Lets see if I understand you correctly:

640 items per account, roughly doubled to include bank and inventory slots = 1280 items. (Assumes each character on the account is maxed in items, very unlikely, as was stated.)

Each item, by your conservative estimate, is actually a 4byte +1 bit data structure. Lets be generous and make it an 8 byte structure.

1280 8-byte structures per account is roughly 10 Kbytes. Assume 3000 accounts on a server, makes about 3 Megabytes of data. This is a lot to back up???? That data wouldn't even fill 3 standard floppy disks. I don't believe data storage or it's manipulation such as backup is a problem given those parameters.

Keledal
"Not a computer engineer in Norrath but I play one in real life."

>>> "Kimes, Dean W." <Dean_Kimes@...> 10/07 2:05 PM >>>

From: "Kimes, Dean W." <Dean_Kimes@...>

640 items ( the correct product of 8x8x10) per account, double that with
bank and inventory plus wearables, would be devastating in terms of storage
space even if every item was a simple 2 byte ID code and a 1 byte quantity
and a 1 bit flag for bank/inventory and another byte (at least) for
container location.
Also I doubt they based their storage estimates on the max, but rather the
mean. 1 character at max inventory, 2 more at 50% (maybe) per account on
one server. I could have 8 characters maxed on every server with just one
account.
The theory is that many people have created mule characters for their
primarys just to serve as bankers thus way overblowing their original
estimates.
Part of the problem isn't so much the physical space required though, as the
backup time required to conserve all that data every nite routinely.
-----Original Message-----
From: Lonnie Lewis [mailto:LLewis@...]
Sent: Thursday, October 07, 1999 1:54 PM
To: 'eqbards@onelist.com'
Subject: RE: [eqbards] Lighstones was Re: Elf Hide Gloves

From: Lonnie Lewis <LLewis@...>

> From: "Kimes, Dean W." <Dean_Kimes@...>
>
> That's been an interesting topic among the developers here at work. they
> had a different take from everyone else on the proliferation of No Drop
> items. There is a group here who believe it is the enormous number of
> items
> ever growing in the character databases that Verant is concerned about.
> By
> making them No Drop they were trying to keep the number of in game objects
> down. An interesting speculation and a reason why it took so long to get
> the bank set up to accept No Drop items perhaps.
>
> Kitasi
>

The problem with that theory is that there's only such much any one
person can keep. 8 characters x 8 bank slots x 10 backpack slots = 6400
items, plus the items on the 8 characters, per account, per shard. Of
course this is exluding stackable items, but light-stones aren't stackable.
Stackable items can only increase this by 20 fold, assuming that everything
you owned was stackable.

Bien

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