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Ship Slot Limitations
kthlazsna
Member Posts: 6 Arc User
Good Day,
I'd like to raise awareness and get some feedback of players who are playing for a while and hopefully get some Cryptic/Perfect World response as well. Since T5U, T6, Lobi, Fleet and Starship Mastery Unlocks happened, if you do like to collect ships as I do, do upgrades and work on your ships mastery, you must be having a hard time to keep up with your free slots. I have already hit the ship slots maximum what I can buy and I'm getting worried what will I do next if I want 1 more ship. I'm not a player who is actively maintaining several characters and it would be quite harsh if the only option is to dismiss some C-Store ship, loosing the training, fleet modules, lobi, ec, dil etc. I know that it is much more complex, but in the x64-bit world, I would be surprised if there isn't a space somewhere for 8-bit slot variable to give us 255 slots
. Would anybody else have something to say on this topic ?
Kthlazsna
I'd like to raise awareness and get some feedback of players who are playing for a while and hopefully get some Cryptic/Perfect World response as well. Since T5U, T6, Lobi, Fleet and Starship Mastery Unlocks happened, if you do like to collect ships as I do, do upgrades and work on your ships mastery, you must be having a hard time to keep up with your free slots. I have already hit the ship slots maximum what I can buy and I'm getting worried what will I do next if I want 1 more ship. I'm not a player who is actively maintaining several characters and it would be quite harsh if the only option is to dismiss some C-Store ship, loosing the training, fleet modules, lobi, ec, dil etc. I know that it is much more complex, but in the x64-bit world, I would be surprised if there isn't a space somewhere for 8-bit slot variable to give us 255 slots
. Would anybody else have something to say on this topic ?Kthlazsna
Post edited by kthlazsna on
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Increasing the maximum would please many of us and allow cryptic to sell more unlocks.
I would love if they just made it where each time you buy a ship or get awarded a ship it unlocks a new slot, but that wouldnt happen because then they wouldnt get money, So just make it unlimited slots or at least make it as many ships are available slots. and just keep selling them on the c store.
I NEED MORE SLOTS!!
thank you for tip. I've done the cleanup, before this post (still loosing experience on the ship if I dismiss/free reclaim as I understand). T5 and most of them fleet or up is what I have there. I have already dismissed couple what I have bought before and can't get a fleet version of it like Vulcan D'Kyr (unfortunately) and I'm thinking to dismiss Odyssey (which is non-free upgrade), but I do collect ships and that is why I do like in the game. DPS is important, but not as a first priority for me. Startrek spirit is what I like.
Kthlazsna
I also did log a support ticket for this and support suggestion is to post it on forums as they are being monitored by Moderators and QA's. Hopefully it would be escalated internally as well as with the global visibility.
Kthlazsna
"You don't have to do something again and again and again repetitive that doesn't have much challange, that's just a general good gameplay thing."
We had this system pre-F2P. You got a ship and a slot came with it. Many of us got as many ships as we could prior to the change and then deleted them afterwards. Same went for doff/boff slots.
You would think, especially with c-store ships, they would just give us one. As it stands, they could at least remove the artificial slot cap at this point.
My KDF main has *2* actual Klingon ships left out of all the lobi/event ships. I've already gone through all my alts and removed any ship that can't be upgraded and on someof those alts, Im even beginning to remove rarely used c-store ships which is sad. My Fed ship roster went from looking like Utopia Planetia, full of Starfleet ships to something that looks more like a hodgepodge from Babylon 5.
They're gambling that if a player wants a new ship and they don't have enough slots that they will either dismiss a ship, or ideally.. purchase more slots.
What I believe it does more often times then not, is discourage the purchase of the additional ship. Ultimately, such a limited amount of ships hinders the ability to sell ships. It's an outdated 'feature' that should be re-examined.
The max was increased not long ago. The increase was too small, however.
Mainly it's an issue with cost of data storage but you might also suffer some performance hits at a certain point off of it.
Data retrieval in this game was designed around the idea that they could afford for it to cost them money in terms of processing power that would be covered by sub fees. Basically, there's a not insignificant recurring expense directly attributable to an active player having more ships and BOs as I understand it, in terms of needed increased server performance. Over time, they lose money by giving you more slots. That money was something they planned for our sub fees to cover and even then with a smaller cap on these things.
They would need to rework how data is stored.
Basically, though, without ship collecting and all the storage/retrieval we currently use, they could get by with a cheaper server plan. What we have raises the cost of the servers they use and with enough ship/BO/costume slots/etc., they could end up bleeding money on players.
Even in a typical MMO, I've heard the server/connection/equipment expense per player is around $2 a month and I get the impression it's higher here.
If we all bought maxed slots on everything and stopped buying, it might give them a really good quarterly report and then they'd find themselves bleeding money to support us in terms of the expenses we'd generate for them.
Allright, that is fair, but I think that you can compromise for a minimal costs. I'm going to completely ignore client side and talk about server side only, because as an infrastructure admin I don't care about that (different department
At the end of the day it is as you said about storage. These days you can have tiered storage and that's why I think that it is completely doable if you just workout mechanism of managing these tiers well. If you want to keep the same amount of resources per player, I would have a ship/item warehouse on a slow storage where you can move/retrieve ships from, but the retrieval period of these ships from warehouse would be something like 6 hours. This will allow me to consolidate multiple requests together and comply with my cloud provider SLA's.If I use some bigger cloud provider as an example i.e. amazon web services I would use service called glacier - google the costs and faq. Charge every person who want this service 2500 ZEN for a lifetime (like some more expensive ships) and I would be really surprised if you would ever run out of money. Your operational cpu, memory, network footprint within cluster won't change and you are likely going to reduce it, saving some money. Some players might move ships there in advance - expecting to buy new lockbox/lobi ships and it might take them couple days to get them. Here you have some free resources for another players. There will be some data transfer fees involved, but with modern compression algorithm (lzma/lzma2)/maybe even deduplication I'm sure that it can be done. To integrate it within the game mechanisms, why not having it as a special type of doff assignment. I'm sure that these are easy to build and you can already drag/drop resources to them. What do you all think ?
BTW. I don't work for Amazon, but know them well enough to use them in this example.