Housing Slot Increases WILL NOT Be Coming With Summerset

TankinatorFR

WoW, ESO, Space Engineers and Ark.
In three seconds, 4 examples of games where the company decided to raise the minimal configuration.

When a game is supported for years, minimal config changes happens.

About houses, I don't really understand where the technical limitation is, and I would be glad if the devs could explain it.
If it was really a technical limitation on our end, then my 5 years old ancient notebook should probably have a hard time running it. Last time I used it, it was running at high-50+FPS in 1080p, with a raw power sitting moderately above the minimal config.

Carbonised

At the very least, they could give us an /option/ to toggle on more housing slots, give it a big fat warning that it may cause your potato PC to render things slowly.

It sucks so majorly that we all have to live with the minimum slots available, solely because someone on console or PC potatoes can't handle any more items.

What happened to freedom of choice, what happened to giving us an /option/ for more housing slots, with the clear knowledge that any risk associated with it had to be on the user?

Heck, this game crashes a billion times in trials and Cyrodiil anyway, who cares if you experience another crash in your own home?

Woefulmonkey

@TankinatorFR

The technical limitations are almost certainly in 'Collision Detection' which is a CPU bound operation (Not GPU).

Rendering (GPU Bound usually but not always) operations are mostly about displaying triangle with texture maps. If you don't have things like mirrors shadows or dynamic lighting (all of which ESO basically removes from the game) it is basically a lineally increasing cost to display more objects. Additionally their are many ways to 'reduce triangle' during design processes which allow you to 'cheat' and display more things. (That is the kind of stuff that Dev's discover over time that allow them to improve rendering operations to give more detail).

Collision Detections has nothing to do with 'Rendering' it is about how object in the game interact so you don't fall though the floor or fall though a plank that you just place or that the apple you just placed does not fall though the desk you set it on.

That is a process where the cost increases at a geometric rate. Basically for each object that can move in the world they have to check if that object 'could' interact with any other object, then test if the 'do' interact and if they 'do' interact how they should 'move' because of that interaction.

So, every movable object basically has to run a test against every other object which means that number of calculations required for collision detection can be represented by a Worst Case formula like this N * (N -1) or (N2 - N).

So the calculation needed for 2 object is 2....

For 10 objects it is 90

For 100 objects it is 9900.

For 700 objects it is 489300

For 1000 objects it is 999000

And for 1400 objects it is 1958600.

Do you start to see the problem here?

Going from 700 object to 1000 more than doubles the amount of collision calculations they have to support.

Going from 700 to say 1400 requires more than 4 times the number of collision calculations.

Now games do a lot of things to cheat to try to reduce those calculations so the increase is probably not this bad, but is likely still a Geometric progression of some kind.

As for your examples please post links... my searches turn up nothing.

To be clear I am looking for examples where a company basically told existing customers they could not longer play a game they paid for by increasing min spec requirements after a release and with a 'Patch' not an 'Expansion' or a 'New Version' of the game and where customers were 'OK' with being kicked off the game or being forced to buy new hardware to continue playing.

'New Versions' and 'Expansions' are 'New Products' and that is something totally different.

When ESO releases an 'Expansion' that have every right to make it have 'New Specs'. They could have made the next expansion a PC only game with high end specs...

but they chose not to...

why?

Because they would loose revenues fro all their Console customers and a large population of their PC customers. (We are not talking about hundreds of accounts here we are talking about millions)

So unless you are offering them a way to make up all that lost revenue I would not expect them to 'chose' to make less money.

Woefulmonkey

@Carbonised

What you are suggesting is a sliding scale service agreement.

Here are the problems with that aside from just that the 'Majority' of customers would not befit from it and the 'pricing' structure issues it would cause.

So lets ignore the following obvious issues:

Why should I pay the same prices as you for a 'House' if I get half the slots you do?
If I am only going to use half the slots why should I have to pay full price for a house?

And focus on ESO's issues:

It means more testing costs for ESO for a small subset of customers.

Basically right now ESO just has to test against a variety of low end min spec machine to ensure compatibility with 'All Customers'.

If it does not break the 'Potato Box' is should not break 'Your Box' right?

But how do they make sure you can't break 'Your Box'?

ESO would have to buy more hardware of various configurations to try to ensure things work as expected with 'enhanced' settings as hardware scales up.

What if they upped the count to a point where you got a character 'Stuck' in your house because it continually failed to load or would load but your UI was show horked you could not move or select your UI to exit the home.

Even if they warned you that something 'Bad' could happen would you accept never being able to use that character again because if an issue like that?

Would you accept never being able to 'Enter' a house you paid for because if you did you would get stuck now?

I doubt it. You would probably demand that they 'Fixed' your house and 'Freed' your stuck character.

Testing won't catch everything so something like this is going to happen eventually and possibly at a large scale.

Which means what? More support costs for when people accidently up their 'Slot Count' for houses too much.

Here is a possible solution....

What if ESO were willing to 'Sell' you extra slots at 'Your Risk' for only say 1$ per slot per house?

Would you pay that?

If so, why not propose that to ESO... just remember that you $1s will probably not be refundable if it breaks your game experience on your box.

I would be more than happy to support the idea that 'You' pay for game options that only benefit 'You' so long as 'I' don't have to pay for them and they don't put 'My' potato box experience as risk.

Carbonised

@Woefulmonkey

What are you, ZOS' lawyer? How about the fact that many of us paid very good money for these houses, and many of us are left unsatisfied and frustrated due to the extremely low furnishing limit, that basically allows you to put a few furniture pieces across all your rooms and make everything look boring, uninteresting and common, or allows you to really decorate a few rooms as you would like them, leaving the rest of your house an empty ghost house with little to no furniture pieces?

I don't really give a damn about the reasons why, I don't give a damn about your non-fixes, or the limitations of consoles or potato computers.
But if ZOS doesn't start changing this, you can be sure that I'm not going to buy any more of these houses, since their primary purpose is fun and amusement and cosmetics only, seeing as housing has 0 real use in this game, and since the fun and amusement is being severely limited by the furniture cap, I don't see a reason why I should want to buy any more of them.

Varidian

My answer is quite simple. Stop being cheap and upgrade with the times. The game is four years old. Consol is a separate issue because they are capped at capacity until a new console is released...

But as for low end pc players the bottom line is, on average every five years the bar is raised just that inch more for pc game performance...

Games are getting bigger and more detailed. You can't let the low end issue sit there as the scape goat forever. If the game can't evolve than it will become obsolete... I'm already looking into moving to a different game for this example reason.

TankinatorFR

Woefulmonkey wrote: »

Do you start to see the problem here?

I absolutely do not understand the link between my statement and yours.
My statement is that the configurations indicated seems powerful enought to not struggle when running this game.
If a slightly above minimum specification computer is enough for a fluid experience, even in a full house, then, it is probably not where the problem sit.
This game do not seems to be like other games where minimal config is barely enough to make the game run in low 20fps 720p with freeze everywhere because of calculations troubles.
So they probably have some room for improvements on some sides, including this one if they wish.
That was the only signification of this part of my message, I wasn't asking for someone to explain me things I already know.

Woefulmonkey wrote: »

As for your examples please post links... my searches turn up nothing.

Look for WoW vanilla and it's upcomming expansion. Also recommanded GPU for next expansion is a GTX960, something "slightly" more powerful than the original recommanded "GeForce 2".

Look for ESO dropping DX-9 support (and associated configurations, of course).

Look for Space Engineer dropping DX-9 and 32bit support. They also stopped recommending processor under gen7 or AMD's equivalent. Also the original minimal GPU was 8800GT, while the actual one is a GTX 4X0.

Ark is more tricky. They simply changed their minimum configuration (and recommanded one too), without any clear announcement, because the original one wasn't compatible with the reality of the project. Also, not accouting for an eventual lack of optimisation, they had improved textures, models, increased max creature number on map, increased max structures per area... And they wanted to continue this way.

In all these case, the consumer is forced to move to a new configuration to continue playing.
In these examples, the only exception would be Space Engineers, as you can still install the last DX-9 compatible version ; the problem being that you are stripped of at least half the game's content and most posterior bug-fixing.

Woefulmonkey wrote: »

To be clear I am looking for examples where a company basically told existing customers they could not longer play a game they paid for by increasing min spec requirements after a release and with a 'Patch' not an 'Expansion' or a 'New Version' of the game and where customers were 'OK' with being kicked off the game or being forced to buy new hardware to continue playing.

'New Versions' and 'Expansions' are 'New Products' and that is something totally different.

So if ESO change it's configuration with it's chapter, wich is numbered as a new version and is also the closest thing they have from an expantion, then there is no problem ?

Blizzard is just publishing the requirement for the next expansion. They don't tell peoples to change config but the result is the same : if the minimum specifications are raised above yours, then, you loose an efficient access to the product you've bought years ago, because the game will change with the next expansion, and you can't simply stay on the old version.
KeenSoftware and Zenimax explicitly told their communities that they were stopping their support of old dx9 only materials, and that more recent equipments were now required to play their games. Couldn't be clearer.
WildCard, as stated above, did it without a word.

Are some people unhappy when it happen ?
Yes. But it happen for everything, and it never stopped anything. So just because something is making someone unhappy doesn't mean that this something will not happen.

Anyway, my point wasn't about "ESO should raise it's min requirement again", but simply "those who are saying that games witch are not simply published but rather supported for years do not change their minimum requirement are wrong".
Why do I have this feeling that just because you give counter-argument, most people are assuming that you are opposing to them ?
My intention was nothing more than to stop peoples from using an erroneous argument and this statement is completely independent of my opinion regarding the need of increasing the object cap.
On this subject, you could probably consider me as a "neutral but curious". I am myself not especially looking for more slot, but I would be pleased to knowing exactly why the limit is where it is without any way to raise it. They stated from start that they were looking forward to increase it, so why is it still at the same value more than a year later ? What is stopping them ?

Woefulmonkey wrote: »

Because they would loose revenues fro all their Console customers and a large population of their PC customers.

Why ?
It's a max number, increasing it is far from dropping a dx-version support. And from a player perspective, it might be much less problematic to not be able to put the max amount of object in your house than it is to play with the lowest setting and the shortest possible viewing distance, being unable to see anything before it is standing right under your nose.
And even so, if this is the limitation, a compromise is still possible, and so the question is : is the actual situation a real compromise ? And here we go back to the fact that the game seems to run pretty well on minimum config, from what I know.

So here I come back with what was in my previous message :
What I'd like to see is a clear explanation from the devs. Is the limitation on our side ? On their side ? In the engine ?... lack of time to add it ?...
Of course, there is a high probability that no clear answer will ever come. It would cause to much trouble.
For example, If they say that it's their code, they will be incompetent, if they say it's the server, they will be cheapskate, if they say it's the least powerful machines, they will start a "war" in the community. At least, that is how the community might react to each of theses announcements.
But anyway, I wish I knew where were the mains limitations. In ESO's particullar case, and not in a general case.

HappyElephant

There must be a technical issue on increasing housing slot limits.
When they introduced the outfit system, we had so many problems with lag.
Swapping skill bars took a long time and animation cancellation is still not back to where it was.

badmojo

I feel like they are going to drastically change the way housing items are limited. Because currently its really stupid from a technical point of view. We just have this total number of items that does not take into account the items and the strain they put on the system that has to render them. For example we can add 600 single wooden planks..... or 600 unique and highly detailed items. But the way things work in 3d video games, having multiple copies of the same static object puts very little strain on the system, its one reason why most video games use the same objects in many places, the textures and shapes are already loaded in memory, its just a matter of saying 'put x item in these locations'. On the other hand having 600 unique items loaded and rendered in the same screen space is going to be highly taxing on the system. That is 600 different textures, shapes and animations which have to be loaded into your graphics cards memory and rendered on screen at the same time.

While the limit does seem low when you try to fill a large house with small insignificant items like knives forks quills and pieces of cheese, the limit is actually quite generous when you consider that having 600 unique and highly detailed items next to each other in the same screen space is possible.

I would rather see a system like Farcrys editor where it looks specifically at how much memory usage is happening and how close together objects are and limits that way. With the option to surpass the limit, acknowledging that performance might become an issue.

Its a private instance for me and my friends, we should be the ones to decide if we want 60fps or 5.