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Additional Character Slots?

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
Will we be seeing additional character slots added to the C-Store anytime soon? I tend to be an Alt-aholic and this game offers a great deal to feed that need. The 3 character slots I have now will never be enough.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Been wondering this myself, as I've filled the three and want more.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    They are suppossed to be coming with expansion packs, and in teh cryptic store. They wont just give them out to everyone, because the information for just one character is enormous in their database. It's purely a monetary reason. Nothing else.

    if you care to search the dev tracker, you will see it explained.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    tedgp123 wrote: »
    They are suppossed to be coming with expansion packs, and in teh cryptic store. They wont just give them out to everyone, because the information for just one character is enormous in their database. It's purely a monetary reason. Nothing else.

    if you care to search the dev tracker, you will see it explained.

    A) We're asking to buy them, not get free ones.

    B)The "one character is wtfenormous in our database" excuse is grade-A ********. I don't really care if they're charging because they want the money, but they could at least not lie about it.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    I also wish to buy one. And the database explanation is perfectly valid.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    mrtauntaun wrote: »
    And the database explanation is perfectly valid.

    It's really not. It's almost comically not.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    mrtauntaun wrote: »
    I also wish to buy one. And the database explanation is perfectly valid.

    I've five slots (lifetime), and I'll buy more.

    But the database explanation is, frankly, rubbish. Champions Online offers (umm, been too long since I logged on to that) five slots straight off, with more for sale in the C-store. Which is still stingy. WoW offers a max of 10 per server, and a total of 50 per account. Yes, fifty. There will be less info stored per character, but even so...
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    I think a low limit at this stage makes sense. Helps balance the load whilst all the kinks are still worked out (Just because its not beta doesnt mean there arent kinks.... MMO's have got to be on the same level of complexity as your average starship... How many episodes have been focused on faults on the shakedown cruse?)

    But, i cant understand why its 2 per race... Surely 3 would have been the magic number?
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    NinetyNine wrote:
    It's really not. It's almost comically not.

    What's comical is how many database 'experts' there are around here.

    Cryptic's database explanation *is* valid.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Not really. Modern MMOs don't delete character data on canceled accounts. That means that, a few months in, they will have tons of data being stored in the system that is just there on the potential of someone coming back. If they were that worried about space, they could start pruning that mostly useless data, rather than slapping restrictions on paying customers.

    Yes, STO takes more space for character storage than most other MMOs. The cost increase isn't crippling, however, or they wouldn't be willing to store all that info just on the chance that someone might come back months down the line. Cryptic is just unwilling to eat the extra cost for good customer relations, and would rather charge the consumer.

    Really wish companies would just be honest about this sort of thing.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    NinetyNine wrote:
    It's really not. It's almost comically not.

    It really is. Just because you don't like the answer doesn't make it any less true. I am a database administrator, and my databases contain tens of millilons of records. I count my SAN allocation in Terabytes (plural). Seriously, just think about the data:

    You character is one record. That table needs to join to countless others in one to many relationships. Your character history in another table will have countless entries. Your inventory will be another join with multiple entries. Multiple ships will have different entries. Your skills will be another subtable. Your bridge officers will be yet another table, who will then have their own subrecords for their inventory and skils. It goes on and on. If I had to hazard a guess, you would need this statement to view all your data, and it would return hundreds or thousands of rows, and that doesn't even take into account bridge officers:
    SELECT * FROM charactertable INNER JOIN charhistorytable ON charactertable.charid = charhistorytable.charid INNER JOIN charinventory ON charactertable.charid = charinventory.charid INNER JOIN charstarships ON charactertable.charid = charstarships.charid WHERE charactertable.charid = 'Your Character'
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Not really. Modern MMOs don't delete character data on canceled accounts. That means that, a few months in, they will have tons of data being stored in the system that is just there on the potential of someone coming back. If they were that worried about space, they could start pruning that mostly useless data, rather than slapping restrictions on paying customers.

    Yes, STO takes more space for character storage than most other MMOs. The cost increase isn't crippling, however, or they wouldn't be willing to store all that info just on the chance that someone might come back months down the line. Cryptic is just unwilling to eat the extra cost for good customer relations, and would rather charge the consumer.

    Really wish companies would just be honest about this sort of thing.

    If its the choice between more character slots, or more content, I'll take more content in the server space thanks....
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    ZenBrillig wrote:
    What's comical is how many database 'experts' there are around here.

    Cryptic's database explanation *is* valid.

    Using a simple example:

    If they stored the dna for each character, and that dna was equal to actual human dna, they could fit roughly 333 characters on a terabyte of storage. That would be around $3 per character.

    Human DNA is 3 billion base pairs long.

    The characters they store are not actually that long. They're more in the few hundred, possibly few thousand, fields of data range. Even if we're stupidly generous and assume they're storing 300,000 bytes of data, it would be on the order of something like .0002 cents cost per character stored. Obviously there's other overhead involved for a company to install storage, maintain it, etc, but saying "database storage space is muy expensivo" is pretty weak.

    Like I said, I don't mind paying for the slots, but at least don't lie about it.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    mrtauntaun wrote: »
    It really is. Just because you don't like the answer doesn't make it any less true. I am a database administrator, and my databases contain tens of millilons of records. I count my SAN allocation in Terabytes (plural). Seriously, just think about the data:

    You character is one record. That table needs to join to countless others in one to many relationships. Your character history in another table will have countless entries. Your inventory will be another join with multiple entries. Multiple ships will have different entries. Your skills will be another subtable. Your bridge officers will be yet another table, who will then have their own subrecords for their inventory and skils. It goes on and on. If I had to hazard a guess, you would need this statement to view all your data, and it would return hundreds or thousands of rows, and that doesn't even take into account bridge officers:

    Ok, we have similar jobs, with my stuff being probably around 3/4 that size in records. And storage capacity is, literally, on the bottom of my list of things to worry about. Your entire second paragraph is about efficiency, so I'm not sure what to make of that. Properly indexed queries would work at the same speed regardless of if I have 3 character slots or 6, since they're looking for specific characters.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    NinetyNine wrote:
    Using a simple example:

    If they stored the dna for each character, and that dna was equal to actual human dna, they could fit roughly 333 characters on a terabyte of storage. That would be around $3 per character.

    Human DNA is 3 billion base pairs long.

    The characters they store are not actually that long. They're more in the few hundred, possibly few thousand, fields of data range. Even if we're stupidly generous and assume they're storing 300,000 bytes of data, it would be on the order of something like .0002 cents cost per character stored. Obviously there's other overhead involved for a company to install storage, maintain it, etc, but saying "database storage space is muy expensivo" is pretty weak.

    Like I said, I don't mind paying for the slots, but at least don't lie about it.

    This is flawed, linear thinking. It is not how a relational database works.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    NinetyNine wrote:
    Using a simple example:

    If they stored the dna for each character, and that dna was equal to actual human dna, they could fit roughly 333 characters on a terabyte of storage. That would be around $3 per character.

    Human DNA is 3 billion base pairs long.

    The characters they store are not actually that long. They're more in the few hundred, possibly few thousand, fields of data range. Even if we're stupidly generous and assume they're storing 300,000 bytes of data, it would be on the order of something like .0002 cents cost per character stored. Obviously there's other overhead involved for a company to install storage, maintain it, etc, but saying "database storage space is muy expensivo" is pretty weak.

    Like I said, I don't mind paying for the slots, but at least don't lie about it.

    It's clear you know nothing about databases or operations in general. Yes, disk space is cheap. But a database is so much more than disk space. If you're happy to have a character that you can never access because the DB is overloaded, then sure, we can give it to you for cheap.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    ZenBrillig wrote:
    It's clear you know nothing about databases or operations in general. Yes, disk space is cheap. But a database is so much more than disk space. If you're happy to have a character that you can never access because the DB is overloaded, then sure, we can give it to you for cheap.

    I'm really curious as to how you think increasing the character count by even 10 would somehow overload a database, even if everyone on earth was playing the game. One character being used at a time=same process regardless of how many are stored. I can update/retrieve/insert individual records in a table that has millions of records with the same performance as if it had hundreds, or even one.

    I'm also getting curious if you're basing your assumptions off of using Access or something where size gives actual performance hits.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    mrtauntaun wrote: »
    This is flawed, linear thinking. It is not how a relational database works.

    Thanks, but I'm just discussing raw disk space there.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Hard drives are cheap, yes. Managed networked storage in a data center with backups, failover, etc., though - not really all that cheap.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Vexiom wrote:
    Hard drives are cheap, yes. Managed networked storage in a data center with backups, failover, etc., though - not really all that cheap.

    Sigh.

    Explain how having the system store an extra character per account, or 5, or 500, increases the overhead of backups, redundant systems, or anything else.

    I'm really hoping for something along the lines of "they have to hire more people to carry the backup drives because the extra data makes them heavier" here, but go ahead with whatever you're thinking.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Bet you all 5 credits that they'll do time-based rewards, which I'm all for. It's a staple of some MMos now.
    • 3 months of paid subscription: free respec for all characters.
    • 6 months: +1 character slot.
    • 9 months: 10 free costume or ship redesigns on your account.
    • 12 months: unlock a "Star Trek: Motion Picture" uniform and +1 character slot.
    • 15 months: unlock "The Cage" style uniforms.
    • 18 months: +1 character slot.
    • 21 months: unlock "Enterprise" style uniforms.
    • 24 months: unlock any unowned uniform type OR unowned race type of your faction.

    Something like that in C store, all tied to billing. For lifetimers, I suppose it would be just automatic.

    Nothing wrong with tying it to rewards for sticking with the game.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    NinetyNine wrote:
    I'm really hoping for something along the lines of "they have to hire more people to carry the backup drives because the extra data makes them heavier" here, but go ahead with whatever you're thinking.

    The technical answer is actually very long and involved and fairly high end from a technical perspective; what he gave you is just a fraction of it. Without dumbing it down using imprecise analogies that can be used to get across the surface-level concepts would take a fair bit of explaining.

    Ultra short version -- yes, disk space and raw storage are in general cheap. Quality backups are not--the storage is cheap, the mechanics/systems are not, so backup shouldn't be taken as a given to be "cheap" ever, unless your company is stupid. The real cost is the actual DB management/maintenance and systems to process it. The larger a database gets--again, depends on the DB system itself and a literal host of factors we can't account for without knowing the inner guts and nasty bits of the Cryptic infrastructure--the more CPU overhead and system load at a minimum is required to process things.

    I'm sure someone reading that will say something like, "But look at how fast Google, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter is, and they're constantly reading/writing to their DBs, and Warcraft gives us a MILLION character slots."

    Yep. And each of those companies alone probably makes more in a quarter in just capital investments--not even sales, just investments--than Cryptic will make total in the next two years.



    It's a really complex answer that anyone but a Cryptic dev is wholly unqualified to answer.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    Zilag wrote:
    The technical answer is actually very long and involved and fairly high end from a technical perspective; what he gave you is just a fraction of it. Without dumbing it down using imprecise analogies that can be used to get across the surface-level concepts would take a fair bit of explaining.

    Ultra short version -- yes, disk space and raw storage are in general cheap. Quality backups are not--the storage is cheap, the mechanics/systems are not, so backup shouldn't be taken as a given to be "cheap" ever, unless your company is stupid. The real cost is the actual DB management/maintenance and systems to process it. The larger a database gets--again, depends on the DB system itself and a literal host of factors we can't account for without knowing the inner guts and nasty bits of the Cryptic infrastructure--the more CPU overhead and system load at a minimum is required to process things.

    I'm sure someone reading that will say something like, "But look at how fast Google, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter is, and they're constantly reading/writing to their DBs, and Warcraft gives us a MILLION character slots."

    Yep. And each of those companies alone probably makes more in a quarter in just capital investments--not even sales, just investments--than Cryptic will make total in the next two years.



    It's a really complex answer that anyone but a Cryptic dev is wholly unqualified to answer.


    You lost me with your being vague. There is no, zero, none, nicht, cpu usage on an unaccessed record. I speak from not only logic, but experience. If I have to make a global change to a table, the size of the table has an impact. For daily operations on a properly structured, properly indexed database, it doesn't matter if it has one record or five million. That applies to both performance and system load. The only way that system load increases is if I have more transactions, not more records. However, since one account can only play one character at a time, more transactions is literally impossible in regards to the character slot issue. Consequently, the actual cost to Cryptic for opening a slot is about as close to free as possible.

    Once again, I don't care if they want to charge. I care about the excuse to do so.

    Also, for the record Blizzard re-invests pretty much squat into warcraft. It has huge profit margine, with very little put back in.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    NinetyNine wrote:
    Sigh.

    Explain how having the system store an extra character per account, or 5, or 500, increases the overhead of backups, redundant systems, or anything else.

    I'm really hoping for something along the lines of "they have to hire more people to carry the backup drives because the extra data makes them heavier" here, but go ahead with whatever you're thinking.

    Again, you have no idea how this works. The size of a relational database can take up terabytes of space. It's not one character. It's that character and every subrecord ever created for that character. That is an immense amount of data.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    NinetyNine wrote:
    You lost me with your being vague. There is no, zero, none, nicht, cpu usage on an unaccessed record. I speak from not only logic, but experience. If I have to make a global change to a table, the size of the table has an impact. For daily operations on a properly structured, properly indexed database, it doesn't matter if it has one record or five million. That applies to both performance and system load. The only way that system load increases is if I have more transactions, not more records. However, since one account can only play one character at a time, more transactions is literally impossible in regards to the character slot issue. Consequently, the actual cost to Cryptic for opening a slot is about as close to free as possible.

    Once again, I don't care if they want to charge. I care about the excuse to do so.

    Also, for the record Blizzard re-invests pretty much squat into warcraft. It has huge profit margine, with very little put back in.

    Once again, linear thinking. We're not talking about one table. We're taking about dozens of tables each with multiple records with one to many relationships. You're thinking one to one in a single, controlled instance. Databases don't work that way. Not even close.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    NinetyNine wrote:
    A) We're asking to buy them, not get free ones.

    B)The "one character is wtfenormous in our database" excuse is grade-A ********. I don't really care if they're charging because they want the money, but they could at least not lie about it.

    really. You want to go with that? ok.

    Take 1 character. Now think of the ship. And every Bo you can possibly get. The ship, and BO's count as a full unique character in terms of database size and usage. So where you think its very tiny, just like wow, in reality, you are around 8-9 "characters" attached to one slot.

    Starting to understand now? Oh wait, you still think its a conspirarcy.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    tedgp123 wrote: »

    really. You want to go with that? ok.

    Take 1 character. Now think of the ship. And every Bo you can possibly get. The ship, and BO's count as a full unique character in terms of database size and usage. So where you think its very tiny, just like wow, in reality, you are around 8-9 "characters" attached to one slot.

    Starting to understand now? Oh wait, you still think its a conspirarcy.

    This is spot on. Now, to take that down to another tier, think of each weapon you have. That links to yet another table. Each skill links to a skill in a skills table. And on, and on, and on.

    And on.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    mrtauntaun wrote: »
    Again, you have no idea how this works. The size of a relational database can take up terabytes of space. It's not one character. It's that character and every subrecord ever created for that character. That is an immense amount of data.

    And we come full circle to the cost of storage. You guys aren't giving up easily.


    Without knowing exactly how much space each record per table takes, it's hard to argue this much more. However, let's assume you're correct and it costs... I don't know, $2.50 per character in storage. That's literally their justification as well as yours, right? It costs money to store more characters. Let's even drop it to a buck a character even though that works against my next point.

    There were one million copies sold, allegedly.3 characters per account. Now, how much are you claiming they're spending on storage?

    I can already tell you that there is no way they spent 3 million dollars on storage. I'm psychic like that.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    tedgp123 wrote: »

    really. You want to go with that? ok.

    Take 1 character. Now think of the ship. And every Bo you can possibly get. The ship, and BO's count as a full unique character in terms of database size and usage. So where you think its very tiny, just like wow, in reality, you are around 8-9 "characters" attached to one slot.

    Starting to understand now? Oh wait, you still think its a conspirarcy.

    Not impossible. Look at Guild Wars if you want to get the closest thing to BO's and such in an instanced game like STO.

    If you own all 4 GW's you have access on each character 22 (yes, 22 different fully customizable heroes) and the number of slots for owning those games before buying any is 8. So 8 toons that can have 22 heroes (same as BO's).

    So it's far from impossible to do. It's just in the way it's being handled that Cryptic may need to tweak stuff first.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    tedgp123 wrote: »

    really. You want to go with that? ok.

    Take 1 character. Now think of the ship. And every Bo you can possibly get. The ship, and BO's count as a full unique character in terms of database size and usage. So where you think its very tiny, just like wow, in reality, you are around 8-9 "characters" attached to one slot.

    Starting to understand now? Oh wait, you still think its a conspirarcy.

    No, I know it's a convenient excuse. Thinking things are conspiracies are things I reserve for my missing pre-order items.

    Edit: Some data that I just tested, because many of you are annoying in a general sense. A 675,000 row table with 48 columns, with a number of 30+ character fields and a crapload of numeric fields, takes just over 17MB of space uncompressed. That's 58 of those tables per gigabyte, or 58,000 per terrabyte.

    If the cost for a terrabyte of storage is $1000(figuring crazy high *because* it works against my argument in hopes that at least one of you will understand why these numbers can't possibly equal what they're claiming), then the storage cost per row is .017 cents. And that's assuming that every character uses 48 fields per row... across 58,000 tables.

    So, yeah. The nice MMO company would never lie to you. The character slot sales are not gravy for the company, they're a real cost burden... Data is expensive n' TRIBBLE.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2010
    NinetyNine wrote:
    And we come full circle to the cost of storage. You guys aren't giving up easily.


    Without knowing exactly how much space each record per table takes, it's hard to argue this much more. However, let's assume you're correct and it costs... I don't know, $2.50 per character in storage. That's literally their justification as well as yours, right? It costs money to store more characters. Let's even drop it to a buck a character even though that works against my next point.

    There were one million copies sold, allegedly.3 characters per account. Now, how much are you claiming they're spending on storage?

    I can already tell you that there is no way they spent 3 million dollars on storage. I'm psychic like that.

    Database storage is not static. It is not a hard drive. You need the database. You need a mirrored backup. You have to cluster it. I will sum it up in one word for you: EXPONENTIAL. It does grow a byte at a time. One record spawns countless others. It grows in leaps and bounds. If you still don't get it, well, those tin foil hats can chafe. So be careful.
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