Floria

It might be that the devs finally went into AB on a 30something alt and realized that it's a pain in the ass. Arathi Basin is a far too large map to play without a mount.

 

Spleener

MH, OH, and ranged/relic slot all follow the same rules, to make the ranged/relic slot follow different rules would take more effort, and they probably don't like relic hot-swapping anyway.

And the haste trick they're trying to avoid is people putting on a weapon with large amounts of haste (ie S4 haste weapons,) casting a spell with a long cast time, and swapping to a weapon with more +damage mid-cast, thus getting the benefits of both weapons.

Pretty much. Same reason why weapon swapping was nerfed in the first place, they don't want people to feel like they have to do that sort of bullshit in the name of min-maxing.

It's not that they don't plan on making bags bigger, it's just that there's a limit on how fast they can scale available player storage space. If everyone can suddenly get 40 slot bags, higher pop servers are going to run out of storage space real quick. Scale it slowly so that the highest-cap bag grows by 2 slots per expansion and the amount of server space taken up by item data won't outscale the server's total storage space.

 

• Abbi

The Ethereal Soul-Trader is a vendor? If he'll buy all the normal stuff, that's the best TCG loot item to date by a huge margin.

 

flyingtoastr

Relic swapping was actually implemented in a previous patch intentionally, its not like we're using some "exploit". This is a stupid argument anyway, you don't have to Spellsurge or Libram swap to be successful, its just something extra to add a little spice. All this change does is to further epitomize just how bad the itemization team is for WoW and put in another undue PvE nerf for the sake of Arenas.

Regardless, confirming that the bags are baseline 1200g:



I am only revered with LC so the discount hypothesis is wrong, Haris Pilton is no longer affiliated with any faction and the bags are always 1200g.

111 seconds

 

rayijin

A full gear set is 17 slots (16 with a 2h weapon).

With x4 20 slot bags and a 16 slot backpack, you have a total of 96 slots.

Lets take a typical (not-so-typical?), hybrid player:

x1 PvE Tanking Set
x1 PvE DPS Set
x1 PvE Healing Set
x1 PvP Set

Assuming 16.5 items per set, that's 66 slots used, leaving 30 slots.

Lets throw in other must haves: Land mount, flying mount, hearthstone, class specific reagents (2 slots), and some food/water (2 slots).

Now we're left with 23 slots.

If you raid regularly, you probably have a shadow resist set consisting of about 5 pieces of gear for fights in hyjal and BT that you often forget in the bank if you don't just keep it on you:

Now we're left with 18 slots.

Lets take this further and say you bring something like, I don't know, 2 stacks of mana potions, a stack of flasks and a stack of stat food and weapon oil.

Now we're left with 13 slots.

I didn't even mention carrying around a few extra trinkets/rings that could be swapped back and forth for differing amounts of regen/threat/mitigation depending on situation; and no vanity pets/other pleasantries.

For this type of player, an extra 8 slots will be nice to have.

 

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.

 

Floria

Said "typical player" can free up 16 or so slots by putting their full PvP kit into a bag, and then banking that bag and swapping when it's time for Arena matches.

Furthermore, most raiders really will only be doing 2 roles at most, whether it's tank/DPS (ferals, warriors), tank/heal (prot paladins). or DPS/heal (shamans/Ret/Balance). Bank that off-off-spec gear, and take a mage port/warlock summon combo for the less than 1% of the time when your raid make up is so screwed up that you need to perform a role that you didn't anticipate.

There are definitely the pack-everything, be-prepared players who run around with 4 free slots, and those folks will be buying these bags and subsequently filling them up. For the majority of players, a few minutes of organizing and AHing/vendoring will find plenty of space.

On the other hand, perhaps additional bank space would be nice, even after the bank buff from last year. I definitely think that players ought to bank stuff, and no one needs to tote 8 vanity pets at a time, but no one should have to trash fun stuff due to bank space being an issue.

Edit: Like you say, technical reasons are not a limitation. The real limit is UI and appearances. When I open my bags at the bank, it's a flood of bagspace, it's ugly. The makers of WoW do certain things for aesthetic purposes, and they probably don't want to have to redesign the UI to account for 48 slot bags.

 

Tanoh

You've obviously never worked in a production enviroment, as you think you can just add more discs and buy the cheapest available and it'll all work.

Anyway, I don't think that's why they're not adding more spaces. There slower they add new spaces the more expansions they can use. TBC added cheaper and bigger bags over pre-TBC WoW. WotLK will no doubt add bigger and cheaper bags the same way, as will the next, as will the next. etc etc. Giving everyone say 50 slots bag now would severly limit their chances of upgrades in the future. How do you move on from 50? 100? and then 200?

Give upgrades, but slowly. That's the model to get people to play. Of course there are some other constrains, if all we got were a 1 slot bag I doubt many of us would feel comfortable playing.


edit: As for the bag. I doubt I'll buy any. I got 20 sloters on Tanoh and don't have any space issues. I'll keep an eye on when WotLK bags start leaking out though and compare.

 

Ripman

Large enterprises do not shop for storage at Best Buy, nor do they cobble together fragile storage solutions from consumer parts. Your armchair guesses of how to provision for a system as large as WoW are very wrong.

The cost of redundant, available, manageable, and fast storage is much higher. Heck, the fibre channel card alone for some server hardware can run $2k. SAN tech is not cheap.

 

Mr. Crow

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?

 

Henin

While farming Ata'mal terrace last night for Credits I couldn't sell any of the greys I got to him. Just got a message along the lines of "You can not sell that item to that vendor." I didn't bother seeing if there were any items I could sell, I just started trashing things.

 

Floria

The encounters are currently balanced around VT doing what it does. Nerfing it right now would severely hurt Shadow Priests, who already do poor DPS compared to other classes at higher gear levels.

 

glowacks

While they are probably looking in to adding as many of the small tweaks that are going in for 3.0, the larger changes are likely to be held up longer because of the balancing of encounters. There's little chance they are going to change the mechanics of shield blocking or severely reduce the amount of mana returned with VT, but the change to CoE will do nothing but benefit raiders. In 2.0, there was a change to the armor curve that people noticed when fighting Patchwerk (and my own guild noticed on Ossirian) as well as a decent change to hunter mechanics that significantly changed raiding but "had" to be implemented then. For this reason I would anticipate that Blizzard intends to release 3.0 at the same time the expansion is released.

As to what other things they might change before 3.0, I really haven't looked that much at the changes to comment effectively.

 

Isin

The obvious connection is that Haris Pilton provides 2 extra slots.

 

Mr. Crow

Sorry, I should have been more specific. I think the VT changes coming in 3.0 will be fine if Shadow DPS is buffed enough to compensate, and I think it will be, not being a theorycrafter.

What I meant was about the current bug where VT returns don't show up in Scrolling Combat Text. I was hoping for a bug fix in these notes, and didn't see one.

 

Spleener

Not at the same time, that would be crazy- can you imagine the clusterfuck it would be if 2.0 hit at the same time as BC, bugged to the point of unplayable servers while people were trying to get into Outland? 3.0 probably won't be half the clusterfuck 2.0 was just because they're probably not doing such sweeping changes, but still, there's at least going to be a week or two between 3.0 and WotLK, I'd think.

 

Teza

I posted another batch of undocumented changes on World of Raids | PTR 2.4.3 Undocumented Changes

- Landro Longshot in Booty Bay suggests that the name of the next TCG expansion is titled "Drums of War"; this TCG expansion will include 3 new loot cards: Bear Mount, [Party G.R.E.N.A.D.E.], Taunt Flag. (Screenshot 1, Screenshot 2)

- New revamped ingame clock system. Automatically sets to your Time zone and shows the Realm time zone. by clicking on he old time icon. A New clock has been added at the 6 o'clock position on your minimap which displays the time with out hovering over it. You can set Alarm Message to pop up if you lost track of time cause you play too much. there is also a 24hour mode and a stop watch feature as well. (Screenshot)

- On PTR, the first parts for Stormwind Harbor are showing up, you can find the Harbor entrance at the northern canal wall between the Park and Cathedral districts in Stormwind. <The Royal StoneCutters Guild> and various Construction worker Npcs have been added to stormwind for the Harbor, you can witness the new npcs two of which can open a chat diolog box explaining whats going on and the new construction zone between The Northern area of The Park and Cathedral Square. (Screenshot)

- All non-combat pets have had their levels changed. Not quite sure what changes there level. Assuming where and what type of level area obtained it can vary from 1-70. Pets from SW orphanage quest are lvl 1 - Shattrath lvl 20. Disgusting Ozzleing farmed from a 55-60 epl zone - level 55. High level 70+ instance/zones/Quartermasters - level 70. (Source)

- New Quest NPC Don Carlos and his White Stallion have been added just out side Gadgetzan Graveyard in Tanaris. Quest name "Nice Hat..." Defeat his old self in the Caverns of Time within the Old Hillbrad instance Bring his Hat ([Don Carlos' Hat]) back as Proof. Not a Chain. (Source)

- Tauren Chieftains Band (LV70ETC) now play a Live Show within the World's End Tavern. Not sure what the time difference is for ever show but its always at the top of the hour as usual. (Source)

 

Mu

You damn well better believe I'll be buying a few of those bags, I've got some extra gold lying around from selling bear mounts and my inventory is terrifying. Cat, bear, moonkin, resto, several specs worth of PVP gear, shadow resist, FR for illidan, and the really good bits of nature/frost crap from my SSC days that I haven't vendored yet. Not to mention the random junk I've picked up over the years that I can't bear to vendor, like my c'thun tentacle and my good old warden staff. I've been making 20 slot bags, and I've got all but 3 slots with 20-slotters in them, but I'm just gonna sell off my mooncloth until this patch I think.

As for WOTLK changes I'd like to see them put in this patch before it goes live, definitely the 6% survival of the fittest. Having to use resilience gems to tank is really, really stupid. Indoor roots, imp FF affecting spells, passive omen of clarity, ferocious bite scaling with AP, frenzied regen scaling, demo roar being as good as the warrior demo, and the tiger's fury change are all things they could put in easily.

 

nfw

The bags are stupid, there's a profession that makes bags, among other things. If they needed a gold sink, make the recipe require an expensive reagent. (of course, there wouldn't be a need for gold sinks if they haven't put in some many daily quests). It seems Blizzard has no idea what to do with tradeskills.

 

Sydane

Blizzard doesn't want or feel the need for a gold sink, they have said multiple times that they believe inflation counters gold selling, which is a Good Thing™. The bag is just something that is relatively meaningless but useful, that gives people with tons of gold and nothing to spend it on something to do with it, rather than just waiting for a 20k two person mount or a 5k hairstyle in WotLK. It's functional but unnecessary.

On a related note, has anyone actually bought one of the other items on the test realm to see if equipping it has some sort of glamour effect on your character?

 

Buiden

The bags aren't nearly as stupid as the argument you have presented. Making a crafted bag solves nothing in terms of the gold sink wow needs. WoW needs money taken out of the economy, IE spent to vendors and thus removed from the server, not passed between players. Inflation is on the rise due to a dramatic increase in the amount of currency circulating and this should help that tremendously.

Also as stated in the post directly below yours, the daily quests shitting out tons of gold for everyone is Blizzard's solution to curbing the needs for gold sellers and it has been very effective. So yes they need good ways for people to make money, but they also need many ways for people to spend it. Repairs, unless you're a top end raider in progression, do very little to slow down inflation.

I'll gladly take a bag for every inventory and bank slot, what else do I have to spend money on?

 

nfw

You missed the part where I wrote the 22 slot bags could take an expensive reagent. As a gold sink this is just a short term solution since bags are not perishable

The best way to put gold sellers out of business is for Blizzard to sell gold themselves, a commodity they can produce more efficiently than anyone else.

Since I still get gold seller spam it's reasonable to assume people are buying, dailies or no.

 

Valerian