Is there any reason for ArenaNet NOT to sell more than 17 bank tabs?

[TheQuickFox.3826]

Players have been requesting a raise of the bank tab cap above the current limit of 17 for a number of years now. But these requests have remained unfulfilled.

To me, it looks like a quick way for ANet to grab some cash that players are waving with.

Are there any good reasons to NOT increase the amount of bank tabs that players can buy? The only thing I can think of is database space. More stored items need more space in the GW2 database. But with the current prices of SSD storage, is that really the reason?

The upcoming expansion will bring player housing and probably a lot of new items related to it. Like furniture items. It would be great to buy some extra bank tabs to store them for players whose banks are already full.

[Zera.9435]

There is no need for more than that. People should instead get off their hoarder mentality and only keep what they actually need. Go clean your room.. err.. bank!

[Farohna.6247]

But but I might need it.  Some day.  For something.   Lol I'm a massive hoarder of anything related to unfinished achievements.  My bank is atrocious, my bags are gross.  I do not have 17 tabs of it though...eek.  Let's hope there's a bookshelf in that new housing lol.

[Schimmi.6872]

6 minutes ago, TheQuickFox.3826 said:

Players have been requesting a raise of the bank tab cap above the current limit of 17 for a number of years now. But these requests have remained unfulfilled.

To me, it looks like a quick way for ANet to grab some cash that players are waving with.

Are there any good reasons to NOT increase the amount of bank tabs that players can buy? The only thing I can think of is database space. More stored items need more space in the GW2 database. But with the current prices of SSD storage, is that really the reason?

The upcoming expansion will bring player housing and probably a lot of new items related to it. Like furniture items. It would be great to buy some extra bank tabs to store them for players whose banks are already full.

As far as I remember one of the devs stated in a discussion about adding new material to the material storage, that they can't just add everything that is used for crafting, as the number of slots is limited in the database.

So I would guess the same might be true for the bank, also the number of slots (510)  is suspicious close to 512?

I'm not a game dev, but i doubt the storage space is the main problem, my guess would be that they don't want to risk changing datatypes  etc. in a database that has grown over more than a decade, as any bug or dataloss of the storage-system,  where people have stored things worth many thousand or even more gold, would cause a large outcry, rollbacks etc.

[Zera.9435]

3 minutes ago, Farohna.6247 said:

But but I might need it.  Some day.  For something.   Lol I'm a massive hoarder of anything related to unfinished achievements.  My bank is atrocious, my bags are gross.  I do not have 17 tabs of it though...eek.  Let's hope there's a bookshelf in that new housing lol.

I used to have a lot of items related to the collections for the Envoy Armor because way back then I thought to myself "One day I'll make that legendary armor" but I never did. Now that I have Obby armor I know for sure I will not be getting the Envoy Armor, so I deleted all those items.

Go finish your achievements! kitten or get off the pot, as they say.

[Dean Calaway.9718]

35 minutes ago, TheQuickFox.3826 said:

To me, it looks like a quick way for ANet to grab some cash that players are waving with.

It's cheaper to make alt characters than getting a bank tab.

When I ran out of tabs I started making alts, some carry sigils, some runes, others boosters and black lion salvage kits, others still carry multiple choice chests.

I leave the tabs for some immediate needs and mostly extra crafting materials, I always like to have a tab full of bloodstone dust, another full of dragonite ore and another full empyreal fragments, I used to just use goblers to keep those at zero but then every time I needed them for a project it was a pain to grind, so keep those 3 tabs full just in case.

The advantage of alt characters is alt parking, those mules can be left at high paying chests and basically pay for themselves over time.

But wait! There's more, you're not interested in playing awful professions like Mesmer or Elementalist? Make a mule, use that stock pile of tomes you have to get them 80, slap some exotic gear on them, get easy Hero Points from EoD and PoF to unlock all 3 elite specs et voila, achievements unlocked.

Forget tabs, invest in mules today!

[Farohna.6247]

1 hour ago, Zera.9435 said:

I used to have a lot of items related to the collections for the Envoy Armor because way back then I thought to myself "One day I'll make that legendary armor" but I never did. Now that I have Obby armor I know for sure I will not be getting the Envoy Armor, so I deleted all those items.

Go finish your achievements! kitten or get off the pot, as they say.

Lol working on it!  I think many people, besides items they have for collections, worry about tossing some things that they are unsure of.  Wiki is a great tool, really helps with purging the bank.   

[Zera.9435]

5 minutes ago, Farohna.6247 said:

Lol working on it!  I think many people, besides items they have for collections, worry about tossing some things that they are unsure of.  Wiki is a great tool, really helps with purging the bank.   

Right? It's so easy to figure out if you need something or not.

[Mistwraithe.3106]

1 hour ago, Schimmi.6872 said:

As far as I remember one of the devs stated in a discussion about adding new material to the material storage, that they can't just add everything that is used for crafting, as the number of slots is limited in the database.

So I would guess the same might be true for the bank, also the number of slots (510)  is suspicious close to 512?

I'm not a game dev, but i doubt the storage space is the main problem, my guess would be that they don't want to risk changing datatypes  etc. in a database that has grown over more than a decade, as any bug or dataloss of the storage-system,  where people have stored things worth many thousand or even more gold, would cause a large outcry, rollbacks etc.

Agreed, this seems the most likely issue.

That said, 512 being 9 bits is a bit of an unusual limit. There isn't a 9 bit datatype, but maybe they are using 9 bits out of a larger composite datatype (eg 32 bit unsigned int) to store the bank slot.

[Solvar.7953]

My recollection for material storage (for crafting) is that once they add something, they can never remove it.  So this makes them very cautious on what to add for material storage - they don't want to add something that no one cares about in 6 months.  But I suspect the bigger issue is more that if they added storage for everything that any player has ever asked for, the material storage would have a lot of stuff in it and become cluttered and then players would complain about how much junk there is in material storage they don't care about and how it makes it harder for them to find what they really want.

 

[TheQuickFox.3826]

4 hours ago, Dean Calaway.9718 said:

It's cheaper to make alt characters than getting a bank tab.

When I ran out of tabs I started making alts, some carry sigils, some runes, others boosters and black lion salvage kits, others still carry multiple choice chests.

I leave the tabs for some immediate needs and mostly extra crafting materials, I always like to have a tab full of bloodstone dust, another full of dragonite ore and another full empyreal fragments, I used to just use goblers to keep those at zero but then every time I needed them for a project it was a pain to grind, so keep those 3 tabs full just in case.

The advantage of alt characters is alt parking, those mules can be left at high paying chests and basically pay for themselves over time.

But wait! There's more, you're not interested in playing awful professions like Mesmer or Elementalist? Make a mule, use that stock pile of tomes you have to get them 80, slap some exotic gear on them, get easy Hero Points from EoD and PoF to unlock all 3 elite specs et voila, achievements unlocked.

Forget tabs, invest in mules today!

Yeah, I know, but it is far less convenient. With mules, you have no oversight which char has which items. I always end up logging into all my characters to fund that one stored item. I rather just buy some more bank tabs so I have everything in one place.

[DanAlcedo.3281]

5 hours ago, Zera.9435 said:

There is no need for more than that. People should instead get off their hoarder mentality and only keep what they actually need. Go clean your room.. err.. bank!

Good sir or lady. 

I'm offended! 

My Bank is sorted, organized and cleaned once a month. 

(all the random kitten is on 3 toons with max bag space. But we don't talk about it.) 

[Zebulous.2934]

Some time ago I made the mistake of buying my bank expansions from the gemstore interface, and not from the banking interface. They were on sale at the time.
I ended up buying one more bank expansion item than I could use.  Apparently this is a known issue, the gemstore likes to tell you that you can buy one more of things even if you can't use them.  (expedition contracts for example)  That issue was not known to me however. 
 If you use the bank interface to buy bank expansions then the little +1 buy button at the bottom of the screen vanishes when you have seventeen total slots.

I have been told that I could contact staff and that I could get refunded for the extra expansion item sitting in one of my bank tabs.  I just assumed that eventually the tab limit will increase and I will be able to activate the expansion item. 
I am not in any particular hurry.  What are they going to say? "We are sorry but you have owned this unusable item for too long."

[Linken.6345]

3 hours ago, TheQuickFox.3826 said:

Yeah, I know, but it is far less convenient. With mules, you have no oversight which char has which items. I always end up logging into all my characters to fund that one stored item. I rather just buy some more bank tabs so I have everything in one place.

For this there is always gw2efficiency.com

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

i think that internally the game uses multiples of 256 for everything in the database, since it was a traditional programming method up until the mid-2000s. for example, even though your materials can stack up to 250, its more than likely stored as 0-255 in the database with a bit of extra space.

 

however, bank tabs have a strange number of storage slots (30), so 17 tabs is just shy of 512 despite all the odd numbers involved.

 

you should beware however that bank tabs are a bit of a raw deal, and that you get much more milage out of character slots. to purchase a bank tab you have to spend 600 gems and get only 30 slots, while if you spend 800 gems you get 90-100 slots on a new character (with cheap bags only), so unless you really need to move stuff back and forth between different alts easily, you're much better off just creating more mules for long-term storage.

 

i think you can also create up to 70(?) characters on an account which is something like over 6,000 slots with 18-slot bags, which is a bit more than 500. 😛

Edited June 25 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[Danikat.8537]

I'm not against Anet adding more bank tabs for people who want it, but I don't even need 17 of them.

I have 10 bank tabs, because I was buying 1 per year during the anniversary sale. (Although once I had to wait until the January sale for them to be discounted.) I didn't really need the 10th one but decided to get it to keep the tradition going, then still didn't need another one last year so I decided the 10th anniversary was a good place to stop and didn't get another one. I've currently got 58 free slots (dotted around, because each tab holds different kinds of items) and could easily free up another 14 if I needed to.

9 hours ago, Dean Calaway.9718 said:

It's cheaper to make alt characters than getting a bank tab.

When I ran out of tabs I started making alts, some carry sigils, some runes, others boosters and black lion salvage kits, others still carry multiple choice chests.

I leave the tabs for some immediate needs and mostly extra crafting materials, I always like to have a tab full of bloodstone dust, another full of dragonite ore and another full empyreal fragments, I used to just use goblers to keep those at zero but then every time I needed them for a project it was a pain to grind, so keep those 3 tabs full just in case.

I understand wanting to keep some of the ascended materials spare, but I'm curious what you do with them that's ever needed a full tab?

Since you mainly store crafting materials I assume you already have all the Material Storage Expanders, so you can have 2,500 of each material in the dedicated crafting material storage. Add on 30x 250 stacks in the bank and you've got 10,000 bloodstone dust, empyreal fragments and dragonite ore. What do you make which needs that much?

[Astralporing.1957]

10 hours ago, Zera.9435 said:

There is no need for more than that. People should instead get off their hoarder mentality and only keep what they actually need. Go clean your room.. err.. bank!

But how the game can push more and more towards hamster wheels while being so unfriendly to hamsters?

[Tiamat.8254]

I have 7 bank slots. What the hell do you have that requires 10 more? 😅

[TheQuickFox.3826]

9 hours ago, Tiamat.8254 said:

I have 7 bank slots. What the hell do you have that requires 10 more? 😅

"I have 9 characters. Why do some players need 69 character slots?"

The fact that YOU don't need it does not mean that there is no demand for it.

Edited June 25 by TheQuickFox.3826

[purp.1806]

14 hours ago, TheQuickFox.3826 said:

Players have been requesting a raise of the bank tab cap above the current limit of 17 for a number of years now. But these requests have remained unfulfilled.

To me, it looks like a quick way for ANet to grab some cash that players are waving with.

Are there any good reasons to NOT increase the amount of bank tabs that players can buy? The only thing I can think of is database space. More stored items need more space in the GW2 database. But with the current prices of SSD storage, is that really the reason?

The upcoming expansion will bring player housing and probably a lot of new items related to it. Like furniture items. It would be great to buy some extra bank tabs to store them for players whose banks are already full.

I'm not here to discuss player mentality, but by adding bank tabs ArenaNet effectively reduces the significance of alts within accounts and therefore reduces potential revenue they can get away with from whales. By capping bank tabs, those players who need copious space will merely make another character and fully outfit it with bags. That is more return for ANET than adding more bank tabs, considering likely 95%+ of the player population does not need more than 10 tabs. It doesn't make sense from a monetization standpoint, and it doesn't necessarily make sense for the majority of the player population.

[Linken.6345]

5 hours ago, TheQuickFox.3826 said:

"I have 9 characters. Why do some players need 96 character slots?"

The fact that YOU don't need it does not mean that there is no demand for it.

people cant have that tho max atm is 73

[Echostorm.9143]

It never fails, you can suggest anything on the internet and someone will argue with you about it.  

"Hey can we have more bank tabs? It will in no way harm anyone who doesn't want them" 

And then,

"No you don't need them!" ,

"No, I don't need them so you shouldn't get them either", 

"I don't know anything about software engineering but I'm not going to let that stop me from telling you it's impossible and you're a monster for asking the devs to do such a thing!"

"Having more than 17 bank tabs will destroy the game and turn my children purple, why won't you think of the children?!!?"

 

[Cernoch.8524]

They increased bag slots many times, while bank only like twice? Not sure. With all expansions there is more items that need to be stored, be it simple gifts from maps. 

I wish they increase it but yes, if you need more space just make new char. I myself have probably like 30 chars as a bank.
Or have alt account for non account bound items.

[Atoclone.4810]

On 6/24/2024 at 11:06 PM, Zera.9435 said:

There is no need for more than that. People should instead get off their hoarder mentality and only keep what they actually need. Go clean your room.. err.. bank!

I forced my self to do this. I sulked like a toddler all the way through it but at the end I had something like 2-3 empty tabs, a nice chunk of gold and a bunch of clovers.

 

I am of course keeping on top of it and not just chucking everything in willy nilly again.... Honest guv

[Tiamat.8254]

I'm going to add a sensible answer and be boring. I'm going to fathom it has to do with performance constraints. I would love to be corrected on what I say but I imagine they are using a relational database (SQL) to store and retrieve data. They are notorious for optimisation as the queries are complex. So the more data needed to be retrieved the worse performance you get, especially if you need to add new information. I reckon if they made a move to a nosql database you would see the cap lifted on these things. However migration isn't simple and requires a lot of testing and optimisation, not too mention higher cost, if at all it's on the cards.

Edited June 26 by Tiamat.8254
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