ArenaNet talk:Guild Wars 2 suggestions/Diversify currency and increase wealth limit

Tell me why this is "technically impossible"? If every single bank in the real world economy does this, why can't guild wars. Look at a mmorpg economical success story, EVE. They have no upper limit to the amount of money you can have, and that works just fine. If you disagree with me, why not have a discussion instead of proposing the page for deletion without even telling me why you think it is "impossible". Laurielegit 14:56, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

You might want to ask the original user ~ Kurd 15:07, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, I've done that now, but looking down his talk page, I can't see a single incidence where he has replied to anyone about anything.Laurielegit 15:54, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Basically, larger numbers contain more information, and more information require greater storage space. One byte can store a non-negative integer as large as 255, two bytes increase the maximum value to 65,565 and four increase it to 4,194,304. A linear increase in field size produces a geometric incease in the maximum field value, however there will always be a limit. -- Gordon Ecker (talk) 09:47, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Ok, but what's to stop Anet going and getting another hard drive or two from the shop. One terabyte drive will store 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, so space isn't a very large issue. The fact that I said no maximum does not mean that people will ever reach that limit. Anet has sold 4 million guild wars 1 accounts so theoretically (using GW1 as a guide for guild wars 2 popularity), using one terabyte drive for all gold storage, they could have 274877 (1,099,511,627,776/4,000,000) bytes of storage each. This may not be practical but lack of storage just isn't an answer. Laurielegit 18:04, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

I also want to add that you could have a impossibly high max amount of money in the bank, such as 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 and still have a fairly low storage space, 70 bytes in this case (2^70). The total amount of money in the game could get as high as 5808912631671152637335603208431366082764203838069979338335971185726639923431051777851865399011877999645131707069373, and it would only be using 500 bytes of space. I know I'm just using numbers to prove my point, but it is the best defence. So I hope that that has convinced you that we can have no max amount of money in the bank. Laurielegit 18:22, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

ANet has proved time and again they are incapable of finding affordable disk drive space. I can get a 2TB HD for 20 bucks behind the Best Buy after ten o' clock, so I feel no sympathy for them. --Jette 18:28, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Just realised I mucked up my maths. An integer using 500 bytes of space would be 131820409343094310010388979423659136318401916109327276909280345024175692811283445510797521231721220331409407564807168230384468176942405812817310624525121840385446744443868889563289706427719939300365 characters long. Anet probably use very stable and high quality hard drives, but there must be 500 bytes space somewhere on their hard drive. Please tell me if I am being completely stupid, as all I have is logic and the formula 2^(Number of Bytes*8)=Maximum length of integer. Laurielegit 19:23, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

The suggestion is not to have a 'very high' limit, is to have no limit, which due to how data must be stored is impossible. Backsword 19:27, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Very well then, suggest renaming page to "obscenely high max amount of money in bank." Or, better yet, "MORE ITEM STORAGE SPACE," which is more important anyway since most players do not have a problem with having too much money, while it seems just about everyone has problems with not having enough room for their nick-nacks. --Jette 20:00, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, I disagree with Backsword. We can have no limit, because we can be sure that the amount of money in guild wars 2 will never reach the vast figures I quoted earlier. It is all very well saying that theoreticaly you can never have an infinite amount of storage space, but if you never reach your maximum allowed, then it is irrelevant whether or not there is actually an upper limit.

I did some more calculations today, and arrived at another interesting conclusion. I hope this shows that storage shouldn't be too much of an issue. If we take the 2 statistics availible on the web, the fact that Guild Wars has 4 million players, and that 50% have 10k or less, 75% have 20k or less and that only 25% have more than 20k, we can deduce this....

4,000,000/4=1,000,000

1 million accounts have more than 20,000 gold, lets say they have 200,000 (generous I know)

4,000,000/4=1,000,000

1 million accounts have 10,000-20,000 gold, lets say 20,000

4,000,000/2=2,000,000

2 million accounts have 0-10,000 gold, lets say 10,000

Now lets say that everyone puts all their money into storage. So now we need to make our storage integers.

We will need:

1 million integers of 200,000; 1 million integers of 20,000; 2 million integers of 10,000

If we now calculate the amount of space needed to store each of these integers, we can get a better estimate of how much space Anet currently use.

2*8=16

There are 8 bits to a byte, so two bytes holds 16 bits.

2^16=65536

The maximum size for an integer 2 bytes big is 2^16, or 65536. This will suffice for people with 0-20,000 gold. So:

Now let's repeat the process.

3*8=24

2^24=16777216

This will handle our people with 200,000 gold. So now we must find out how much space all these integers will/would take up:

(2*(1,000,000+2,000,000))+(3*1,000,000)=9,000,000

This means, that at the moment, Anet probably have about 9,000,000 bytes, or 9 megabytes devoted to storing the gold in storage.

Now, I know that 9mb is more than I quoted earlier, but it is still tiny. I don't know a thing about servers and games, but I hope my thinking is something like right. I suggest doubling that 9mb figure, as many people cary substantial amounts of gold around with them in their back pack. If we are looking at guild wars 2 then double it as GW2 is expected to be more popular. That ends up as 36mb, which is less small, but still hardly anything compared to High Definition Textures or something. I for one, do not use high definition textures, but would welcome a bigger bank. Laurielegit 21:29, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

I read the new idea, I still disagree with the last point that no limit is unrealistic. If the space assigned to each person was dynamic, and the few super rich people out there could have 2 million platinum+ while the vast majority of people with 0-20 platinum could go along as always, then the actual size of hard drive space needed would be hardly more than today. Because the max integer size goes up massively when you increase the size of the space available, less and less space would be needed to increase the maximum integer size. I thank you though, for removing the delete tag, which seems to plague almost all articles in the guild wars 2 suggestion category.

Laurielegit

19:40, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Sorry to be a bit of a doomsayer, but given the tendency to nerf over effective farming, I doubt the gold limit will ever truly need to be adjusted, even in GW2. As for item storage, I decided to crunch some numbers:

Per item slot, I am assuming 4 bytes of data. 2 to ID the item, 1 for mods/customization/dedication/etc, and 1 for stacking purposes.

We each have access to material storage, which is at least 36 bytes of data (1 byte per stack, 36 materials). [36 bytes per account]

Adding up inventory slots I count 52 per character, and for the sake of my sanity, I will assume the very untrue 'fact' that each account only has one character. [+208 bytes per account]

We also have 4 pages of storage, with 20 item slots per page, so a total of 80 items storable. [+320 bytes per account]

This brings my total up to 564 bytes of data per account, barring the addition of heroes and extra characters, again for the sake of sanity here. Multiply that out to see how much they have to set aside right now, and I am coming up with 2.256 gigabytes of data for item management, spread between the 4 million accounts. For every additional character, That number goes up by an additional 180bytes (720mb, game-wide, if every account added a single character), and another 28 bytes per hero per character. Food for thought, if nothing else. Guildwarsrunner 07:52, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

This isn't about storage space, this is about space for money in the bank. I think I've seen several suggestions to increase the amount of storage space, so could you doom-say on their talk page please.

Laurielegit

15:43, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, but I saw a mention of storage space up above, so I figured this was a general 'make it easier to be obscenely more wealthy than a casual player' topic. So that it doesn't seem like I am trolling though, I will add in a suggestion that can work with only minor changes, and would accomodate the players that DO want to be insanely richer than everyone else, without altering the amount of data set aside for anything. Raise the personal gold limit per character from 100k (0186a0 in hex) to 1mil (0f4240 in hex). I bring up their hex values just to show that they take the exact same amound of space in a system.

Pros

>Trade simplification - Trades will be 500k gold instead of 100k + 100zkeys or whatever the current trade for an item that expensive would be.

>Extended Gold 'space' - Assuming an account that bought enough slots to have 1 of each primary class, this change would take the max gold a player could have from 2mil, up to 11mil.

Cons

>Price Drop - If eliminated as alternate currencies, both ZKeys and Ectos would likely drop in price, being useful only for their original purpose again.

So there is my proposal. Nothing to be changed except one control variable, and it makes things simpler in the trading scene as well as makes the people who want more gold to spend on nothing happy. Guildwarsrunner 21:03, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

I agree with you, but the drop in price of zkeys and ectos will be a good thing. The main problem with the guild wars economy at the moment is it's dependence of rares and holiday items. Let the ectos be used for what they were intended, so that players can afford armour containing ectos. Ectos were never meant as a currency, and let us not see a repeat of this in guild wars 2. If players want to be stupidly rich, that's fine by me.

Laurielegit

22:06, 9 January 2009 (UTC)