The Bar Brawl: Xunlai Thieves
By The Bar Brawl ~ 10th May 2011
Last week’s Bar Brawl came up with a multitude of well thought out responses, so congratulations to everyone. As was said on the podcast, we’ll be starting to hand out “awards” or “titles” to people on the back of their contributions. They’re not always for being reasonable though – in fact the sillier and more ridiculous the response, the better.
Kicking off the awards are Shongaqu and Klunk who share the “Double Trouble” award for their oddly well synchronised responses, closely followed by Bottle who can officially call himself a “Playa” for wanting a mount to impress the ladies. Shout outs go to Kyrai Styx, Bargamer and Ghostboy for their extra awesome responses too.
This week’s fight is all about storage. Lets face it, some of us like to wander through our lives with a little bit more luggage than others, and eventually we all reach that point where there’s just no more that can be stuffed into a backpack. Thankfully in Tyria reaching that point isn’t swiftly followed by a trip to the docs, but there’s still only so much you can carry. Its strange now to think that when Guild Wars started in 2005, players only had access to a single storage pane and four characters on an account when we now have a multitude of storage panes, material storage and characters. The problem of storage is compounded of course by that random item you don’t want to get rid of. Whether its saving an item “just in case” or for sentimental reasons, most of us have an item or two that we just can’t part with – even when our storage is full to overflowing.
Today, we’d like to hear your visions for storage in Guild Wars 2. Do you think the Xunlai will be making a return to Tyria? Do you want the system of storage to change in Guild Wars 2 – maybe we should be purchasing bag slots for storage instead of extra panes. How much of a strain will crafting put on storage space? Are you planning on purchasing another account to ease you pack rat woes? What random items do you currently collect?
Leave your thoughts below, email us at [email protected], send us an mp3 of your response or call us on 708.202.9262
Half the reason I don’t play “free to play” MMO’s is because of the storage. They either want you to pay for inventory or warehouse space. It goes the same with Guild Wars. I haven’t been playing Guild Wars very long, but I am already full. I haven’t gone so far to make mule character, buying storage panes, or buying another CD key to make another account for more depot mules.
One game that I thought got storage right was Aion. Even though that game gets bashed on all the time, they had a good way of handling not only inventory slot, but warehouse capacity as well. The one feature I really liked is the account storage. So, if you ran out of space, you got two rows to fill up, and when you are really running out of room, you can make another toon to put all that junk in.
We should have the chose to spend in-game coin on to upgrade our stash, and not resort to spending $40 (USD) to max out our storage capabilities.
If Guild Wars 2 also has the account wide Xunlai, I most likely will buy another account and just make mules with goofy names.
Well, we do know a few things about how it is going to work, barring the usual caveats of “everything is subject to change”. We know there is a focus towards making more things account-wide, and storage space of some variety seems an obvious candidate for this. Secondly we know from the demo that you have ~5 bagslots on a character, and for the demos at least 3 of those were filled with 20 slot bags. The rest were not filled with bags, but also from what I could tell not locked.
Given the crafting system, I think there is going to be a bigger strain on storage space, both on a personal level, but also in terms of within a guild. Guilds will want to be able to complete some of the more expensive items as a community effort, and will want a place for crafters to dump leftover mats and items to help their friends along.
A final point is the level cap: Storage panes like we have for mats in GW1 will not, I think, work simply due to the sheer number of different mats. I’ve mentioned before that once you get to level 80, you will not care very often how many “Broken Nose of Charrdolf” you have left over from level 1. In keeping with their philosophy of a simple interface, storage panes would be a waste of UI space.
So what do I want, given all these statements of the obvious? Well, I think in this case Ye Olde Bag of Holding is actually the way to go, especially if coupled with some sort of search feature. I don’t want all storage to be account wide: My various crafters will share some mats, but my Chef will get annoyed having to sift through my Armorsmiths piles of metal looking for 1 Dough, 1 Cheese and 1 Cream for “Delicious Cheesecake (no pie)”.
Give us about 100 slots of carry-around storage and a comparable amount of bankspace. Add to that an account pane (say 20 slots) for easy trade between my chars and I think I’m golden. I wouldn’t mind a microtransaction to say double your bankspace, as long as you get a reasonable amount for free (or at least for in-game money).
In terms of gathering: I think I will collect cakes and pies. We may never be able to decide the cake vs pie thing IRL, but given enough time I will be able to decide which type has more variety amongst the Tyrians. So I’ll let them decide based on that.
Brilliant
/signed and seconded
(thanx for saving me the typing time… well done, well said)
In game I am a horder, i hate to sell or trash stuff. I’ve never bought an extra pane for storage as i’ve always thought it was a tad overpriced. Especially when you can buy an extra character slot for the same price i believe, or even go and try and find another copy of the game in a bargain bin and get way more slots in the form of bags and other inventory slots on each extra character.
For GW2 i would like to see something similar as GW1, just more of it, and maybe even more specialist panels similar to the materials panel in GW1
I am a packrat and hoarder too. I recently managed to empty one storage pane by getting a truly obscene number or Perfect Salvage Kits, so I could get rid of all the gold/purp drops that had something worth salvaging, but I still have several mules full of pretty-much-junk.
Whether we’re buying bag slots or storage panes, it comes to about the same thing, except for ease of accessibility. I believe crafting will not significantly change this, as Anet seems dedicated to the “don’t make it unless you need it” philosophy. Discovering new recipes is naturally excluded from this. Crafting badly needs a dedicated blog post. or even a whole week.
I’d love to see the Xunlai return in GW2, especially if they make dark hints and references to the blocked-off campaigns/continents.
Why not something like minecraft?
Oh, that is quite ingenious.
Mind if I take your idea and run with it?
Let’s say we could craft storage chests which can be placed in our home instance, perhaps these could act as personal storage. If we need more personal storage we simply craft more chests (within limits I guess).
Then Xunlai Agents become the go-to for account wide storage, this would dictate also having a Xunlai chest in your home instance for ease of access and transferral between your personal and account wide storage.
I was thinking of something like this too. Make bags able to hold bags. Suppose a bag has 10 slots. Fill that bag up with 10 other bags and now you have 100 slots. Fill those bags with bags and now you have 1000. Unlimited storage from one top-level bag.
There’s a freaky “Twilight Zone” episode here somewhere… something to do with the creation of a singularity – effecitvely destroying the world.
From a programming POV, there is nothing preventing you from doing that. It’s a fundamental datastructure to have nested arrays (or lists or vectors, depending on implementation). However there are concerns about costs, both in time and space. The deeper you nest a list, the longer it takes to either retrieve a value or insert a new one (again, depending on implementation). Generally you can have either quick retrieval or quick insertion, but not both. Space-wise, you have to consider that if you give people potentially unlimited storage, you need potentially unlimited amounts of database space. Even if you never actually reach that singularity, you are looking at introducing server-lag into the system.
Gameplay-wise I doubt they’d go that route. It’s been done in another game, actually, Ultima 9. And it was a right royal pain to find anything in your bags even with 2 levels of bags (bags within your bag) in that game. I also think ANet has an interest in limiting bagspace to promote player cooperation: If you could potentially have as many crafting mats as you’d like, and we already know you can in essence have all crafting professions, you are diminishing the market for materials. A similar argument could be made for items: sure you could sell that old item, but if you don’t have storage space tradeoffs to consider, you may be more inclined to hang on to it in case you ever make that next alt. Were I ANet I’d rather you sell it now, to let another player have a good experience right away by gaining a new shiny toy, and also force you to go out and play the game (potentially gathering a dungeon group) if you want another one.
And active market is part of an active community, and packrats do little to promote this.
Also, I want your stuff (for a fair price)
I agree about the storage issues. I was thinking more along the lines of linked list rather than pre-allocated array to save space but your point about size is still valid as are the seek/insert issues. Tasha what kind of title would GhostBoy and I get if we got into an in-depth discussion of Big-O notation here.
That is why I would be willing to pay for the extra space. I left that piece out of my original post because that is a whole other argument and I didn’t want to get sidetracked.
I also see your point about management but really it is up to you to how simple or complex you want your storage to be. Many of us have already implemented this across multiple accounts. You have several accounts (bags) and on each account there are multiple characters holding things (second level of bags). I currently have a spreadsheet to track all the stuff I have stored away for Nick spread across all my accounts. I would be willing to do the same in GW2 if it meant I was able to keep all of the “stuff” that I wanted to.
My feeling is that it is not Anet’s job to manage my storage for me. Give me building blocks, even if they must be purchased, so I can make what I want to of my storage. If people don’t want complex storage don’t do it. If they do want a more robust storage then let them.
Brings a whole new meaning to storage Tetris.
Titles though… hmm… probably “Something for the Weekend”.
Discussion on that might be better on the forum, just cos you can’t nest far in comments.
Personally I was a huge fan of the Fable 3 school of storage and would love to see our character’s personal storage be tied to their Home instance and function similarly to Fable’s sanctuary.
I would also like to see storage designed around categories instead of a simple grid. While some people enjoy organizing their bags I find that a few minutes of killing monsters destroys my meticulous organization system. I recommend a system of storage where items have tags hard coded into them and you can create categories that group items by tags. For example you could group weapons, crafting mats or vendor trash into their own categories. Instead of selecting bags you would select categories. Bags would simply be tracked to identify how many storage slots you had available.
The real advantage of a categorized storage system is that it would be more accessible to new players who may not be used to hunting though bag slots for items. Since ANet aims to be the best game I think it is in their interest to design an inventory system that is easier to use than the modern MMO experience of icon hunting.
That would actually be my ideal storage system as well. I detest icon-hunting and would very much like if I could categorize loot and have some selection routines based on either hardcoded tags or custom ones (like “all level 60+ weapons” or simply “all weapons above X quality”).
I really only care which bag any given item is in as a function of how easy it is to find. If I can have categories or searching (or both), I’d be happy.
Shongaqu reclined at his table, muddy booted feet casually propped upon it. Taking a drink from his tankard the necromancer took in the brawl that was shaping up before him. It has been a rather relaxed affair, just a few people gathered around a table discussing a possible change in the way the Xunlai guild did business. The topic itself would normally not have piqued the pale skinned man’s interest, but he was spoiling for a fight and was decidedly drunk a fact supported by the twelve empty tankards stacked on his table. Still holding his tankard Shongaqu sauntered over to the group of debaters.
“You’re all wrong!” the short drunk man stated as he slammed his tankard down on the table. The conversation stopped and all eyes turned to the pale haired man verbally accosting them.
Satisfied he had their attention Shongaqu continued, “You’re thinking too insularly. Sure the Xunlai Company may do what they’ve always done just on a larger scale, but what if they didn’t?”
Shongaqu’s expression changed softening somewhat from his usual deep scowl, “Imagine if the great god Anet told the Xunlai to borrow ideas from the god with a lion’s head? Instead of a traditional storage system shared between you and your alternate friends what if your personal items and gold were kept in a vault beneath your house, Your gold piled high in one room your weapons and armor kept in chests lining the walls of another. Ofcourse your favorite weapons and armor could be displayed on pedestals scattered throughout your home and vault. Minipets would romp happily in your yard.”
Shongaqu’s expression changed again thoughtful this time, as he stroked a nonexistent beard. “If an individual were so inclined to share their goods and gold either with their alternates or their guild then the local bank would serve them well offering both services in convenient locations scattered across the face of tyria, this is the Xunlai company after all they have boxes everywhere!”
With his final point made the diminutive necromancer hurled his tankard at the nearest patron and attempted to upend the table at which he stood.
I’m a hoarder out of laziness. I’ll keep that useless water magic wand if it’s gold, that purple un-moddable shield from Prophecies, and those 15 Battle Commendations – purely because I don’t really care about gold or items, and the damn merchant is always too far away. It makes me wonder why I pick them up in the first place!
To me it looks like we get houses in GW2. So then obviously the best way of handling storage is to put it in the attic and/or basement, and when you run out of room there, build a shed. When that is full build an addition to your house. Then build a barn. Storage has been solved and the children are saved.
Of course if the “houses” are only for guilds, Well the same rules are applied as for where your stuff goes, but your stuff is subject to being sold in a yard sale by a jealous sibling.
A lot has been discussed about mat’s, crafting items, etc. I personally do not hoard nor am I an avid crafter, but what I found to be a pain in the royal rump was finding space for all of my various armor sets/weapons, especially in the early days of GW. I think giving us a storage pain to keep stacks of crafting materials was a great idea, now just do the same for armor and weapons. Now that we can potentially buy tranny stones or whatever they are called, people will have tons of different armor sets and if we don’t have enough storage that will not be good. I think we should have “switch armor sets” for various armor for our toon so they don’t have to be in storage when we want to switch to a set for a particular raid, dynamic event, or whatever, at the moment you need that specific set. We could just switch maybe up to 4 different sets on the fly when we are not in combat. Just food for thought, so Anet, i’m begging please, just give us more space than we had in GW at launch, I don’t care if you charge me a reasonable micro fee.
I am liking several of the ideas. I certainly would like more storage space than GW1, which I think is fairly fitting considering that a much higher level progression will increase the amount of stuff you pick up. I love the idea of panes-by-type, though I would also like to have at least one pane of “Whatever you want” for quick access of commonly used items. The materials window they added in GW1 was a brilliant idea, and seems even more useful in GW2 with a more broad crafting spectrum.
I tend to only horde things that will be useful later. That means I don’t horde pre-max level items (weapons/armors), but I always hang onto materials, dyes, and max weapon mods. The problem really starts at end game, especially as I gain more alts. Once I am getting max gear that is different in some way than other gear, I like to hang onto it if I might need it. This has left most of my characters with 5-12 greens, and some golds to boot. They have multiple armor sets of different levels of prestige, each with different runes/insignias for special builds. The end result is that most of my characters only have the first backpack and the 5 slot bag free, and the rest are filled with extra armors and weapons that I want. The equipment bags were a great move IMO, though I am still over-crowded. My ranger has pulling bows, a crip shot bow, vamp and zealous bows, different kinds of bows (long, short, recurve, etc)…
What I would love would be a pavilion like the HoM, where you could display your armors/weapons, *but also store them*. Like the Fable 3 method, you could have preset equipment packs that you have put onto a “dressing statue” for quick access AND display purposes. This could be a great way to store large amounts of armors, weapons, and minipets, or even Ranger pets in a ZM style.
Guild Storage is another matter I would like to be addressed. Having varying levels of access to guild storage is really useful, and great as a community. In GW1, our guild actually had a mule account that only officers had the password to. It served as a semi-convenient method of pooling resources (cheap crafting mats, dyes, etc), as well as a way for the officers to keep some nice items in reserve. I would love for there to be a mult-tiered access guild storage where there is a large low-tier access (which could be granted/denied on a per-member basis), and then an officer tier, and perhaps a leader strongbox to boot. It could be managed via the guild hall for convenience.
As for microtransactions- this is another pitfall of “evil” microtransactions. They could easily give very few slots, with the option to microtransact for more. I don’t think that is a very wise move though because very few people would actually do it, and I think it would overall just be a turn-off. There will always be a market of people that want a HUGE amount of storage, and I don’t think it is unfair to have optional additions to your storage for a small fee (though I think the current on-sale price of $5 is what the base price should have been) so long as there is enough space to actually accommodate the space requirements of the base game. If the game is throwing dozens-hundreds of items that have long term use, giving only a fraction of that is both inconvenient and obnoxious. It is one of those things that if you lower the price point enough, you will earn a huge amount more money because there is a huge percentage of people that just won’t pay more than X dollars for it, where X is a fairly low number. You may have 10,000 people that buy additional storage for $10, but 100,000 that would buy some for $2.
In Guild Mag’s interview with Ree Soesbee, she says that while the Xunlai Guild still exists, it holds “positions of significantly less prominence” than they do currently. This suggests to me that whatever means of storage is in the game is unrelated to the Xunlai. Perhaps rival banking houses have sprung up to offer similar services. Or perhaps storage and banking is part of joining an order? No, that wouldn’t work for account-wide sharing or for characters that don’t join an order. Well regardless, I like the idea of a banking house with a strong connection to the lore of the game, and with vast amounts of money and influence, kind of like Valint & Balk in Joe Abercrombie’s books. A finger in every political move and a coin in every noble’s pocket. Intrigue! I want intrigue! Plots and clever machinations. I see plans within plans. Ruthless men, women, cats, rats, giants and plants for whom the death of a child or a king represents nothing more than potential profit. *sigh* I guess that seems pretty unlikely, but still… A man can dream.
Putting aside the lore aspects, I guess there are a few things I deem important.
* Enough storage from the start that you don’t have to pay for more anytime soon.
* Special storage for materials and components and whatnot.
* Shared guild storage.
* Wardrobe storage where you can keep your town clothes and old armour sets.
I really like the idea that Greibach mentioned above, with the combination of storage and display. Any weapons you put in storage appear on a weapons rack in your house or whatever. Armour sets and placed on mannequins, tomes, runes and scrolls are kept on shelves, and so on. There would have to be a central place to access all the storage at once, though. No one wants to run to three different places in your home district just because you changed your build to something more appropriate to the task at hand.
I suspect that unlike Guild Wars where there was an Xunlai agent and/or chest in every outpost the Xunlai guild not operates solely out of the major cities and perhaps out of our as of yet unrevealed instanced guild halls…
For the storage bag, I beleive having a mail system part of the UI, instead of having a physical place to receive and send mail, pretty much makes a moot point of needing it to be very big. If I run out of space, I open up my mail and send myself what I don’t immediately need, to be retreived when I get a chance to sell some stuff. If I find something for an alt or another guild member, I can automaticaly send it to them instead of having to carry it around.
Having the ability to have ‘purpose’ bags would be nice, but instead of having a dedicated slot for it (here goes your slot for the bag that will only hold mats) I’d rather have ‘free’ slots and different choices of bags to place in them (here is the slot you can either put your normal, weapon or materials bag in). That would allow players to customise their 5 slots to their own needs. Having an added option to have new stuff either appear in your first ‘normal’ bag or your first bag dedicated to the type of item picked up would also be neat.
As for banking goes, doing away with the traditional bank as a physical place in game and having instead a panel for a cross acount holding space accessed where you can do crafting and in the auction house/market would also be very useful. Having those panel being upgradable via in game currency would also be a lot better then having to pay cash, simply because there’s so much more interesting stuff they could sell us before pushing for paid storage space.
I’m having this imagery of entering my home instance and just having crap laying around everywhere. You just drop it on the ground (or wherever) and it stays there forever. Why bother with storage when you can just leave 700 mergoyle skulls randomly lying in a back alley, just in case Nicholas the traveler is collecting them (for like 70 weeks in a row). I imagine the only problem with this would be that when I invite my guildies into my home instance, they would flog stuff and run off – just like half my CD collection (you know who you are, i haven’t forgotten).
Whilst storage is efficient and effective, dumping my inventory all over my home instance would be much more in line with the approach i take in real life.