Is there a reason why house items limit is capped?

Dragonnord

Any ideas why?

I have a large house, reaching the items limit now (even with ESO+) but my house still has a looooooot of empty space, inside and mostly outside, to add hundreds or thousands of more items.

So, why I can't put something else in a space that is completely empty, where the nearest object is like 10 meters away? Or why I can't put another plant in an empty corner? Or whatever more...

Btw, my house IS NOT overloaded with items, not at all.

It's just a large house that, based on its surface and available empty space, can hold thousands and thousands of items, while I can only put 600.

Any ideas why there is a limit?

Thanks.

Waffennacht

They already said the limits are due to performance issues. They said they're working on what they can do to up the caps for all housing stuff.

Edziu

its ZOS plan, after month, months until next patch you need to struggle with this pathetic limit only to buy for 5k crowns per 100 limit for decorations after this time

Alpheu5

It makes sense in a way. It may look like there are a lot of assets in a normal worldspace, but that worldspace is mostly the same for all the players so the server only has to save one or two copies of it. A zone like a house is bound to have a few hundred thousand different instances that need to be saved. 5000 ESO+ subscribers filling a small house is a million items alone.

Cryptical

Alpheu5 wrote: »

It makes sense in a way. It may look like there are a lot of assets in a normal worldspace, but that worldspace is mostly the same for all the players so the server only has to save one or two copies of it. A zone like a house is bound to have a few hundred thousand different instances that need to be saved. 5000 ESO+ subscribers filling a small house is a million items alone.

To expand on this point...

And each item has its own lengthy item number, and location in the 3dimensional x/y/z space, and rotation, and state (lit/unlit/etc), and data pointers to the 3d model, and volumetric shape, and and and and...

They have said they have about 8.5 million total players, roughly evenly distributed between the 3 platforms.

All of North America on one set of mega servers, able to interact with each other at will. There comes a point when there is no possible way to provide a lag-free experience to such a large population of players simply because the amount of data space dedicated to each person means that not as many people fit into the max-hardware of a single server unit... Leading to a need for more server units in the cluster, which introduces system lag...

A very few people can have all that they want, all people can have a few things they want. Zeni has to balance that somewhere acceptable, trying to hit a sweet spot.

zaria

Alpheu5 wrote: »

It makes sense in a way. It may look like there are a lot of assets in a normal worldspace, but that worldspace is mostly the same for all the players so the server only has to save one or two copies of it. A zone like a house is bound to have a few hundred thousand different instances that need to be saved. 5000 ESO+ subscribers filling a small house is a million items alone.

Limit on inventory and bank space makes sense, it has to be in server memory all the time you are logged in.
Houses is an separate instance like an group dungeon, it loaded from disc then you enter and if you do changes this is saved, then you leave house its unloaded, you notice the load time.
say each housing items uses 100 bytes, only 40 or something is needed but database indexes and other stuff take some.
100*350 = 35KB, say two million players with houses you get 70 GB data, anybody have an old SSD?

Yes you can get lag with all items being light and all players in AoE rich duels.
This is not normal use.

NewBlacksmurf

Alpheu5 wrote: »

It makes sense in a way. It may look like there are a lot of assets in a normal worldspace, but that worldspace is mostly the same for all the players so the server only has to save one or two copies of it. A zone like a house is bound to have a few hundred thousand different instances that need to be saved. 5000 ESO+ subscribers filling a small house is a million items alone.

That doesn't make sense that suggests they've once again "did the dumb"

It's why you test and stress test before you roll things out finalized. They could've easily used the doors as portals to another place and that's how it seems now but you're saying we are just entering the house in the same zone as others mixed with the towns instances and sharing resources.

I don't know what is what but if that's the actual issue and it's not a doorportalto another completely different instance, I'd be upset.

I truly don't believe it's that the houses are in the existing zones instance because I do not see players outside of Hundings who areoutaide when I exit on the bridge.

Glaiceana

Yeah as @Waffennacht said, its to do with performance. I don't know about you but when I spawn into my house, all the items take a good few seconds to load in, fires and lights are the last to load usually. And I am getting close to the cap. So I'm guessing this is why. I hope they improve and increase it some day.
Each time I come home I worry if this time the items will not load in!

AdamBourke

I have a small house with 100 items in the garden, and about 25 in the house. When I load, it is noticeable that the trees dont load straight away.

However, I would be willing to take a little bit of a longer load time in order to have maybe 50% more slots.

Pendrillion

Also incentive to go ESO plus. You have doubled the space

mb10

*In the not so distant future*

300 more items in your home?

That will be 3000 crowns.

Toolzy

I thought that limit was weird too. But in all honesty, I would trade the item limit for actual storage. Like...seriously. I own a mansion and not a lick of square footage can I put a trunk of junk in.

Vaoh

Because ESO+ has to let you place more items somehow.

MercTheMage

So *** what? My *** takes literally a second to load and im playing on a borderline potato. The item cap is bs

Chilly-McFreeze

Astonishing how everyone seem to know exactly how many calculations and how much testing went into housing from ZOS' side, how much their server can take or how it's surprising to give subscribers a little candy and therefore scream BS again.

akl77

Cos it has to load all items when you port in. My game crashes every time if I travel to a house that has hundred of items.

Tommy_The_Gun

"Is there a reason why house items limit is capped?"

Those information are stored on a server (not your local hard drive). Every item needs information about:
- Item ID
- Position x,y,z
- Rotation x,y,z

Imagine a situation where you have all houses unlocked and all "full" (no more room for any new furnitures).
Now multiply this by the number of players - and you will probably get like a 10 Petabyte of data... that is a lot eh ?

zaria

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

"Is there a reason why house items limit is capped?"

Those information are stored on a server (not your local hard drive). Every item needs information about:
- Item ID
- Position x,y,z
- Rotation x,y,z

Imagine a situation where you have all houses unlocked and all "full" (no more room for any new furnitures).
Now multiply this by the number of players - and you will probably get like a 10 Petabyte of data... that is a lot eh ?

Se my calculations above.
Its gigabytes not more and its just stored on server until someone enters then its loaded as its own instance.

I assume they will sell increased limits later.

Molydeus

When I enter my house, usually the default unfurnished version loads a second or so before my version with all the furnishings. I wonder how much longer it would take with 1000 items, or 2000? 10000?

notimetocare

Performance. Data storage.

Chrysa1is

ZO$ will probably add more space eventually, but it will sit behind a paywall

Danikat

Too many items in an instance can definitely cause it to run much slower and eventually to crash. I've done it frequently in two offline games - Sims and an old simulation game called Creatures (admittedly that was with older PCs, but also 2D sprites rather than 3D models and a much smaller world).

In Sims it doesn't take much for it to start running slowly - so that not just loading the house is slow but even going up or down a floor or switching between build mode and live mode. I've crashed my current PC - which can run ESO with all graphics set to High - twice: once when I was trying again to see if you can fill every single square on every floor of the biggest map (I'd tried before and it crashed, but that was with a PC that was very out-dated), it was fine until I started adding basements and tried to go between floors. And once when I was building a "normal" house, not just spamming stuff but got a bit carried away, I think it was using animated fish tanks as walls that did it.

You can do it in other games too, but opportunities for players to add more objects to a map tend to be more limited. But "collecting" cliff racers in Morrowind would be one example - even with modern PCs it would start playing up sooner or later.

Of course I don't know if any of the houses in ESO come anywhere near that point. Especially since it's likely to be different for everyone - my PC can probably handle far more items now than it could a week ago when I was waiting for my GPU to arrive and relying on the onboard graphics.

Maybe they should increase the item limit and just put a very clear warning somewhere (maybe the loading screen for houses?) that it may cause performance problems.

The trouble would be if someone did put so many items in their house that trying to load it crashed the game they wouldn't be able to fix it, because they'd have to go into the house to remove items.

Alpheu5 wrote: »

It makes sense in a way. It may look like there are a lot of assets in a normal worldspace, but that worldspace is mostly the same for all the players so the server only has to save one or two copies of it. A zone like a house is bound to have a few hundred thousand different instances that need to be saved. 5000 ESO+ subscribers filling a small house is a million items alone.

There's also a lot of groups of items in the world that are actually just 1 item - like piles of crates or barrels that are all 1 thing (that's why you can only loot 1 of them) or a bookcase full of books which is just 1 object.

It would be nice to have some of those available to us as well. So instead of a bookcase + 5 or so rows of books we can just have 1 filled bookcase. (And of course still have the empty ones available for the mages guild books, or for putting other objects on.)

I've also noticed that most NPCs houses use a lot less items than many player houses - a merchant wagon might have 1 crate and a backpack in it, arranged so that you have to get close up and angle the camera carefully to see all the empty space under the cover. Whereas a player will fill it with crates and sacks and barrels because realistically a merchant isn't going to carry around just 1 crate of goods.

raj72616a

data storage and server performance, i am not so sure whether that would be an issue.

the graphics performance of your machine could be an issue, quite obviously.
let's say, if all the items you put into the house is copiew of the same chair, then putting 10 chairs or 500 chair might not be a huge difference. it's still loading the same texture into ram. houses and dungeons made by the dev are reusing the same pieces over and over again to save resources. but with player housing, we'd go crazy and might put thousands of different items into the house, with hundreds of light sources. we might argue that the current cap is too low, but a cap is definitely needed.

Zypheran

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

"Is there a reason why house items limit is capped?"

Those information are stored on a server (not your local hard drive). Every item needs information about:
- Item ID
- Position x,y,z
- Rotation x,y,z

Imagine a situation where you have all houses unlocked and all "full" (no more room for any new furnitures).
Now multiply this by the number of players - and you will probably get like a 10 Petabyte of data... that is a lot eh ?

Exactly this. But the solution could actually be interesting...
Right now, there isn't much variety in houses apart from how they look, they are essentially cosmetic. Instead of having 40 different styles of house what they could do is have 10-15 houses but with 3 different functions.... bear with me!

- You could have a house for duelling and guilds which has a high player cap but a low item cap
- A house which is client based i.e. the details are stored on your hard drive. This house would be completely disconnected from the megaserver and could be worked with a full creation kit. All interactions controlled by megaserver ( in order to avoid cheating) but the loading of the instance seeks data from the client hard drive. This house would prob need to be solo player but would allow you unlimited creation possibilities..... obviously not that simple but could be explored.
- Thirdly, a house as it is at the moment with a balance between item placement and interactions with other players.

This could give a certain amount of functional diversity to housing.

STEVIL

While i hope they do raise the housing limits at some point, i hope adding the more functional aspect folks have been wanting gets first priority.

A list of just a few is in my sig.

FuriousStar

So is it in a collective agreement that better performing servers are needed, or maybe new servers? Or a matter of adding servers to handle just certain aspects and functions of the game? Honest questions, not an expert in knowing exactly how Zen operates.

Smith4HirePmMe2Order

TBH im OK with them adding a +50% item limit increase that's behind a 1500 crown paywall (And that store addition cant come soon enough imo.).. i don't buy most of the stuff in their in-game store anyway, because it doesn't interest me AT-ALL.

PS: Yes i have ESO+, and no its still not nearly enough for the larger homes. The small (50k-100k) ones get by fine with ESO+. but the Mansions and Notable estates seem really empty. The Item caps on larger homes is simply to darn low.


IF ZOS wants more of my money, they need to start selling what i want/need. A Global account wide +50% housing item limit increase would be an example of what i want & need..

And if were taking notes here...
1: Obviously the above mentioned item limit increase..

2: I and many others would like a "Guild liaison" NPC assistant that has guild banker AND store. (ied be willing to pay 4-5k crowns for that.) that would also be a good addition for guild houses/HQs, or super heavy traders like me. (also lets be real guys and gals... There is NO WAY Zos will buff the current banker assistant to have all that. If were ever gonna have a chance to get it, it will likely have to be a totally new NPC as i suggested.)

3: Writ boards for homes.

4: A cyrodiil style wayshrine so we can connect to the rest of the network and port OUT, but not in.
Most houses are pretty far from wayshrines and trying to port to a house that's closer to one just to port, to port, to port... well let me put it another way.. Right now we have Have to *Loading screen* just to *loading screen* to *loading screen* to get out for free..... im sure you can see the problem with the current system by now and why a house Exit shrine is needed..

5: The Smuggler assistant needs updated to have a 25% fee instead of 35%, and a fence option needs to be added but at 4-5x the cost of the normal fence.

6: The Banker assistant needs to have its price cut in half permanently, and anyone who brought it at full price refunded half of their crowns. (this NPC is not worth 40$ tbh i have a hard time justifying 20$)

7: The Merchant assistant needs to have a repair option added, even if its at 2x normal price. (another example of an assistant that isnt worth 40$ in its current state, but adding repair would increase the value of the NPC and then an argument could start to be made in-favor of buying it.)

8: Add an XL 4,000,000gold/12k crown Imperial Home. The Largest one we have atm is 1.3m.

Those are the things ied be interested in buying for crowns, and thats what it would take to get me to spend more of my money.

Also Tbh if they do all of that stuff on my list then they should get ready for me to spend 250-400$ in 1 go. Cuz ill soak ALL that stuff up day 1.

Acrolas

The super-short answer is, because nobody likes things taken away from them. They'd tick off a lot of people if they had started the cap at, say, 1000/2000, then lowered it to 350/700 but ESO+ members could still maintain a 2000 item house if they were fast enough to load it.

If they slowly increase it and run into issues, then you're only going to maybe weasel 50 or 100 more items in if the cap is rolled back. Which would only be obvious if you started counting.

They'll still tick off some former ESO+ members who furnished prior to a cap increase, but then they'll look at their decorative Craft Bag and say *** it what's one more month of perks?

PriorityBalle

If its a performance issue they just need to up their game and make it more balanced for creative minds that have and wanna put alot of money into creating a extravagant abode.

PriorityBalle

#IncreaseHouseItemLimit

Pliz