----- Original Message -----
From: <kim@...>
To: EQ Bards <eqbards@onelist.com>
Sent: Thursday, November 04, 1999 11:34 AM
Subject: Re: [eqbards] Item Decay and Loot Once

> When were corpse decay times changed? I thought only the time
> you had to get an experience res was changed? AFAIK, they
> still last 8 hours online or 7 days offline.
>

There was a change a while ago - I forget the nitty gritty. It was was for
multiple corpses of the same character. They disappear much quicker.
Perhaps only if they have no items on it. I'm not sure if it was on the
patch message - or an excerpt of a usenet post from Brad. I recall reading
this off of EQVault. It was explicitly stated from Verant directly that
they are having problems with too many items on the servers and have to take
steps to reduce it.

> Unlike UO, there's a limit to how many items each character
> can have. You have your personal inventory, bank inventory,
> worn items, and that's it. Assuming you have all your
> inventory full of 10 slot backpacks and chock full of items,
> that's 160 items per character. Call it 180 to account for
> worn items. Assume all 8 character slots are used in this
> manner. That's 1440 items per player. Assume 5000 players
> per server all doing this, and that's 7.2 million items as a
> close-to-worst-case scenario. If each item has 1k of data
> associated with it, that's roughly 7 GB. My PC's hard drive
> is bigger than that.
>

Only 5000 per server? That seems WAY low to me. The active servers average
just under 2000 players simultaneos in peak times. Verant says they have
250,000 subscribers. How many servers are there - 12? If evenly
distributed that would be 20,000 per server. But we know the users aren't
evenly distributed. And how many CHARACTERS on averager. This database
discussion is based on characters not players. How many characters does the
average player have. How many people buy the game and have quit. How long
do they stay before being purged. So my estimate is (worse-case server)

30,000 player accounts - and average of 4 characters - 120,000 characters -
So by my estimate we're adding 164 GB not 7.

Now even if is 7GB and not 164GB - comparing to your PC's hard disk to a
Database you're comparing apples to oranges. My experience is with
commercial DBMS that support transactions and two-phase commits. Verant I'm
sure uses a properietary scheme that's tuned for speed But regardless A 7
GB increase can be a HUGE problem. We are expecting a seemless world where
everything seems to happen in real-time. I've worked with 7 GB databases
(and we're talking about a 7 GB increase to a much larger databases here)
Searches on it - even indexed properly isn't instananeous. This is a VERY
significant change. (Thus is the point I'm trying to make)

> There are only a thousand or fewer "named" mobs with special
> drops in the game. If you assume 5000 players per server, and
> a 1000 mob bitfield, it's only 5 megabits, or about 625k of
> extra data for the entire server. I made a similar suggestion
> to the UO dev team (for different reasons) and the problem
> there was that this stuff is handled via a high level
> scripting language; so you can't have a bitfield - a boolean
> takes 1 byte minimum, probably more. I agree it would be a
> monumental task to graft it into the current system. I was
> thinking more in terms of future games (in case anyone on the
> list finds himself as a programmer in such a game :).
>

You're agreeing with me here! My main point is many people are making these
suggestion with an unreasonable expectation that they could (and should!) be
implemented by Verant right away (not implying you are anyone else on the
list is one of them).

I've given up reading alt.games.everquest - because there are so many people
that post a game suggestion (with a subject line of BRAD READ THIS!) with a
suggestion that often is an excellent (and often boneheaded) suggestion that
would require a complete rewrite of the code.

I see many posts all over the place from people that complain that Verant
"ignores them" and "doesn't care" and are "stupid programmers" because they
don't treat all 120,000 customers like they are the only one....

Dan