It's possible there is a feature or features they want to implement but aren't sure if they will have dev time. Marketing is going to want to know what to advertise. With the Dragon's Hoard it didn't even exist on beta for weeks, then literally went live without lore checks or find integration. I strongly suspect that was lack of developer resources and not a specific design choice.
You think they don't want to make an announcement? I am sure that they would like to get the word out and create some buzz around the next expansion. Also why do you think that perks has anything to do with the announcement of the next expansion? I don't think that the marketing people who would make that are the ones responsible for the perks (out side of announcing them). While it is strange that they haven't announced anything yet I am sure they have their reasons.
The lack of lore checks and find integration is intended and (from a technical standpoint) what differentiates the Dragon's Hoard from other forms of storage. All items that your character owns outside of the Dragon's Hoard are loaded each time you zone, meaning the more items, the slower you zone. There's a substantial difference in zone times between fresh characters and those with completely full real estate. I imagine loading all of those items also (in aggregate for whole servers of players) puts some stress on the game's servers, though I don't know how small/large the performance impact is. In any event, that's why the game can't lore check them or find them - the technical benefit of the Dragon's Hoard over other item storage is that the game doesn't know what's in there until you load it separately by opening the window at the bank.
Thanks for the correction. I would think item data would be infinitesimal in size though? I wonder why it would cause a slowdown.
When you consider how big bags are along with how many bank slots we have in addition to how many can be placed in housing it does add up quickly and make it seem like the item storage in the past was nothing.
Sounds like the beginning of a new conspiracy thread. My guess is that it will be announced in about a week.
When you consider we used to find out in August at the Fanfairs, it seems a bit daft that less than a month till beta and we still have no official announcement. They seem to be pushing back announcements later and later. We don't need to know the ins and outs of the expansion, features, etc but it would be nice to see some of the zones and hear a bit about the lore and what we can expect.
Is there any reason to think that advertisements and announcements will in any way affect how many expansions they sell? Everyone already knows there will be an expansion out before xmas. Everyone on live servers will decide if they want it, based on info that will be public looong before it goes live anyway. Even if there was no announcement at all, no-one would be caught by surprise and somehow miss that it exist...If nothing else, then when all the explore achievements begins to spam us to death... How many missed the existence of CoV, even if they never looked at the homepage? Unless of course, this super special expansion is aimed at newbies and forgotten returnees...
Marketing is important, especially for returning players too. Gaming sites typically cover the announcement too. I don't know thier data format, but I would be shocked if the memory for player items isn't infinitesimal. That's why I'm wondering how it would slow things down. A single character model probably takes a great many times more data for example. Perhaps the re-reading each zone from several different data structures would be the reason it's a strain? I would be very surprised if the actual data took much of any storage or bandwidth. It just makes me curious is all.
Not really sure on the size either but we have gone from 10 slot bags and 8 inventory + 8 bank slots at the beginning to 40+ slot bags and 10 inventory + 24 banks + housing. A player can easily have 2000+ items these days and while it might not be massive it is still something that has to be accessed every time you zone. I would guess the code for doing that hasn't changed much from when you would only have couple hundred.
If it was my task to optimize EQ1, I would nerf the find-feature slightly, and use "dragon's hoard"-tech for the bank and storage-crate-contents. Not sure when housing layout is loaded/cached? or if dragon's hoard tech for all housing would mess up trophies...? But they would rather turn dragon's hoard into a marketplace money-grab.
it is not just the size of the item data but the efficiency in querying it from the database that is at play here, (I don't know there DB structure at all) but that could be as much a factor if not more if there are wait /que times for the query. --- as for the new xpac, I put my money on news By end of day Wednesday
What is everyone so freaked out about. I don't get it lol. Take off the tinfoil hats and get out of moms basement and go outside and do something!
It's dark out there! There maybe gouls and ghosts..... and don't forget the witches.......bedtime soon.
