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curiosity on char exspansions
now that we officially have a 3rd page with our 17th char slot how long before we get to fill the rest of the third page with more characters xD
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To be a bit more precise, the storage itself is not so expensive but the whole package. The data is not only stored once, but at least twice. It's mirrored to a backup or data storage plus there are security measurements running (I think they are called snapshots). But this is only what I heard, so I have no idea if this is the real reason for limitation (why not give us 100 slots per account?).
There is some policy about server such as, if a HDD got a few kb of bad sectors, then the whole disk have to be removed/replaced. That hard disk is then shipped to its manufacture to be RMA/repaired. They won't be good as new since they only replace the faulty part (in this case, the disk which got the bad sectors), and then send back to the server's company and to be put on stand by as "new" hard disk in case another hard disk failed. So, when the server got a new HDD, most of them won't be necessarily "new" but it is a reconditioned or refurbished hard disk as it is a part the their agreement (server-manufacture hardware supply). So, in the end, that hard disk actual life-span is getting lesser and lesser over time, which more RMA/repair services required.
You sell a product that isn't expensive, but you got a contract which only you could services or repair said product and this is where your profit were made. We can says the hardware isn't expensive, but their services is. It's just how a business is run.
Edit 1: Grammar and spelling check.
But let's go back and consider how much data does our character take: Everything on the character is just a code/pointer to the right textures and 3D structure parameters. The big part is locally rendered. We have only 11 race and gender combinations, out of these they have their set face counts, like, say 20 of them (and it's not that much if I recall), ~50 skin tones or something, a handful of this and that. All a bunch of small numbers, sliders go form 1 to 32, some races got more sliders than others. Thighs changer, height changer, breast changer, and now we go into items: let's say the game has 4 billion items. That's still a 32 bit integer per item. All your inventory + your pet's bank + your account's bank on each server and so on.
End of the day I'm betting we're struggling to make the ENTIRE account be bigger than 1MB if coded the right way. For a 1TB drive that's... well... one million accounts on one single drive. Let's blow the file size up to 100MB. Still 10K accounts on a single 1TB server drive, and those are not uncommon. That's with 100MB account size that is totally out of proportions, if we go the middle way with 10MB, on a 10 drive array with 1TB drives each, again 1 million accounts on this array that is not particularly expensive and nothing out of ordinary, in fact super cheap, small and unlikely, and I still bet the accounts are not close to 10 MB in total. Tho it's TERA code so anything could be true even the 100MB value there.
For the record I'm ignoring entirely the 1GB = 1024MB thing to simplify it as it's not important at all in this case.
There could be some other reasons behind the character cap being raised one by one instead of BANG 255 characters! but I doubt it has to do with storage.
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and how does this relate to the fact that we don't have more than 17 slots???
....lots that....
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they sell?
Which means, buy a monthly account in order to play, with limitation character slots. If you want more character slot, you will have to buy its character slot until it reach its full limit. If you still want more character, you will have to buy another account which again, with limitation slot, and buy more character slot until it reach its full limit. Because of this, the lower your accounts character slot limit, the more account you have to buy.
Repeat this over and over, the publisher is then making money, thus profits. In other words, the less you have, the more you have to buy.
Now this game is Free 2 Play, in order to sell those character slot, you will be given only 2 character slot as starter. Buy more character slot if you want until it reach its full limit. It is however no specific rules that you can't have multiple account to play this game. Sure you can make 5 accounts with 2 character slot each. That will bring 10 character slot for free.
This business role is famous by any online game developer/publisher.
Now that we have Tera Rewards system which each account would have their own bonus which you can obtain via spending money or efforts ingame. This would makes whoever have multiple account, would have different Tera Rewards Tier depending which account you favor/spent money/efforts, rather than your alternate character in other account(s).
But again, same business role model is again will be used here.
If you look at here: Tera Rewards Official Page News
http://tera.enmasse.com/game-guide/tera-rewards
It shows that the higher your Tera Reward Tier, the more benefits you have. So, more account, more money/efforts you have to spent on each account you have in order to get your Tera Reward Tier higher. This at the same time, indirectly would make you have to buy more character slot for your favorite account, and or spend more money/efforts to your alternate account(s).
You could say, this is business it is all about money.
Yes, the beginning of the game made sense to lock the char slot max count, but now? I really don't think anyone would go out of their way to purchase EMP and elite specially for a separate account's reward tier. They'll just play another server. Considering the server count, you can make quite a LOT of characters, but it's still annoying to have your favorite one locked out. End of the day the player just [filtered] about it instead of having it easy, and Enmasse wins nothing.
I cannot imagine a single player paying twice for Elite to have more than 17 slots on a single server. It will either be another account with NO elite at all, or no account at all and a player complaining about the lock.
I can also not imagine they would think this is a great business strategy.
Sure you can create more character in different server but most player would concern about their items in said server. Lets say you have maxed your character slot (in this case 2, Mr.A and Mr.B) in Tempest Reach with lots of Masterwork Alkahest and Tier 10 Feedstock (as extra you get from drop and quest), but in for Mr.C in Celestial Hills however, alone and having no MWA and T10 FS to enhance his gear. So, in this Celestial Hills server, you have to start to grind again in order to get those MWA and T10 FS. Same things happen for another character, in another server (For example Mr.X and Mr.Y in Ascension Valley) and so on.
This doesn't including your friends in guild(s), or friendly players that you've been together doing BG and dungeons. Lets say you are trying to do a dungeon using IM / LFG with people you get randomly. With random people, it comes with random performance as well (said player's gear, skills etc). This would cost you more time and efforts to complete it. Rather than when you are doing with your friends/guild with confirmed performances and sure complete-in-time with optimized efforts. This is what most hardcore players concerns about. They don't do IM with a random players that can cost their dungeon entry, time and efforts.
This is a simple dungeon run. Now think about HH or CU. It require more efforts and time consuming.
You'd surprised how many player have multiple elite account although I can not state some kind of prove.
As long it can generate money because in business, every penny counts.
In the end, there is always a "free" methods to use in order to maximized your game experience in Tera. It is up to you to spent actual money or in-game currency to buy those character slot and many more.
They only have two servers, both PvP65 (both were pure PvP in the past) for that matter (so stop complaining about PvE/PvP server issues lol). Apart from that, the second server is more of a newbie server, usually used as a springboard to the main server.
From that, they look out for the account average. Unlike NA accounts, Korean accounts are tagged by their national identification number (of course there will be some people who decide to codegen a Korean ID but it is detectable. From there, they track the average number of characters used per account, how many are used frequently etc. 16 was a very safe number considering Tera didn't have 16 classes yet, and very few players play all 16 characters regularly.
@ElinLove forgot one thing about account slots. Size is not an issue when it comes to accounts, it is the eventual operating costs and maintenance fees that add up. By allowing more characters you also need to prepare more redundant space. Even then, not many people actually own 16 characters as of writing. BHS has never seen an actual reason to why you need more than one character of the same class, especially when 95% of the active accounts don't have 16 characters to begin with, and only like 0.1% using all their 16 characters to use.
I don't see how it would increase operational costs, it's pretty much like saying every cloud storage user with a 10TB account literally has that 10TB of space there, ready for him in the form of 10TB of hard drives. No cloud storage server in existence would have as much physical space as you would end up "requiring" if you multiply all accounts per their allowed space, it's ludicrous.
Same goes for these extra character slots: exactly because so few people would actually require it, that you wouldn't need to change anything in infrastructure on the servers. Also the entire extra redundant space would likely not be much anyway.
The end of the story is: a handful would require, many would be happy, the investment for that is really low (I'm really wiling to bet it's just some small code rewriting), and the possible profits are real. They sell character slots, they have more possibilities to sell them.
Like stated on some previous topic: some people just love creating characters for the heck of it. And these characters may be simply used as dress up dolls from Lv 1 onwards, this is all money that the company earns directly or not (EMP sellers are their love).
To be fair I still have a Lv 54 Gunner elf that I created, bought her a costume, and don't play but don't also want to delete. Cause yes, don't judge. I'm not the only one around that would benefit from this.
No one is judging. But you have to remember a company has to do what is best for their service to maximise profit.
Yes you are right, there are people who love creating characters for the heck of it. Not many ended up being used. But exactly how many people actually have that many characters to doll around? Put into percentage wise, you are probably one in a thousand players at the minimum.
Given the same statistics, should BHS actually spend that bit more just so that a select minority gets a small QoL boost where the rest actually isn't affected at all? Sure BHS has done pretty bad decisions in the past, but even at this point, the move to remove character limits won't make any sense. If anything, the character limit would be increased only when there is a legitimate need for it (more than 16 classes, meaning a larger group of players will be affected even if it is still a really small amount of active players).
PS: You are basing your knowledge of a cloud storage system, in which your logic is actually flawed because most services actually have to prepare more physical space and redundancy than intended for users. This is the same for game servers, they always prepare extra storage and redundancy whenever you know a new class is coming out or new maps etc.
Local phone companies (AT&T for example) do exactly as ELove said, at no point in time can a O.E. / single switch card (on the switch I once worked on @ Bham Main and Tow ( lata tandem)) go above 65% usage or it will cause the card to crash as the cards physically are not capable of handling the 100 directory #s assigned to it. So if guy # 66 picks up his phone while 65 other people are talking that block of 100 will go down until that card is replaced in the switch.