Originally Posted by rayijin
ItemID+EnchantID+a line or two in a log somewhere with how the item was acquired = a couple of bytes. Lets be generous and say 1kilobyte of data is stored per item once you include all the logs.
Thus, adding an extra 500 slots per player is 500 kilobytes of data. Assuming you have 10 million players with 1 character each, that's a mere 4.65 terabytes. I saw a deal for a 1TB drive for $150 yesterday so we'll say that's the price each.
In other words, they'd have to add an extra $1000 worth of hard drives to all their servers worldwide to accomodate this huge capacity increase.
$1000.
Technical limitations / storage concerns are not the problem whatsoever, and never will be.
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I think that grossly oversimplifies the issue. It can't simply be a hardware limitation, because you are right in saying that Blizzard has the resources to fix that. This is more likely a design limitation in how their databases are coded for character data, allocating only a certain quota of ItemIDs to each character ID. This is something that's fixable, but I like to think that it requires more effort than sending an intern over to Best Buy for some drives.
Either way, Blizzard has shown in the past that they consider inventory management to be a gameplay mechanic. Remember Diablo? There was a real bagspace-scarcity game.
Blizzard limits bag space so they can give players progression in areas other than content. More playable content means more vanity items, more playable content means more recipes and thus recipe components. Blizzard increases bag space incrementally to coincide with content upgrades because that's how you broaden the game.
Now, back to patch discussion: nothing in there about the mana returns from Vampiric Touch, huh?