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Inventory Size, Persistent Storage, and the Problems of Item Hording - Balanor - 01-26-2014
In the never-ending battle against lag, I feel it is time to provide some details, requests/comments, and information on an upcoming change, to help address pack-rat-ism and item hording that can cause lag and other issues on the server which affect everyone. This is a lengthy read, and I apologize for that, but by going through it and doing your part, you can help reduce/avoid some of these issues that cause problems for all players - and greatly delay the inevitable day when all persistent storage will be cleared.
Regarding Voluntarily Enforced PC inventory Size Limits
First, I want to provide a little background for this upcoming change which comes from experience running NWN servers for many years, comments from other server admins in the community, and the NWN Lexicon article on fighting lag. Specifically, this section of that article (with certain text emphasized by me):
Quote:11. Limit the Number of Items Your Players can Carry
The more items a player carries, the more load they place on a server. This is one of the areas in which our knowledge is largely anecdotal, but it's also been commonly accepted in the community for some time — so much so that a limiter was already in place under our PW's last admin in 2004, before it changed hands. It was originally set to teleport players to 'Encumbria' and not let them leave until they got below 200 items, but this limit was lowered in several steps to a 150 item limit over a period of some months, with noticeable performance improvements resulting. It also stands to reason, since more items means more for the server to keep track of, and more for scripts to loop through, though those alone probably don't fully account for the performance increases we noticed. Any lag generated by packrat players is probably mostly server lag, unless item data is streamed to other players for some reason (and we have no reason to believe that it is), in which case there might also be a connection lag component.
In the Thay PW, whenever you pickup an item a script of over 400 lines runs, and may potentially call other scripts depending on the item. But to make matters worse, whenever you login this script runs for each item in your inventory! So for PCs logging in with a horde of items in their inventory, this can cause a server-side lag that affects everyone.
To raise awareness of this, if a player logs in with a PC that has more than 150 items, they receive an OOC notice requesting that they work to reduce the size of its total inventory. In addition, both the DMs and the server logs are notified. If notifications are often received for a certain player/PC, the player may be reminded by one of the staff to take care of it. Note that a stack of items (10 potions, 99 arrows, etc) only count as one item for purposes of the 150 item guideline, and that there is nothing automatically enforcing the 150 item guideline. If you go over 150 items during the course of an adventure in-game - don't worry about it. Haul all the loot you can carry back to the merchants, sell what you don't need, and move on with your life.
But if we start seeing someone often logging in with more than 150 items in inventory, or DM requests/reminder to them to voluntarily reduce inventory are ignored, then the 150 item limit can be automatically enforced on the PC. When this occurs, the PC will be unable to move if they have more than 150 items in inventory. This enforced inventory limit is only a last resort, and only occurs when someone has repeated ignored either the automated or DM requests to reduce the size of their inventory.
So in the end, I ask you please keep in mind that this is for the benefit of *all* players on the server. It is not some arbitrary rule made up to make your lives difficult, but something *requested* of all players to help reduce a known cause of lag, which helps maintain a more enjoyable experience for all players who spend their time here.
Regarding Items Sought by Questgivers
It seems virtually every PC carries around certain quest items like Ichor and Skeleton Knuckles for ages because the player either knows or hopes that they are wanted for a special quest – not really because there is an IC or roleplay-driven reason for their PC to have 30 Skeleton Knuckles in a bag, for example. In the past this problem got so bad that PCs were hording these items to give to other new PCs for little to no valid IC reason - just so they could quickly get quest rewards (even worse metagaming). As a result, these items can no longer be placed in persistent storage, which I do realize only allowing you to hold them in your inventory increases the overall number of items your PCs are carrying.
However, I’d ask that everyone really think about the IC reason as to *why* your PC would be hording skeleton knuckles they took at level 1 when the questgiver who may ask for them likely won’t do so until the PC is a *much* higher level. Instead focus on getting the quest items when your PC has taken the quest, and not before. As I have pointed out in other threads, it is possible to get all quest items in some way when the quest is in progress, so if your PC doesn’t know ICly that they need Skeleton Knuckles until its asked for – please sell them if you even bother to pick them up, rather than horde them in inventory.
Regarding Persistent Storage
This brings me to the last topic of PC item hording: the seemingly unlimited persistent storage options. Persistent Storage is limited by container size, as most people likely know, so you cannot shove 100 items in your personal vault, for example. However, it is possible to store things in multiple persistent chests (especially when there are a bunch placed in player houses). With each item placed in persistent storage, the database on the server they are stored in grows. While I have a way to shrink this database if items are taken out, the more items that are put in, the larger the database gets and the milliseconds longer it takes to retrieve (and store) those items as well as the increased chance of potential lag that generates.
I regularly shrink the storage database to ensure it remains as small and compact as possible, but as our community grows and more and more people start putting more stuff in it, or old PCs who have put stuff in it are retired/deleted/never return leaving their stuff in the database, it is inevitably getting bigger al the time. As a result, something like this will happen where the database is going to purged and deleted because it gets too big.
At some point in the distant future, the ‘Zulkirs’ will end up seizing everything in vaults and persistent storage again, wiping out all persistent storage! When that day occurs depends greatly on how much everyone puts in persistent storage (your vault, horse saddlebags, other persistent storage containers, etc). Therefore, this is once again another reason I encourage *everyone* to sell items that you truly do not need or want rather than stuff them in storage with the hopes that one day someone might need or want them.
RE: Inventory Size, Persistent Storage, and the Problems of Item Hording - Balanor - 11-18-2014
Our first storage database wipe since the setting reboot almost two years ago, will be occurring on November 30. You can read more on what this means for you here.
But to ensure we don't need another wipe in as many years (or hopefully even longer), I want to bring attention to this thread and encourage all our new and returning players to acquaint themselves with it.