Suggestion Add last logged in, Location for guild and friends

The 24 is the max toons you can have. The 32 million users are the login info. People can have upto 4 accounts on 6 servers. The record count will be split up based on server but still is a record count. The messages downloaded to you pc is a good idea but what if you stop playing that will never happen and the sever has to hold the info...

5 severs with 100 records the same as 1 server with 500 records.

 

Time for the worse case... all 32.5M have 24 characters. Each player has an online "Mailbox" of 50 messages. Any more than 50 can be saved offline, but would be deleted if the user deletes the DSOClient folder. In this example, we would have to find space for the messages and headers of as many as 39 Billion messages. This number is already garbage because there are not 32.5 M active players and there is no way that even a fraction of the players that do play have 24 toons.

I'll use an estimated message size of 1 KB per because with point to point messaging, you would not need the huge header that you are thinking of. This would provide for a 160 character Unicode message and would leave enough space for a header of 160 characters. I still maintain that with a well thought out database and the fact that nothing ever leaves their servers and has to be routed across the world using standard protocols expecting specific headers that sender's name, recipient's name, and a date time stamp is more than enough to provide all the pertinent information needed in processing and displaying a message.

39B messages (1000 bytes/message)≈39 TB

Sure this is huge for a message service but not unrealistic given modern server capabilities, but as I pointed this is an UBER over estimation. Lets scale this down to what would actually make sense.

32.5M users... Lets say 2M-5M active users (Just think about all of those "Friend Invite Bonus" accounts that have one LVL 15 toon that hasn't been touched in 3 years or the people who have quit because of BP constantly shafting the players). Since we are talking about BP also adding a "Last online" feature, we could include a limitation that you can not send a message to anyone who has been offline for greater than six months and any message that is greater than 6 months is deleted. This prevents things from going nuts. If they wanted to make it even less likely to to be wasted space, you could impose a level limit before you are able to send/receive offline messages. That could help greatly too and could be a guard against spam. Depending on how many of these controls were implemented, that is what accounts for the range in my estimate.
Also, instead of 24 toons per account, lets estimate 6. I'd say that most people have four, and some casual players may only have one or two. The number of people who actually have and maintain more than four are so few and far between that they can not overcome the masses and will just be on the statistical fringe. I'll stick with the 50 online messages just as a good number to work with.

Now, for the math.

2M users * 6 characters/user * 50 messages/character=600 M messages
5M users * 6 characters/user * 50 messages/character=1.5 B messages

This would result in a database of 600GB-1.5 TB. Compared to today's tech, that is very doable. My home server is larger than that.

Now, here is one more modification that would make it even smaller to implement.

How about you get 100 online messages, but only per account as opposed to per character. You could see your entire mailbox from any character, but you could also see who it was sent to (which one of your toons). The header would be a little larger as it would have to include the server that it came from too, but that could be done with one or two bytes if coded well. The advantage of this is that if you are on your main, but someone sends one of your alts an offline message, you'd be able to see it and switch characters to interact with the person if you so choose. Now, I'm not advocating cross server messaging. I don't want someone in Grimag to message me out of the blue, just cross server reading. You'd have to be on the same server to write back.

With this sort of change, the data storage would go down to about 200GB-500GB, and if there is a major online game that can't afford to add 500 GB-1.5TB to their server infrastructure, then they must be well on their way to bankruptcy and wont be a major online game for long.

 

@_Baragain_

You theory works wonders when you have a message system in place. In fact even Facebook and Twitter have very small foot prints. But a game is a whole not her ball of wax. What your failing to see is the engine that the game is written in and for it the active/inactive user means nothing. In fact the inactive users will have more messages waiting. Since I last posted there are even more users have joined. The system that is in place does not currently have a way to do offline messaging ecp have messages as like a new type of locker system. This system has to have 1 slot for each of the messages that can come in. Just like the inventory you can have only 1 item. And even if the toon is inactive he still has gear. The difference is there is not preconfigured message so you have to have a user defined field. So the inventory for each toon has to have a preset max charters per item slot. That has to be preset so that even if you have no messages it still takes up the same space.

Here is a snap shot of the screen capture of the current user count. This is the logins and passwords count as of Thursday midnight German time.

 

Then I guess this is one of those rare times that you and I will have to agree to disagree.

All debate aside, I don't see it happening any soon, if ever. Plus, if they did, they would likely screw it up (after all, this is BP we are talking about). How about they put it on the road map for 2020 if the game survives that long. Maybe by then, they will have a new developer team that is actually competent.

 

From reading the posts i don't see any substantive objections to having last logged in feature. And no, offline messaging is not a replacement for this feature, which by the way does exist in other games with larger user bases. Lol.

What concerns the interface for seeing friend's or guild-mates current location being abused by spammers or stalkers that will depend entirely on how it is implemented. The idea that the feature shouldn't be implemented, because of potential abuse strikes me as rational as the idea that world chat should not have been implemented due to likely abuse.
I can't speak for others, but personally i prefer to know who the spammers are so that i can add them to my ignore list.

Regarding the discussion about offline messaging system, which is not really pertinent to the original post it is unlikely DSO team would be willing to allocate needed resources for it and not because it would require 1.15 quadrillion records (why on earth would someone design a database that requires 35 million (1.15 quadrillion records/number of users) records to store messages for each user even for the worst case scenario is beyond me).
It would be a nice to have, though i imagine they have much bigger fish to fry. Like increasing server capacity to handle guild wars maybe? Considering that at least agathon can't even handle nahuatlan or map 1 mobs without huge lag spikes and rubber-banding when there are a lot of players on.