Suggestion Add last logged in, Location for guild and friends

As part of guild maintenance, we need to kick inactive players to make way for new ones... It is hard to determine who is inactive. A column to show log in date, which could be sorted would help a lot.

Also, if location was added to the friends/guild tab, it would help with grouping "oh, you are in Oceanus, can i come?".

Another idea would be to add more ranks, like Candidate and Veteran, to help officers with guild management.

Edit: allowing the guild to expand to more than 50 players is an idea too.

 

That would be pretty horrible.
Its already bad to be in Mortis Courtroom because of spam requests. With that trackinjg device "feature" some players would never come to rest.

About inactive players: Maybe talk to them?
If they dont communicate with you and you not with them, why are they in your guild anyway?

 

How can you talk to an inactive player? To be aware of inactive players, you would have to play 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and take a guess with who you have not seen.

I suppose something could be done about the spam requests part, maybe the location is only showed if both people have friended each other.

 

OK think of it this way. When your offline someone can send you a single reply that you have to actively go and read... On the fends list there will be a ! green or red in place of the dot. Click on the name and it will ask you if you want to read the message. If the same person sends 2 messages it will say pending. This is also a good way to add someone to the don't bother me. If you do not clear out their message then the can not send you a tell in game while you on. Of course that would be a setting.

 

A buffer for messages, I like it!

Maybe we could ask BP for this on Christmas, because it would require a bit of server capacity and they are not exactly keen on buying stuff.

 

Sever capacity never crossed my mind. Checking a simply MySQL database for a message server does seem to use quite a bit of space. Granted MySQL is a crapy data base but it's free...

 

In most online games, players can send offline messages to each other. If it did take too much server capacity, the other games would not do it.

 

What game with more that 32,559,545 user accounts do you know have offline messaging?

I ran some numbers and here is what I come up with. The server for offline messages if everyone was allow 1 letter "a" for an example the data base would require 10.6 EB of data storage. Adding letters just increases the size x times. My very humble suggestion of the price of hard drives would put it just over 1 trillion dollars per letter.

 

I Vote +1 for the new ranks in guild. They should have Co-leader rank, 1st officer , So on . will make the "promotion " for the members much more enjoyable i think.

 

I hope that was sarcasm and that my sarcasm detector is just broke because that doesn't pass the common sense test. Think about it. A user's character takes a lot more server data than even a small message. There is no way they have exabytes of storage right now to store character data. I think you may be off by a factor of at least a million... Maybe a billion. Consider this: an offline message could be 160 character. Each Unicode character can be between 1 and 6 bytes (not bits). Say an average of 3 bytes per character and you are looking at the 160 characters, each message would be approximately half a kilobyte (we are just taking rough numbers for order of magnitude comparisons). 32M users multiplied by 0.5 KB is about 16 GB... I could store that entire message database on my phone. Even if you double this (for multiple messages or allowing for every message to be composed of 6 byte character), you are still looking at less storage space than a good SD card, let alone an average server grade hard drive.

 

Well the way the database is setup for this game for a person to leave an offline message each person has to have a box for each of the other person. So that means the database has to be large. And no the user database is a lot smaller than the message database. Take a look at your email. Take out the message data and you get 1 message from everyone that has an email sent you a empty message how large would your inbox need to be. And your email is from the ground up to be for message delivery.

 

Still doesn't pass the common sense test. Your example about email: while it is true that even a blank email has data in the form of a header, the average size of that header is usually no more than a couple kilobytes and that is because it has to pass through multiple servers and handling protocols. An internal message database would have significantly smaller headers, like sender, recipient, and time. Including this data I may be off by an offer of magnitude at most to account for back end framework, but there is no way my estimate would be off by the six to nine orders of magnitude necessary to agree with your estimate. A good parallel would be a system like Twitter... There are billions of tweets and if you are telling me that those billions of tweets take more than 100 TB-1 PB (again, just talking about orders of magnitude), then I'd call you crazy. A well compressed database can be very efficient at storing small messages on a self contained system.

 

I like your suggestions but there has been minimal love for guilds showing the lack of importance the game places on them.

OK i'll start a riot.

Guilds in DSO are of minimal importance and until the recent change to % bonuses really offered nothing concrete that encouraged membership. They are a way of opening a new chat channel and offering an expanded social connection. Nothing in the game requires guild affiliation, there is no raiding, specific classes are not required to complete any element of the game etc etc. The friends list offers more in these areas than the guild list does. This is why members are so transient. New members join the guild; ask for help leveling, completing quests and killing bosses, and when done get offered an invite to another guild and the grass is always greener. Because there is no specific need for them or benefits other than that there is also minimal loyalty. Look at what happened as soon as they announced the guild PVP the first time. People started moving into stronger guilds with like minded and similarly capable peeps. When the PVP didn't come through as quick as thought, peeps bailed and moved on.

We have a natural tendancy as humans to take care of our own, and guild membership does satisfy our basic needs of belonging and acceptance. But until there is some true benefit to guild membership, loyalty and commitment will be minimal.

I do enjoy the people I run with in my guild, but I know I would run with them anyway because they are good peeps, not because their text shows up in green.

 

@BigPapa You had me prepared for a riot and i dont think you said anything too controversial. I guess most ideas can be implemented eventually, but its about priortising them. I would put guild pvp as a low priority because im guessing that few people will be able to participate given most people are not in an elite guild and there are not often 4 people available to do pvp in a guild since they would rather do m2 etc, yet they scheduled that for october. Last logged in date is more useful to me and easier to implement than guild pvp. We will have to see how popular guild pvp is (even though we cant since we don't have the stats, i guess a poll could be conducted).

 

I absolutely like the idea of showing last login, especially now that the guild bonus is based on active members, rather than just number of members.

For this idea, I am not in favor of it. I've recently had to shove a stalker on my block list and ended up leaving the guild since we were both officers there (so I couldn't even have the satisfaction of kicking him! XD). While a good idea in theory, I suspect some people will just use it to harass/stalk others, so it doesn't have my support.

 

Twitter would be 1 person so then multiply that by 32 million and then again by 4 per server. Remember each of you Accounts can have a max of 24 toons. Twitter is large but not sure if it has as much users as 32 million x 24. This is the max and not the actual. My account has only 18 toons on it.
Now this system does need more info than just sender receiver and the data. Since the system was not built with offline messaging so one way would be for each toon to have 299 blocks. 1 for each guild member and 1 for each of the 250 buddy list member. So the record count for the database looks like this. 32 million x 12 (min ~max) x 299. Now that comes to 1.15 Quadrillion. Each record will require some data to let the system know there is no message from that user.

 

@MegaNuker Space is dynamically allocated, a user with no messages will have no space allocated to that user. Also note that most accounts in drakensang are dead accounts. Where did you get the 32 million number from anyway? and *24? A free to play character has 4 toons max.

 

Each account can have a set of characters in each server. Six servers times four characters equals twenty four characters.

I'm traveling at the moment, but when I get in later, I'll do a deeper number crunch, but taketh has a good point about dynamicly assigned space.

 

@_Baragain_ The idea of messaging people is worth noting, but in terms of priority, im not sure it will be implemented 6 months later because of the development time versus the amount of people that want this. I am guessing that people would rather see a new mini-game like a mount race or something than this.

Edit: it could be desirable, a whisper not replied to could be sent to your mailbox, or an accidental offline whisper. But a revamp of the whisper system would need to be reworked for this to make sense; chat windows; flashing for unanswered.

Also, based on my limited understanding any increase in server capacity would need to be done per server, so it does not make sense to times it by 24.

Lol, i am surprised it took me this long to figure out that offline messages can be stored to each users computer. The game would have a buffer for messages to be delivered, as soon as the user logs in, boom, the messages get copied to a folder on the players hard-drive.