The concerning thing for me about these QOL improvements is that @Shan is now relaying the point about the lack of item name. The inventory update has been 6 months in the making. At least 3 times in that period I have had senior customer service supervisors over this issue they have all promised address the issue of no item names to developers. Now it seems they did not get the message. Seriously how can the developers who work on QOL improvements be so ignorant of what would actually improve our quality of life.
Do people know that you have always been able to request help from customer services when you are close to the inventory limit. They can do a quick search for any items that are unusable by your current crew and email you back a list of names. You select the items you want to get rid of and they credit your account with the equivalent replicator rations for no credit cost. So the current update is fine for just deleting items, but if you want to be selective just send in a customer service request??
Thanks to those of you who understand and appreciate that the intent is really a first pass at improvements, especially to address the fact that players are being taken by surprise by the inventory cap and its consequences.
I am bringing up your concerns about the cost and I will relay again the pain point that is the lack of item name.
Oh as an afterthought, I think the easiest and most useful improvement would be to add a basic search box to the inventory. A simple search for the text inside the quotes " 's " finds most personalised items without the computational overhead of any crew database analysis.
Surely a long press on the item could show the name just like it does on the slider for adding multiple items. Minimal program effort or risk if it is already in place.
Final improvement for me at least would be for the replicator to show ship schematics in a different colour for ships you have already fully levelled. These are the most useful for replicating and are completely useless for anything else. Better yet to auto-convert them to replicator rations so they never take up inventory space.
Give me the QOL improvements job - payment in honour and dilithium!
DB had to program the game for those limitations. Those limitations are not as bad as they were, but you have to look at the big picture. If you take away the limitations of the inventory, each individual players storage on the server goes up. To us it's minimal, but multiply that by 30-40,000 players or whatever, it becomes a potential nightmare in server resources.
I don't understand why they even come up with such weird workaround attempts. Why not remove the item limit?
Part of their problem is the game database is housed on a MySQL server (no joke, completely serious).
This is a big reason why limitations exist, such as inventory and roster caps. I've asked database experts and all have said the same thing ... MySQL isn't the best fit here. However, it has zero licensing costs, reducing their initial capital and ongoing costs.
MySQL does have stability and performance scaling issues, so when you build a game on top of that, supporting 60,000+ players, you're going to have to cap things to help performance.
Regarding the credit cost issue ... my best guess, is they copied the mechanism for replicating items and neglected/overlooked removing the costs. It was probably the easiest, simplest way of implementing the same thing, as you're using the same functionality.
I would imagine, if they want to remove the costs, is they just have to remove the portion of code that does a credits charge, and just allows us to hit that button ... but without knowing what the original design/wishes of the dev team was/is, it's difficult to tell.
I sincerely hope this isn't all there is of the update. it neglects to address the major issue of the inventory system, namely the ability to sort and search for items in any way. Scrolling through a list of 1000 items where half of the items do not have unique icons is an absolute friggin nightmare and the number one reason I use external tools that interface with the game. Couple this with the fact that in every version of the game the inventory screen is still fubar and using phone screen dimensions after these last few years despite the numerous bug posts I've made about it is unacceptable.
I give this update a 3 out of 10. Completely disappointed, which I shouldn't be surprised at.
Comments
Do people know that you have always been able to request help from customer services when you are close to the inventory limit. They can do a quick search for any items that are unusable by your current crew and email you back a list of names. You select the items you want to get rid of and they credit your account with the equivalent replicator rations for no credit cost. So the current update is fine for just deleting items, but if you want to be selective just send in a customer service request??
Surely a long press on the item could show the name just like it does on the slider for adding multiple items. Minimal program effort or risk if it is already in place.
Final improvement for me at least would be for the replicator to show ship schematics in a different colour for ships you have already fully levelled. These are the most useful for replicating and are completely useless for anything else. Better yet to auto-convert them to replicator rations so they never take up inventory space.
Give me the QOL improvements job - payment in honour and dilithium!
Part of their problem is the game database is housed on a MySQL server (no joke, completely serious).
This is a big reason why limitations exist, such as inventory and roster caps. I've asked database experts and all have said the same thing ... MySQL isn't the best fit here. However, it has zero licensing costs, reducing their initial capital and ongoing costs.
MySQL does have stability and performance scaling issues, so when you build a game on top of that, supporting 60,000+ players, you're going to have to cap things to help performance.
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I would imagine, if they want to remove the costs, is they just have to remove the portion of code that does a credits charge, and just allows us to hit that button ... but without knowing what the original design/wishes of the dev team was/is, it's difficult to tell.
Second Star to the Right - Join Today!
I give this update a 3 out of 10. Completely disappointed, which I shouldn't be surprised at.