.

Meaning will it work more like the cosmetic tabs where it saves JUST the looks (not the stats of an item) but with the ability to do 20 items instead of 2 head, 2 chests, etc.

Or will it work like a normal storage device almost like an "armour rack" where I can put my hele set, rift set, etc.

Thank you.

Originally Posted by Patience

Yes, you will be able to buy additional shared storage, and there is also a cosmetic item wardrobe that will hold 20 items (it does a couple of other nifty things, but we'll spill the beans on that later this summer. )

Bags are still maxed at 5, for now.

Meghan

I HOPE you meant to say....

Bags are still maxed at 5, FOR NOW!

Any chance of a store-purchasable rep item bag? I'd happily dump 350 points to clear up the piles of random leaves, tokens, mathoms, badges, and assorted other junk into a single inventory slot. You could sell different sizes of bags that hold a different number of item types, varying in price.

My understanding of the wardrobe is it is like a 20 slot bank vault where you can actually store the item instead of using space in your vault or inventory bags.

Or will it work like a normal storage device almost like an "armour rack" where I can put my hele set, rift set, etc.

My question is similar; this says "cosmetic items", so does that mean it works exclusively for items marked "outfit" and the like, or will we be able to stuff old armour sets in it as well? 80% of my burglar's bank is devoted to armour sets because they're the best looking ones in the game.

Originally Posted by Patience

Yes, you will be able to buy additional shared storage, and there is also a cosmetic item wardrobe that will hold 20 items (it does a couple of other nifty things, but we'll spill the beans on that later this summer. )

Bags are still maxed at 5, for now.

Meghan

When I originally saw this, I was thinking that we'd get 20 complete cosmetic slots where each slot was a complete set of garments. If it means 20 slots like inventory slots, then that is good for 3 armor sets.

I will admit, I like my original interpretation better!

I really like the idea of 20 wardrobe slots.

Too bad the bags are still maxed at 5 though. They just need to see if they can possibly make more stuff stack to higher numbers as they have done before, or find an alternate way of fixing it.

Originally Posted by Talas

"For Now", I'll take that as a maybe sometime then. Please do think about it, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would love it!

Everyone would obviously love this. However, they haven't raised it in 3+ years (despite dozens of threads asking for it) because it has significant performance and memory issues for them. I'll spare everyone the long explanation this time, but they keep on doing much more difficult things to help us streamline our inventories instead of just giving just more bags because the former is feasible, and the latter isn't.

Two years ago, I was told by a Turbine developer that they do indeed have a bit of "headroom" in terms of what personal storage they could provide, giving themselves the opportunity to give us just a bit more at some point during the life of the game. But that would be it. And given that they've been increasing character memory footprints in the two years since he told me that (e.g. skirmish data, quest item data, keyrings, mounts, etc)... I'm not even sure if what he told me is accurate anymore.

Adding things like shared storage, house storage, vault storage, and "wardrobe storage" are in a different category than personal storage. They're just rows in a database somewhere, aren't accessed almost continuously, and don't take up server memory. So it's far more feasible for them to add more of that than it is to add more bag space.

Khafar

Originally Posted by Talas

There will still only be a max number of 5 bags? I would gladly pay real world money or these turbine points for more than 5 bags. Please consider this. Thanks!

I do not see this ever happening due to server memory constraints. Unlike some other game publishers, Turbine seems to maximum size character inventory at launch for level 1 characters. Leaves it that way for the life of the game.

Take their first game - Asheron's Call which launched in 1999. The only difference between a starting level 1 character with the basic inventory and a maximum inventory character is one bag of 24 slots. Which is only available to high level characters because you have to buy it with 4 billion experience points (about what it takes to get from level 1 to level 126). That was the situation at the 9 year mark after live launch. It is possible Turbine added a little bit more since then.

It is unfortunate that their game architecture limits the memory footprint including inventory for a character. That is such a core feature of this game. Turbine is never going to change for us. Assuming Turbine is willing to give up the benefits of their current architecture.

Originally Posted by Yula_the_Mighty

I do not see this ever happening due to server memory constraints. Unlike some other game publishers, Turbine seems to maximum size character inventory at launch for level 1 characters. Leaves it that way for the life of the game.

Take their first game - Asheron's Call which launched in 1999. The only difference between a starting level 1 character with the basic inventory and a maximum inventory character is one bag of 24 slots. Which is only available to high level characters because you have to buy it with 4 billion experience points (about what it takes to get from level 1 to level 126). That was the situation at the 9 year mark after live launch. It is possible Turbine added a little bit more since then.

It is unfortunate that their game architecture limits the memory footprint including inventory for a character. That is such a core feature of this game. Turbine is never going to change for us. Assuming Turbine is willing to give up the benefits of their current architecture.

Was it architected that way or simply optimized that way? I would honestly be surprised if they hard-coded and then left it there forever....unless they've actually stated this somewhere and I missed it.....

My guess is that they played around with this number and found that 5 gave the 'most bang for the buck', so to speak. Computers get faster and memory gets larger as we go, along with network bandwidth, etc. They way I see it, Turbine has to be careful how they say these types of things so that no promises are made or implied. I'd gladly pay real money for some extra inventory bags

Originally Posted by Talas

"For Now", I'll take that as a maybe sometime then. Please do think about it, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would love it! Thanks so much for the responses. The other storage will help for sure but I almost always have two bags full and the other three fill up fast when questing and deeding and then you have to stop and empty them. The nerve! Thanks again!

lol, that must be very true for most of us. Two ideas:
1. If the number of bag is hard to change, how about the space of each bag?
2. How about resouce/consumable bag?

Originally Posted by Harlinator

Was it architected that way

Yes, it has to do with how the game is architected. My understanding is that they cache player inventories in server memory to help with performance: inventories are accessed incessantly, and a database transaction for each of those accesses would be brutal. This also allows them to batch up changes to inventories, writing them out in bulk every few minutes (instead of every single time someone loots something). This means server memory footprint is directly correlated with A) number of players logged in, and B) the number of objects in personal inventories. With F2P, A) is going to get larger, so they'll be pushing their limits... I don't expect to see an increase in B).

That's part of it. The other part is due to the way the game world works. Each world is actually about 20 servers in a cluster, and the servers can dynamically load-balance by handling more or fewer instances, more or fewer landblocks in an open terrain, etc. You can actually be transferred from one subserver in the cluster to another one simply running across the terrain (as well as entering/exiting a building or instance). Each time that happens, they need to persist any pending changes in your memory-based inventory to their database and then reload it into the new subserver's memory. The time that takes is a function of inventory size, and if the landscape handoffs are going to be seamless, they have to meet certain performance criteria (so again, inventories cannot be too large).

Khafar

Originally Posted by Harlinator

Was it architected that way or simply optimized that way? I would honestly be surprised if they hard-coded and then left it there forever....unless they've actually stated this somewhere and I missed it.....

As Khafar stated is architecture decision. Followed by assigning of the amount of memory to each character. Testing the performance of the machines that make a cluster. The goal to make sure they can support their target number of players on a shard. Plus make sure the game play for you and I is acceptable.

You move around enough in the landscape you will experience the down side of the seamless hand over of your character. I periodically have the issue on a landscape stable ride where I hit the border between two machine. I will freeze. I will watch my character for 30 seconds. Horse running in place. Waiting for the receiving machine to take me off the queue. Accept the hand off.

You will see a machine sometimes over load. Everybody or a lot of people in a group will be frozen. This sucks if you are in Moors raid. You can watch your character being killed. Or you raid members being killed there is nothing you can do. I see this sometimes in instances. The server may freeze all the characters. Let the mobs beat on your group. Never seems to freeze the mobs though. They got priority access to server resources.

The bigger each character's memory footprint the more likely you will encounter freeze lag. Or a significant stutter because the hand off can not be made quickly.

Every game has this kind of issue in one fashion or another. I can remember playing EverQuest. I got in an area where right at a zone boundary. I kept zoning. What a pain. One loading screen after another.

Eve Online will shut down gates. Not let you dock. Not let you undock. You stuck for 10, 20, 120 minutes unable to do anything or what you want.

Originally Posted by nikito

Can you be a bit more specific on how "cosmetic item wardrobe" works.

Meaning will it work more like the cosmetic tabs where it saves JUST the looks (not the stats of an item) but with the ability to do 20 items instead of 2 head, 2 chests, etc.

Or will it work like a normal storage device almost like an "armour rack" where I can put my hele set, rift set, etc.

Thank you.

This is one of my big questions about the cosmetic item wardrobe. While it seems logical it would be for actual cosmetic items only, it would be nice to be able to convert actual items to cosmetic. Since we kind of do that now (when we put an item in a cosmetic slot), I'm hopeful that the wardrobe will allow older armour sets and such to be placed in them. I wouldn't even care if that meant all stats were stripped and they literally did become cosmtic only, since most of what I'd want to store would be older sets I wouldn't want to wear for stats anyways.

The word from on high last year was that adding more basic personal bag space increases load on the game exponentially. See, whenever you "meet" (walk past) someone, the game swaps all of your public information and that includes what's in your bags. Apparently, this is hard coded in and would be extremely difficult to change (basically an engine change). So, more personal bag space will likely never again be offered.

More shared space, though, can only be accessed from an NPC. Like your house, its contents are never loaded by anyone else, so lag is only increased geometrically (instead of exponentially).

So, shared storage = x*y, personal storage is x^y. Apparently, the same reasoning still applies.

Originally Posted by Banaticus

See, whenever you "meet" (walk past) someone, the game swaps all of your public information and that includes what's in your bags.

I don't think so - there's simply no reason for it to do that. Nobody but you can even inspect what's in your inventory... just what you have equipped (and only if you aren't in Anonymous mode).

But caching the objects in your inventory in server memory is a big enough issue if your goal is to have tons more bag space. That's a limited resource, and can have severe impacts on server performance if it gets into swapping...

Khafar

Originally Posted by Patience

Yes, you will be able to buy additional shared storage, and there is also a cosmetic item wardrobe that will hold 20 items (it does a couple of other nifty things, but we'll spill the beans on that later this summer. )

Bags are still maxed at 5, for now.

Meghan

How about more house chests or bigger house chests? The amount of space they have now is a joke.