Cute Kitsune wrote:

FFXIV has a storage rental system $2 / month. I ran out of bag space. I got a friend and traded them 97 stacks of stuff. Logged in an Alt, Traded back those stacks. Leveled alt to get storage with friends help. Now those items are sitting nice and free on a toon that will sell them and I will add more stuff to the market board every week till it all sells or I transfer new stuff. I just started playing FFXIV about 45 days ago. So, money where my mouth is, I won't rent space. I'd have paid $35 (18 months cost) to own them without a second thought. Granted those retainers do ALOT more then hold inventory too. Had it just been space I'd have paid maybe $7.50-$10.00.
Hope this data point helps as it just recently happened.

Unlike Cute Kitsune, I was an multi-alt player. I designated certain characters to store ranges of salvage in their vaults, others were Bankers holding a billion inf or so. They were alts I actively played, but the point remains. Why would I ever want to rent storage space when I can just buy character slots for Mule Man and Shelf Girl? And even that is assuming I don't have some unused slots to begin with. Even if you blocked direct transfer between characters on the same account, I can easily get around this with my wife's account, and vise versa. As long as you have a trustworthy friend, or even just access to two accounts you can do this.

Now if you offer me more storage as a one time purchase, and the price works out more economical than buying a new slot I will certainly purchases at least one upgrade, probably withing the first month of playing.

Using characters as "mules" for extra loot/inventory space is as old as [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMo6xzVjpaU]Diablo II[/url] ... meaning 15 years and counting. This cannot in any way be considered a "new" phenomenon (that no one has ever thought of before).

Redlynne wrote:

Using characters as "mules" for extra loot/inventory space is as old as Diablo II ... meaning 15 years and counting. This cannot in any way be considered a "new" phenomenon (that no one has ever thought of before).

Older than that, it goes back to MUDs.

Radiac wrote:

Redlynne wrote:
Using characters as "mules" for extra loot/inventory space is as old as Diablo II ... meaning 15 years and counting. This cannot in any way be considered a "new" phenomenon (that no one has ever thought of before).

So what's the solution then?

Don't monetize inventory; just make it unlimited? Sucks to have to sit out part of a TF/raid because you have to vend loot.

Interdictor wrote:

I'm not a fan of "renting" the space - I'd prefer to see such purchases be permanent. The question I have is; would this be per character or per account?

Character Bound. ;)

When you Delete a toon you dont want anymore that you already paid once to increase storage space on, you dont get a refund.
And thats Ok. I see it as Tricking out a street racing car. You paid once to improve its mileage.. but if you wreck it.. You loose all of it.

When Creating a new toon you will need* to pay a one time fee Once Again if you want extra storage.

And, MWM makes cash (just think of it as money that might be re-Invested back into the game),
plus 99% of the player base doesn't see it as being unfair. Win, Win. ;)

Radiac wrote:

The other approach would be to force players to pay rent on both character slots and inventory slots per character. Considering that for a minute, when the rent isn't paid on a character slot, then what happens? The toon is still there but locked, making both the character itself and, by extension, the inventory it has unavailable until rent is paid?
I would point out that this method is neither "Pay to Win" nor "Paywalled content" and is thus the preferred thing most people CLAIM they want, namely "pay for added quality of life stuff only".
If you're going to demote the rent paid on character slots to "no that should just be free" or even just "pay once and own the character slots/inventory space forever" neither of those methods make the company any regular amount of "repeat business" money over time and are thus not a thing that would cause someone to want to pay a subscription or even be part of one.
People, when posed with the question of "What will cause you to want to pay on a regular basis?" largely respond with "nothing" because their responses, a lot of the time on these forums, are things like "I should just get that for free" and "I should be able to pay once and unlock that forever" and "just make THIS free and then charge other people for stuff I don't care about and leave me alone".
None of those reactions amount to anyone wanting to pay a subscription because they feel like it's the best value for the money, which I think ought to be the goal. And that's a tall order, when the other option is "pay $50 to buy the game then everything is free forever after that", or so I'm assuming.

So, if I am given 50 starting spaces and I need to hold 200 items. I must A, pay rent on 2nd-4th character slot or B, pay rent on 3 inventory upgrades? How about C, I make 3 extra accounts and just log them in and hand over stuff. Oh a 1 time fee, ok I'll pay it. Now I've unlocked perm for a set cost my extra space ... I've just circumvented your rent system ... next?

Cute Kitsune wrote:

Radiac wrote:
The other approach would be to force players to pay rent on both character slots and inventory slots per character. Considering that for a minute, when the rent isn't paid on a character slot, then what happens? The toon is still there but locked, making both the character itself and, by extension, the inventory it has unavailable until rent is paid?
I would point out that this method is neither "Pay to Win" nor "Paywalled content" and is thus the preferred thing most people CLAIM they want, namely "pay for added quality of life stuff only".
If you're going to demote the rent paid on character slots to "no that should just be free" or even just "pay once and own the character slots/inventory space forever" neither of those methods make the company any regular amount of "repeat business" money over time and are thus not a thing that would cause someone to want to pay a subscription or even be part of one.
People, when posed with the question of "What will cause you to want to pay on a regular basis?" largely respond with "nothing" because their responses, a lot of the time on these forums, are things like "I should just get that for free" and "I should be able to pay once and unlock that forever" and "just make THIS free and then charge other people for stuff I don't care about and leave me alone".
None of those reactions amount to anyone wanting to pay a subscription because they feel like it's the best value for the money, which I think ought to be the goal. And that's a tall order, when the other option is "pay $50 to buy the game then everything is free forever after that", or so I'm assuming.

So, if I am given 50 starting spaces and I need to hold 200 items. I must A, pay rent on 2nd-4th character slot or B, pay rent on 3 inventory upgrades? How about C, I make 3 extra accounts and just log them in and hand over stuff. Oh a 1 time fee, ok I'll pay it. Now I've unlocked perm for a set cost my extra space ... I've just circumvented your rent system ... next?

Presumably the one-time fee for making extra accounts is $50 per account (you're literally buying the game a second time).

Assuming the average entrepreneur only need like 3 accounts worth of space, this is still way cheaper than paying $15/month for 8 years, if you look at it that way.

This may well be the reason why CoX paywalled content and sold IOs in the store. The added slots were just gravy and maybe a perk of paying a sub whereas the only ything people were willing to pay for over time was access to tip missions, alignment systems, Incarnate Trials/powers, Cimerora, the ITF, etc.

Renting = More money over the long haul for a more affordable monthly price.

Buying = Money up front, but cheaper in the long haul.

There are different people with different approaches. Some don't have enough money up front to purchase the item outright. So renting the item is the only way to go for them. Then there are those that are willing to make the sacrifice and just flat out purchase the item and suffer for a little bit until they can get their feet back under them again. Basically, pay a lot now or a even more later?

I think the difference between just renting inventory slots or having it included in a subscription boils down to the overall package. If there are more things added into the entire package with inventory included then people will feel a better value is being given to them versus just renting inventory slots. This is part of why I have mixed feelings about this whole Micro-subscription idea. If we break everything down into bits and pieces and let everybody choose, I feel most people will just choose the most basic things they need in order to play the game and leave out the fringes. That could end up hurting MWM in the long run, maybe I'm wrong (shrugs).

Perhaps the happy medium is to provide both options. A high one time fee to purchase X amount of inventory space, or a cheap monthly fee of renting inventory space. Everybody seems to be a big fan of options, so let's give people options.

Regarding the concept of "mules," what if that were side-stepped entirely, and [i]accounts[/i] had inventory, rather than characters? Access it from any character you're playing. Perhaps with a tool to deliniate/organize your inventory "by character," but without any need for tricks or shenanigans to transfer items or wealth from one character to another.

People will transfer these things anyway; will it harm the game to eliminate the rigamorale required to do so within the same account? It would mean a larger inventory space in general than is on any given character "normally," but it would also mean adding new character slots doesn't necessarily add new inventory slots. Those would be separate. (Maybe a "recommended package" would include extra inventory along with a new character slot, just out of recognition that it might need the extra storage space.)

Is there anything harmful to the game in this idea?

Segev wrote:

Regarding the concept of "mules," what if that were side-stepped entirely, and accounts had inventory, rather than characters? Access it from any character you're playing. Perhaps with a tool to deliniate/organize your inventory "by character," but without any need for tricks or shenanigans to transfer items or wealth from one character to another.
People will transfer these things anyway; will it harm the game to eliminate the rigamorale required to do so within the same account? It would mean a larger inventory space in general than is on any given character "normally," but it would also mean adding new character slots doesn't necessarily add new inventory slots. Those would be separate. (Maybe a "recommended package" would include extra inventory along with a new character slot, just out of recognition that it might need the extra storage space.)
Is there anything harmful to the game in this idea?

In GW2, the bank vault was buy account, but each character still has their own inventory.

Segev wrote:

Regarding the concept of "mules," what if that were side-stepped entirely, and accounts had inventory, rather than characters? Access it from any character you're playing. Perhaps with a tool to deliniate/organize your inventory "by character," but without any need for tricks or shenanigans to transfer items or wealth from one character to another.
People will transfer these things anyway; will it harm the game to eliminate the rigamorale required to do so within the same account? It would mean a larger inventory space in general than is on any given character "normally," but it would also mean adding new character slots doesn't necessarily add new inventory slots. Those would be separate. (Maybe a "recommended package" would include extra inventory along with a new character slot, just out of recognition that it might need the extra storage space.)
Is there anything harmful to the game in this idea?

This doesn't necessarily address Cute Kitsune's issue of "I'll just make multiple accounts one time, then never pay for added storage or a sub ever." does it? I mean, a one-time-only outlay of $50 is going to be a much better value over 8-10 years than any tangible monthly subscription you want to charge, isn't it? If the game lasts for 10 years and you buy a second account (or got one with the Kickstarter, like some of us) up front, the added $50 you just spent will amount to paying less than 50 cents per month for whatever amount of storage space that account represents.

I think the basic decision that needs to be addressed here is how much inventory space do you actually get without paying a sub (or microsub, or one time purchase, renting more, or microtransactions, etc.). How LITTLE storage space do you need to limit the non-sub to in order to encourage subscribing to get more inventory space (or renting it, or whatever)? Will that limit, whatever it is, have the desired effect on most people? Or will people largely just learn to live with less space and keep playing free or just rage quit instead of subscribing? Is there even a level of storage/inventory space etc that is the "sweet spot" for this, or does that sweet spot not actually exist? It could be that the proposition before the players comes down to either "enough to play on a non-sub" vs "little enough to cause people to quit outright" with no wiggle room inbetween.

That, to me, seems like the issue that needs to be addressed, and once again, a lot of people on these forums will come back with the response of "I should just be able to buy that once and have it forever, to heck with this 'pay rent on inventory space' stuff..." which tells me that the idea of giving people more inventory space as a subscription perk is really just the icing on the cake, you need to provide more for the money than just that. But beyond that, you're left with the possibility that NO level of inventory space is considered appropriate for the non-sub. At some point you go from "too little, game is crushing my attempts to have fun, I'm out" straight to "this is enough, I can make do as a non-sub".

Assuming the inventory space that is provided to the non-subber is intended to be a modest-to-cramped amount of inventory space for SINGLE toon, just to be able to collect some random drops and have a place to put them during a day's worth of missions, how many slots are we taling about? Andf do the similar items stack or not? Is there a stack limit? etc.

Myself, personally, I'd use whatever is given to me for free at first to see how well that goes. If I find that I am running consistently to the Vendor, Auction House, Base, or whatever to empty my inventory more than I am able to enjoy playing missions, then I'd look into what it would take to get more inventory space. If it were a rental only option I'd probably just suck it up and deal with it. If I could purchase more space for a one time fee, I'd pony up the money to do so. If it were included as part of a perk to a subscription offer, I'd seriously look into and consider the subscription. It's all about the value to me. Is it something I can just live with as is, or is it possible for me to make it better without it being too much of a burden doing so. Obviously there are different tolerances for different people. So finding that mark, well..........good luck!

Segev wrote:

Another thought I had, though it probably is NOT a good idea, would be "one-time emergency storage." Mid-mission, you can spend 1 Star (tentatively, roughly 1 cent, less if you've bought them in bulk) for 1 emergency inventory slot that can be filled once. (It might be able to accept additional of the same stackable item, if item-stacking in slots is a thing.)

hit delete on least valuable item.. Done. ;)

Anyways, why the hell is a F2P account even Able to transfer stuff around from toon to toon freely? Nip it in the Butt! :)
Place a Limit, of Influence transfers in a day.. as well as Augments or what have you. Receive or Send! >:)
I'm a stinker, I know. ;D

As long as it doesnt GIMP the F2P player in COMBAT,
i dont care if the F2P crow is INCONVENIENCED outside of combat. ;)

Well, thats not 1005 true. The exact same Travel power for a F2P should be on par with a Subber.
So, maybe the term PERFORMANCE is more appropriate as a metric?

Is Performance a factor?
if not.. place a ten ton weight on the F2P player. >;D

Oh wait, Gold Farmers might not like that limitation! :<
And they cant create more that 3 toons for a F2P account... Darn! :(
But, if the game allows for new slots to be Subscription based, they can just create 10 new toon slots for the same price it would have cost to just Buy 1, so they can spam using multiple toons, instead of just that one. YAY Gold Spammers, for the Win! :|

Segev wrote:

Regarding the concept of "mules," what if that were side-stepped entirely, and accounts had inventory, rather than characters?

Account level storage - available to all characters on the same account, good for making item transfers
Supergroup level storage - controlled by the supergroup permissions and assigned by the leaders
Individual character storage - typical one-character inventory

In a MMORPG there is a real need for all three levels of storage. They don't all have to be the same size, and the combination should not add up to enough capacity to manipulate the ingame market. It would be very unwise, for example, to have hundreds of spaces to store items at the account level. Depending on what kind of items require storage, I'd favor a design that went along these lines:

Account storage - 15%
Character storage - 85%

Which adds up to a hundred, naturally because group storage is supplemental. It should have a range that can be controlled by group leadership. Something like:

15-30% per member

This just applies to storage apportioned to individual characters. Supergroup/clan/guild level storage is another ball of wax entirely, unless the items the group needs to build and outfit their base/lair/house/clan hall are the same items as an individual would use.

So, if we assume an individual needs a total of 50 Augments/Refinements and each Augment or Refinement requires 3 crafting components, then perhaps something like this:

Account - 15 unassigned Augments/Refinements\crafting components
Individual - 40 unassigned Augments/Refinements\crafting components
Storage assigned to the individual character - 10 to 30 unassigned Augments/Refinements\crafting components

And if the slot is used for a crafting component perhaps make it stackable up to 15.

The percentages don't quite match the totals, but it's fair approximation of the idea.

Depending on what the loot is, there is the immersion factor. I will most certainly play on both sides, heroes and villains. To transfer some currency or items from one character to another is one thing, I do that out of character. But having my heroes and villains share their wallets and storage sounds a bit odd. Very convenient sure, but still odd at first.

Other that that, I can not think of anything. And just because it is new and needs a little getting used to is no reason to not do it.

The added convenience of an account wide inventory could even be a subscription perk. That would be difficult, I know, but an interesting incentive to subscribe.

Segev wrote:

Could you go into more detail as to why there is a need for all three kinds of storage? Preferably identifying why each is necessary. What does individual-character inventory space do that would be lost if it was all account-level, instead?

If the game is to be character-centric, then the primary inventory should belong to a single character. A great deal depends on what kind of materials or items the character will need to have on hand from day to day.

As a minimum, each character should have enough individual inventory space to carry the drops from 5 missions in a row. Anything less and I find myself spending more time sorting junk than playing. Anything more and by the time I hit the store it takes me forever to decide what is worth keeping and what needs dumping. At this point I'm just talking about the number of items a character can carry. At the end of those five missions they will need some place to put the items they have decided to keep.

Individual character storage (the place they unload items into after five missions) is needed because each character will need different Augments and those Augments will require different components. If I need 14 widgets to make three Augments for a ranged damage character and 26 gizmos to create three Augments for my melee character, but my account-based storage only has 10 slots then I'm forced to focus on one character over the other. I make many alts and I play a different character every day. Each character needs enough personal inventory (the amount they can carry) to craft enough Augments to completely fill out at least three powers (4 Augments per power means enough components to craft 12 Augments without running back and forth between the storage and the workbench). The same character will need enough character storage (the place they retrieve those components from) to do this three or four times.

Character storage needs to different than account storage because it serves a different purpose. The purpose of Account level storage is so when my ranged damage character stumbles across a really cool melee Augment, or a rare component I need to make one, I have an easy way to transfer that item. Account level storage does not need to be very large, 10-15 storage slots should be more than enough.

Now, if you want to ONLY have Account-based storage than it is going to have be huge, easy to organize, and easy to access. I will need enough storage to completely outfit 3-5 characters AND store enough components to make 12-15 Augments for an additional 3-5 characters. And those are conservative estimates.

I like being able to play for about four hours and make no more than two trips to storage/vendors per hour. Thus, individual storage (personal inventory) has to accommodate this. When I get ready to craft, I like being able to pull out enough components to make Augments for 3 or 4 powers at a time (10-12 Augments), because I usually upgrade at the end of a play session right before logging off.

Now, if I don't have enough character inventory to carry the loot from 5 missions, and enough character storage to hold the loot from four hours of game play, then sorting, selling, storing, and crafting begin cutting into time I'd rather devote to running missions, hanging out at the local version of Pocket D, or just chatting with friends. And no, I can't craft and chat at the same time. My mind is a single 8088 processor with no cache to speak of. It only processes one data stream at a time.

Other players have even higher character storage needs because they will want to process and sell Augments in the Auction House. They will need to store enough components for 30-40 Augments and have personal inventory enough to craft and sell in similar size batches. Those players might even need double or triple the 10 or 15 slots in Account-based storage because they will want to organize crafting by character type. At least, that has been my experience.

Just having Account-based storage and no character-based storage beyond personal inventory is going to dramatically limit the flexibility and organizational choices available to all the different kinds of players out there. The Account-based storage would have to accommodate players with 10, 15, or 20 characters, and in some cases many more. Components would have to stack in huge stacks of at least 50, better would be 99, and even Augments/Refinements should probably stack in lots of 5 or 10.

No one really needs much their first day of game play, but by the end of the first week there will not be enough storage no matter how much you implement. Some players are natural hoarders, after all.

Now if one of your design goals is to limit hoarding, then small Account-based storage and extremely limited personal inventory would be the way to go, but having played in many games that attempt to do this for exactly that reason, I have to say, the end result is far too many unhappy players.

Of course, there are many things I do not know. I do not know how many components are required to craft a single Augment. I do not know how many Augment and Refinement slots are allotted to each character and at what levels. I do not know what kind of items enemies will drop, how often, and in what quantity. Variations in all of these dramatically change the storage needs of each character, each account, and each group. How many items can be stacked and how large the stacks can be also come into play.

And now that I've typed all that out, I did think of one exception.

If items dropped by enemies immediately transfer to the Account-based storage and if the crafting table loads up both Account-based storage and a list of available recipes at the same time so there is no running back and forth, then I suppose Account-based storage could replace both personal character inventory and individual character storage. However, the Account-based storage would still have to accommodate enough components to create 30-40 Augments at one time, and maybe even ten times that amount for the serious crafters.

One last caveat, all of this is based on storage available to a full subscription player. If you wanted to limit storage in F2P accounts then you would have also limit access to higher levels, crafting, and the auction house because there is no way for the game to be playable if personal inventory and storage are limited but they have full access to crafting and auctions.

All of these things work together. That is one reason so many mobile games have a free version and a full version. The free version lets a player get their feet wet, but to do anything at all they need the full version. In a MMORPG you could get away with limited storage only by also limiting the maximum level and then locking both crafting and the auction house behind the subscription "pay wall".

So basically in F2P they would create a character, run it up to about level 20 while being completely dependent on drops and vendors. They could easily get a feel for the game and decide if they wanted to subscribe. Of course, then your server winds up with tens of thousands of accounts that a person plays for a couple weeks and abandons, which creates an entirely new set of headaches, and all because you were looking for a way to limit server space consumed by storage.

I suppose F2P accounts could run on entirely different server and once a year or so that server could be wiped to get rid of the dead accounts? That would also bring some bad PR from time to time, even if it was stated up front.

Nope. I don't envy the job of the developers. Putting this puzzle together is a huge task. Life is much easier as a player!

Each character ought to have personal storage.
Account storage simplifies inventory transfers between characters on an account.
Supergroup storage simplifies inventory transfers between characters within a supergroup (ie. Account-to-Account within a restricted range).

In a LOT of cases, and especially in City of Heroes, slot for auctioning stuff in the Marketplace wind up being extra inventory storage, potentially over and above what can be accomplished via Account storage. So keep in mind that Market slots can serve the purpose of Account storage simply by not putting the items up for sale.

Segev, sounds like you're seeking a (*cough*) gearing ratio (*cough*) between how much inventory is personal relative to how much is shared. For this sort of thing, I'm thinking that a 4:1 ratio ought to work fine. 1 character gets 10 slots, but there's an additional 40 slots for the account. That way, MOST of the inventory gets tossed onto the account for long term storage, while the individual character acts as "liquid" storage for things like drops and so on (assuming we're even going to be having drops at all). The benefit here is that although muling of inventory CAN be done, the advantages of doing so aren't all that overwhelming, so ... lots of work (ie. overhead management) for little return. Perhaps that return will be enough for the dedicated to pursue it, while for the more lazy among us it just isn't worth the effort.

How does that sound?

Segev wrote:

I am frustrated that I cannot see an actual purpose behind character-specific inventory space, but it seems to be something that is expected as a norm, and whatever benefits may accure from decoupling it from character slots are not really looking significant (if at all extant) enough to make such a change, so I don't think I'll actually propose it.
My frustration, in case it comes out in my tone (for which I apologize), is not with anybody here, but with myself for not being able to put my finger on what it is that I'm missing. I do appreciate the feedback.

I think it's as simple as "people expect it" and it stops there. In other games, as far as I know, each toon has personal wallet space, so that's the paradigm people are used to.

There are still ways around the problems that Red is posing above though in the "it's all account inventory" system. For example, you COULD give the owner of the account the ability to decide how the available inventory space get's partitioned among the toons on the account. So imagine you have 150 total inventory slots, and three toons. The game gives you a line segment that represents your total inventory space and it has two "partition" sliders on it that you can move left and right until each toon has the amount of inventory you want it to have. Then when you access your inventory, you get a tab for each toon and can drag and drop stuff around between the tabs all you want, but each tab has it's own maximum capacity, decided by you, with the limitation that the three toons get a combined total of no more than 150 inventory slots combined. You could even have a button that quickly does the math for you and distributes the remaining free slots evenly among the toons.

Segev wrote:

My thought - and this is just a thought - behind the "account-wide inventory" was that it would function in all ways as character inventory, but would be available no matter which character you're playing, and would be as large (by default) as the sum of all the inventories of the normal "maximum" number of characters you can have.
Making up numbers out of thin air for illustration purposes, if the theory was that you will have 3 character slots with 50 inventory slots per character, this model would instead give you 3 character slots and 150 inventory slots shared between all three of them. Buying new character slots would NOT give you 50 more inventory slots along with it, but by the same token, buying 50 more character slots is 50 more slots available to every character. The idea behind it would be to both remove the need for mules and remove the incentive to create them.
The valuable thing about a new character slot should not, to my mind, be the "free" inventory slots that a new character slot gives. If it is, we're doing something wrong in how we're pricing/making available inventory slots, at least to my mind.
That said, I am not saying that this "shared inventory across the account" concept is the right solution. It just seems a possible means to reduce the need for spending entire character slots on nothing more than inventory management. To decouple the use of a character slot - which should be a fun and exciting avatar to experience the game - from inventory expansion or management, and to bypass the need for hoop-jumping just to get your new level 1 character the best stuff the market can provide him. We know players will self-support (and support friends') new PCs; why create artificial obstacles we know they'll just circumvent, rather than incorporate it somehow into the design?

Laid out like this it seems very workable. Different, and will take some adjustment, but very workable.

I don't have a problem with the inventory being an account-wide thing, really. I think the detail that matters is how many inventory slots a single account gets, and what those numbers are as a subscriber versus as a non-sub. If you estimate that 50 slots per toon is a decent number, then I personally would allot like 40 slots TOTAL to the non-sub account and maybe 200 or more to the subscriber.

People can only actually play one toon at a time, and as long as you have enough space to manage to make a couple of Augments (or Improvements, or Refinements, whatever) at a time, you're fine. I mean nobody ever said you had to gather up a metric ton of salvage and stuff before finally actually crafting it into useable Augments. You can get what you need, sell what you don't, and make stuff one item at a time and save a lot of space doing it.

So the non-subs will tend to have to economize on space while they kit out one toon at a time, while the subscribers can try to kit out 5 toons in tandem, horde anything and everything they want, and even use inventory space as a long term place to let rare goods appreciate in value before selling them for a profit later. That seems good to me. If you want to break that down into a micro-sub that get's paid every month for just the inventory space and nothing else, you'll probably need to do focus groups or something to determine a price point for the added space, because I have no idea what people will pay. I doubt anyone is going to buy 5 accounts at $50 each just to get their storage up to 200 slots, but in the long term, that's about $2 per month added up over 10 years so that's about what those slots are probably worth, about $2 per month for about 160 more slots. Somewhere in that ballpark anyway. You could maybe up the subscriber number to 250 or 300, which is probably more space than any one account will ever really need, just to make it look like a better deal, that wouldn't hurt anything.

Good points, Tannim222. I do not want to press for the account storage solution, but I think some of the problems can be solved.

Tannim222 wrote:

I see a few issues with inventory being account wide. The first is if character slots are a one time purchase and all inventory is account based, then new characters can place constraints on the inventory. So then either new characters must also increase account storage space, account storage and character storage be separate, or there are also increasing costs for multiple levels of account storage. The last option could exist as is, but its also a slippery slope with character slots being a purchase and making sure if all inventory is account wide that the various levels of access is sufficient for all the total possible character slots. But I could also see some back lash if players end up in a position where they feel that they must purchase additional storage in order to add a new character too.

Possible solutions could be to offer a package deal. Buy a character slot together with storage extension and get both for a reduced price. Another idea would be that buying a character slot also grants a few storage slots.
And if a lot of the items stack, it might not be a problem at all.

Quote:

Another possible issue is designating character bound items. By very definition there needs to be a separate character specified inventory for any possible bound items. Not that there are any current plans for bound items but the possible inclusion needs to be accounted for in design.

City of Heroes had multiple inventories for different kinds of loot. If things like that do ever come up it might be possible to create a specific inventory just for them. Not ideal, but it could work.

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Lastly, it can be an issue of management. If a player has a large single account wide inventory and they have a heavy / lengthy play session they might have to sift through a lot of their drops from that play session requiring a lot of down time. While character specific storage may be easier to manage on a smaller scale.

I thought about that too. But the account- inventory would need to be clearly laid out and easy to organise anyway. How about one section of it gets dedicated to new items?

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That said, the main point of context is the immersion factor. The player's character has their own personal inventory because those are things they eared and things they use. The account side of storage is only necessary for ease of the player transferring items from one character to another instead of using in-game e-mail systems.

I think that is more a matter of getting used to. Inventory systems rarely are anything near realistic, in most cases the character would need a cart or truck to carry all that stuff with him. We learned to not let that ruin our immersion, because a realistic inventory space would have us running to the vendors every three to five drops. If the account- inventory offers enough convenience over character- inventory, I believe that we would get used to that as well and learn to like it.

One thing I think I have been conflating in my head without really considering it is the distinction between "banked" storage and "carried" storage. These really are used differently. The former is long-term storage of items which you would access to change your "load-out" or to manage your market and crafting materials, while the latter is what you manage both for your current purposes (whether heading out to craft or market or adventure) and where you stick the new "drops" you acquire.

That last part, in particular, is the thing that likely makes carried inventory valuable as a storage space. It's what governs how often you have to go home to bank your drops or head to the vendors or the market to dump your vendor trash. That's a QoL issue.

Would it be fair to say that pricing "banked" storage differently than personal carried inventory is reasonable? Or are they functionally equivalent, and I'm overcomplicating things?

Segev wrote:

I am frustrated that I cannot see an actual purpose behind character-specific inventory space, but it seems to be something that is expected as a norm, and whatever benefits may accure from decoupling it from character slots are not really looking significant (if at all extant) enough to make such a change, so I don't think I'll actually propose it.
My frustration, in case it comes out in my tone (for which I apologize), is not with anybody here, but with myself for not being able to put my finger on what it is that I'm missing. I do appreciate the feedback.

I had around 250 characters on my main CoH account, I used every bit of storage on most of them. It would be prohibitively expensive for me if a new character didn't come with inherent storage, it wouldn't particularly matter to me if the storage it came with was personal or shared, but there needs to be storage with each of them.

The only advantage of personal storage would be that I don't have to search through 10K+items every time I want to find something in the pooled storage.

Minotaur wrote:

Segev wrote:
I am frustrated that I cannot see an actual purpose behind character-specific inventory space, but it seems to be something that is expected as a norm, and whatever benefits may accure from decoupling it from character slots are not really looking significant (if at all extant) enough to make such a change, so I don't think I'll actually propose it.
My frustration, in case it comes out in my tone (for which I apologize), is not with anybody here, but with myself for not being able to put my finger on what it is that I'm missing. I do appreciate the feedback.

I had around 250 characters on my main CoH account, I used every bit of storage on most of them. It would be prohibitively expensive for me if a new character didn't come with inherent storage, it wouldn't particularly matter to me if the storage it came with was personal or shared, but there needs to be storage with each of them.
The only advantage of personal storage would be that I don't have to search through 10K+items every time I want to find something in the pooled storage.

I understand your needs, but I feel like hoarding hundreds of crafted items, salvage components, recipes etc should be discouraged to some extent in order to keep people actively dropping stuff they don't have an immediate use for onto the market so someone else can buy it. I feel like the non-subs should definitely feel the squeeze here a little and the subscribers not so much. That way players have to try to decide WHICH items are valuable enough to hold long term. The system ought not be designed to allow people to hold onto EVERYTHING long term without paying for a bank vault micro-sub, and even then there needs to be a limit somewhere.

Also, making the inventories searchable (by typing in a string of letters to find the name) would be nice.

For what its worth, I still like the idea of making the banks in the game a thing that the NPC factions can try to rob sometimes and making people lose randomly selected items when the bank robbery event goes well for the NPCs and badly for the players. If you got purples, keep them in account inventory, not the bank. banks get robbed.

Radiac wrote:

For what its worth, I still like the idea of making the banks in the game a thing that the NPC factions can try to rob sometimes and making people lose randomly selected items when the bank robbery event goes well for the NPCs and badly for the players. If you got purples, keep them in account inventory, not the bank. banks get robbed.

That's a big old 'Nope' from me. I never want to log into a game only to find that some random event decided to delete things from my characters. No.

Radiac wrote:

For what its worth, I still like the idea of making the banks in the game a thing that the NPC factions can try to rob sometimes and making people lose randomly selected items when the bank robbery event goes well for the NPCs and badly for the players. If you got purples, keep them in account inventory, not the bank. banks get robbed.

Uh ... you *DO* realize that [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWCq9KiY9Yo]Azuria had a reputation[/url] to LIVE [b]DOWN[/b] as the keeper of the M.A.G.I. Vaults ... right?

Radiac wrote:

Also, making the inventories searchable (by typing in a string of letters to find the name) would be nice.
For what its worth, I still like the idea of making the banks in the game a thing that the NPC factions can try to rob sometimes and making people lose randomly selected items when the bank robbery event goes well for the NPCs and badly for the players. If you got purples, keep them in account inventory, not the bank. banks get robbed.

Seriously? No. Just No. A thousand times no. Unless your intention is to randomly piss off the playerbase, this is a TERRIBLE idea.

Bank Robberies do occur, yes. However, they are not like the old west days where they took the safe and everything in the safe. Now, most bank robberies involve the tellers only. Very rarely do Robbers take anything from the Safe or the Safety Deposit boxes. Mostly they only confront the tellers and ask for all the money in the tellers drawer. It's no longer items that are sought after in bank robberies, but just the money itself. So this whole idea about having bank robberies and losing items is a complete joke and obviously just something to try to piss off the player base.

IF there were a Bank Robbery scenario, I'd expect it to be either a Mission or a TF. Not a random event. Even if it were random with a warning, that does not mean that that person could still be able to make it online to defend their stuff from being taken. Family life, Job, Emergencies, Hanging out with friends, Events, etc. could all play a role in keeping that person away from the computer at the time that the Bank Robbery would take place. At MOST I'd be willing to concede having money taken away. Items, no. It could be used as another currency sink. I don't think most players would be all that upset if a little bit of their money was stolen from them as compared to a Rare Enhancement or Salvage piece. Also Banks are insured so that anything stolen from them is not the responsibility of the person that placed their money or items in the bank. So there would be recompense for anything stolen to the person it was stolen from. Also if you are going off of comic book material, usually Bank Robberies are for a SPECIFIC item in the vault. Not random items. Usually they are for large quantities of money or some extremely rare and powerful item that is being housed in the vault.

For what its worth, I can see where charging people for bank vault inventory space then having NPCs rob them would be problematic. So that's probably out. I also don't like the idea of giving pack-rat players practically infinite storage space. They never sell anything if its like that. I know people who play Magic: the Gathering that horde cards like that. Their idea of "trading" is tho walk up to you and say "I have an extra copy of Card X that I don't need, and I need a copy of Card Y. My X for your Y is the one and only trade I will accept, because I don't have any other cards I'm willing to let go of and you don't have any other cards I want, so... deal?" and when you point out that their proposition is totally one-sided they're like "WHY won't anyone trade with me?!?!"

So I like the idea of inventory being finite and moreover FEELING somewhat limited to the players (at least to the non-sub players) for the sake of getting people to actually part with their cheap-to-moderately-valuable swag that they have no immediate plans for. This way there's always plenty of that stuff on the market for rates as cheap as you'd expect. It makes it harder to corner the market on some common thing like Iron Bars, and it ensures that there will be Iron Bars available there when you need one, for a reasonable price.

An important part of this, I feel, is the role of the NPC vendors. If they run out of Iron Bars, more can be bought on the market or generated by them somehow by giving out missions. If they end up with zillions of them they can stop buying them altogether and then eventually sell some off and start buying them again or else just delete them from inventory once in a while. It also might be an idea to let the NPC vendors upgrade like a hundred Iron Bars to one Steel Bar or something like that as a way of regulating the markets.

The problem with common salvage in CoX was that people knew it was too cheap to make any INF off of unless you tried to manipulate the market somehow. So people largely deleted that stuff or sold it to NPCs who gave out ridiculous amounts of INF for some of it. But then the market would run out of that stuff a lot bewcause nobody though it was valuable enough to be worth a sell slot at the auction house and it all got dumped on NPCs or deleted.

I want a market where common, cheapo stuff is available in abundance and cheap, not non-existent because nobody's interested in being the supplier. I see this as a role for the NPC vendor/traders, but I'm not sure how that would work, especially if their AI is trying to gain INF for itself over time and not lose it.

I feel like even having salvage that common and cheap is part of the problem in the first place. I would only have salvage components that are rare enough to be worth trading in for profit. All of the lower level more common stuff could just be gotten rid of and you just have to pay higher INF costs for crafting instead. Maybe that would be better.

On the subject of Beamrider's idea, you could make the augment recipes in CoT work in such a way that you drag and drop the salvage pieces they require into them one at a time and then when the last piece get's dropped in, it magically transforms the recipe into a useable Augment. This would probably have to be a one-way street, in that you can't get the salvage part back out again after you drop it in, but it would allow people to make room in their salvage inventory by doing "partial crafting" a little bit at a time. I also think that the inventory space that Augments inhabit when not slotted in a power would have to be shared with the not-yet-completed recipes, in other words your IO tray and your Recipe inventory are now the same inventory volume essentially.

People could even try to sell recipes in various stages of completion on the market for varying prices.

I like the gist of Red's idea there. Not sure how to hammer out the details right now, but sounds good in principle.

Pyromantic wrote:

For the love of the game, please do not make it possible for items you put into storage to be stolen from you, whether it can be avoided (at some risk of failure) or not.
I'm seriously having a hard time thinking of a way to turn me off the game faster.

+1

Redlynne wrote:

One of the things that always bugged me about the Mayhem Missions was that you were supposed to Steal Money from the Vault, which was fine for an objective. The problem was that once you broke into the Vault there was only a single moneybag sitting there waiting for you to interact with it, and it took up NO INVENTORY SPACES to carry it out.

Well, you know modern banking, with all the deregulation of minimum reserves, generally has no actual money in the vault these days. It's all out in credit default swaps or whatever. (And [i]that's[/i] where the real crime is to be had!)

Mendicant wrote:

I think Radiac's bank robbery idea is likely a Nemesis plot...

MWAAAA-HA-HA-HA!!!!

...and just like the Nemesis invasion events in CoX, no Mole Machines this time either :)

Segev wrote:

While I won't say it's a good idea to run them, I will say that it is not "obviously" just trying to piss off players. There is a lot that happens in comic book tales which is reflective of anachronistic ideas of what "really" happens, and which relies on levels of suspension of disbelief in the name of fun/interesting tales. "Super criminal robs bank, carries vault away on foot" is not that unrealistic for a super-powered comic story.

...it WOULD piss off the playbase though and I would bet that the moment something like that went live and a couple THOUSAND accounts got hit...MWM phones would light up like a friggin Christmas tree! hell, I would be one of those lil blinkin lights... LOL

I can appreciate the concept of "thinkin out side the box" but I am thinkin we should just let this bear sleep...while such things 'might' occur in a comic CoT is, unfortunately, not a comic, but an MMO that is set in the superhero genre. as such, not everything can be translated directly over and this robbing of a players bank account is a good example.

Fireheart wrote:

Mendicant wrote:
You fiend! Then how will we get to the Lost World at the Center of the Earth?

The Lost World at the Center of the Earth was accidentally filled with Lava, but nobody is taking credit/responsibility for it.
Be Well!
Fireheart

Gravity is a harsh mistress.