Guild Wars 2

I remember the devs posting about this topic quite a few months ago, asking for suggestions on what to add to material storage… Any idea when new material storage is going to be implemented??

It’s not going to be pre-announced; anet as a studio are following a current policy of “we would rather show you what we built when it is done, rather than talk about what we might do tomorrow”

also, I understand this was kind of a side project for a dev, rather than daily work, so it’s likely a bit slower by way of that.

It’s not going to be any time soon. If you go back over the topic, you’ll see that:

• It’s a personal project by one senior developer, not a corporate priority.
• That developer is responsible for several critical projects unrelated to storage.
• It’s a huge effort, the easiest part being asking us for suggestions on what to add.

She consulted us early about the part that will be most visible to us. Now, the hard work begins (as a side project) to figure out the in what form the new data will be stored, how it will be presented, and (worst of all)

Put another way: Linsey Murdock is as irked as any of us that material storage is so awkward and would like to overhaul the system. Getting it done won’t be quick and I don’t expect to hear about it before the next expac.

If it’s anything more than updating a database entry or two per item then there’s something seriously wrong with GW2’s architecture.

Pifil.5193:

If it’s anything more than updating a database entry or two per item then there’s something seriously wrong with GW2’s architecture.

At a minimum they’d have to update flags on the items that will be added to mat storage, as well as update the mat storage code itself to hold more items. This would be an absolute minimum in any well designed database, individual flags on items to tell the engine what to do with them, as well as the code for the storage itself to allow it to hold more objects. Even something as simple as adding more squares to the UI is going further than updating a database entry or two.

I’d rather wait and have this done well and be inclusive than have it be rushed through with bugs

OriOri.8724:

Pifil.5193:

If it’s anything more than updating a database entry or two per item then there’s something seriously wrong with GW2’s architecture.

At a minimum they’d have to update flags on the items that will be added to mat storage, as well as update the mat storage code itself to hold more items. This would be an absolute minimum in any well designed database, individual flags on items to tell the engine what to do with them, as well as the code for the storage itself to allow it to hold more objects. Even something as simple as adding more squares to the UI is going further than updating a database entry or two.

I’d rather wait and have this done well and be inclusive than have it be rushed through with bugs

First database entry is the storage itself, they’ll have to create new entries there for each item ID that they want to store. This will require updates to live database tables and as such may even require manual changes to a deployment script. It’s probably an automated system though.
Second database entry is the item entry itself, this should just be setting the “depositable” flag to true. (If this is even required, the existence of a storage slot for the item ID may be enough).

The rest, the appearance and behaviour of the UI, for example, should follow on automatically from those database entries. If it doesn’t, if you have to update actual code for these kind of changes then that’s where bugs creep in.

I suspect the bulk of the work is going to be deciding which items should go into storage. It’s highly unlikely there is just one person at Anet who can make those decisions without consulting anyone else so they have to get a consensus.

Getting player feedback on it would be a first step in that process (and I’m sure the devs all have their own ideas) but it is only a first step. They have to narrow the list down and make sure it’s not going to cause any problems (like items which are crafting materials but also function as a currency or key/consumable, how annoying would it be to get to a merchant to spend them only to find that at some point you’d accidentally deposited them and now you have to go and get them back).

I imagine it’s similar to when I was updating the list of websites we advertise volunteer positions on at my work. Actually updating the list took me 1 afternoon. Getting everyone in the department to agree on what should be included, how it should be formatted, what needed notes/warnings/disclaimers etc. took a lot of discussion and because it wasn’t a priority for anyone that discussion happened in bits and pieces over several weeks (basically whenever someone thought of something to add to the email chain) so overall it took a couple of months to get it done.

That sounds much more likely to be the reason alright, Danikat. The changes themselves will be straightforward to implement and test but you’ll have to run them past a load of people to get approval. I know that “currency” items (like Blood Rubies) in your bank is counted when you get to a vendor but I’m not sure about “currency” in material storage.

Edit: actually now that I think of it, vendors can see the currency in material storage just fine, I bought my ascended spvp armour using shards of glory that were in my material storage.

Assuming she has the bandwidth to actually work on this.