Where did my bags go?
Posted 1 February 2012 by KaydeeSome fans raised some questions about the missing bags you can buy for your shared 
stash. In patch 10 we can now only have 3 bags and not 5 as before. So Bashiok gave a long and interesting answer.
We reevaluated average character and account storage space requirements, and found it necessary to ensure we could handle what we anticipate will be a large amount of data very quickly after release.
Diablo III has both the benefit and disadvantage of having completely random items. Pretty much everything can roll up different affixes, if not a range of its benefits. That’s obviously great because the item hunt is what it’s all about, more randomization means you can keep chasing that perfect item, but that means the amount of data needed to describe an item is much, much larger than say, a World of Warcraft item, which is static and only needs a unique number to identify it. For example: http://www.wowhead.com/item=51003 that number there at the end is that item’s unique number. That’s all we need to store to identify that item no matter where it is. A Diablo III item first has to say the base item, then each individual affix that it rolled up, then the ranges of each variable, and if it has any sockets. And we have to think about everywhere an item can be, an item on the ground is still an item, and so is an item on the auction house.
We obviously have room to grow if our projections are incorrect, or we just find that we eventually have the space. World of Warcraft definitely grew over the years, and that storage space didn’t appear out of nowhere (although it does seem rather magical at times). We find three tabs to be plenty for at least the initial release of the game though. Not counting the items you’re wearing (assuming they’re the best you have), and assuming worst case scenario of nothing but 2-slot items, you’d be able to hold 405 swords per region. That’s a lot. We don’t expect people to be storing 405 swords… hopefully ever, because that might indicate you have an obsession with swords, but at the very least there should be enough storage to start and then we can continue to evaluate as we go.
I can see how this will stir up some angry fans and item hoarders, traders or those whose account has the full 10 characters to store for. 3 bags is in my opinion way too little especially when we have runestones and gems to store.
Or maybe we won’t have skill runes to store, and that’s part of the big, still-secret runestone system reworking. Preserving runestones, but removing the item spam element?
In the image above you’ll see a comparison of the Stash from patch 9 and the latest stash and as well as removed tabs the ‘Appearance’ option is also now gone. This allowed you to view the contents of your stash as a particular class – useful if you had lots of class-specific items so it would ‘X Out’ anything that class couldn’t use.
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welcome back mule-accounts >.<
the big stash was one of the best things they had in d3…
Yes, but now they’re $60 mule accounts.
A big stash would be great, and it’s total BS they pin this on storage issues. I broke down the math on this months ago. Basically, a few gigabytes would hold everything. If you’re feeling frisky, you can search the forums for my post.
Yes, the limit of ten characters per account is getting stupider by the minute.
Now they’ve definitely brought back the need for mule characters in addition to everything else. People already thought five stash pages for ten characters was way too few, so they cut it by 40%? Now you can’t even devote a page to each class.
will the AH become the new shared stash ?
Although fanboys love to give away their money to Blizzard I don’t think they will be crazy enough to spend 10 cents to store a single item for 2 days.
I know what Blizzard is thinking by doing that: “Hey bro! I noticed you need moar stash space. How about this promotion? Pay us 9.99 montly and you can have 3 extra tabs in your stash.”
Let me steal space from first page to mention another thing:
No matter if someone still thinks they got sufficient space in the stash (lol, fanboys), look at this post made by Doomscream basically reminding the community about Jay Wilson’s promises (http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/3967947405#15) about the huge amount of space allowed in the stash in the past, that now got reduced to an OK amount (in the best case scenario). For me its just a matchbox sized stash now.
Actually, I assume Blizzard will be analyzing how storage space affects RMAH utilization. I imagine, not having a large amount of space will entice more players to sell something that is valuable that they do not have a current use for. If it turns out that storage space does affect RMAH profit in this way, I expect Blizzard to be right on top of this.
How could I have missed that one? Thank you for making me dislike Blizz even more. I wonder how much storage the (eventual) emulators will have? I also wonder if Blizzard has some metric to tell when they have gone too far, and their reputation starts taking a serious hit.
Don’t forget that some items stack now, that didn’t stack in Diablo 2. 3 Bags SHOULD be enough for the first months at least!
Heh, I wonder what Bashiok is talking about. In D2 (and all other games with unique affix items that need to be stored) they just store the BaseItemId and a 32-bit Seed. Then they can generate the affixes each time the character is loaded just like those items were generated to begin with. Maybe they have more requirements design-wise than I know about, maybe gems/enchants/whatnot make it worthwhile or maybe they favour speed vs space on their database but it’s an odd choice in my eyes.
Too bad they shrunk the max number of bags. :/
That can’t be true. There was a Hero Editor for D2 which let you edit the items in your character’s inventory. It would be very hard to generate the correct seed for a given set of affixes and stats.
Assuming, of course, that single player uses the same item representation as Battle.net. I cannot see why not, unless it was patched after release.
It would only be hard if the seed to affix function was one way (like MD5 hashing). If instead it was bi-directional, there’s no problem.
3 bags is not much even if gems stack as they do. I can with no sweat max out 3 bags in the beta, one bag for crafting materials, rings, scrolls and such. Then have one bag for stashed gear that I use for different tasks like Magic Find and Gold Find.
Well, you guys need to take into account Mule characters…. Which there will be certainly alot of. With 10 character slots, nothing is stopping you to hoard items on alts. Also, I think we need to keep in mind that they want to prepare* for the amount of data influx coming in to their servers at release…. The key word “Release”..
Am I the only one reading between the lines here hehe? More tabs can always be added on later, thats no problem, but does this mean they are getting set up for release…. Q1 PLZ BLIZZ
Agree.
first the Bnet changes and now this… Q1!!
If they where just trying to limit the initial number of items in a stash they could have just greyed out 2 tabs and have them unlock at lvl 60 (or one at 60 and one after finishing Inferno)…
I smell DLC
absolutely terrible.
first it was unlimited(i think?) characters changed to 10, and now this..
Inarius, i bet.. pay or ****off.. sad
1 extra bag slot, 5 dolla…
Referring to Diablo 3 is a bit misleading. The items are the same with D2, the difference is with WoW but he makes it sound like Diablo 3 has this kind of special storage requirement.
I call BS on the storage issues. We’re in the age of terabyte HDs and storage space needed for items is just a few bytes.
This is simply yet another change meant to boost RMAH trading.
was just about to say that, say an item take 500 bytes, i think thats much more than needed for an item, a 1 tb harddrive could hold 274877906 items
thats 274 million items, on 1 drive..
blizzard probably use harddrives like that to wipe their asses with…
they could easily set up a few servers in each region to hold much more than 5 bags if they wanted, and it wouldnt cost much in blizzard standards.
edit: not only to boost AH income, but to sell more space later
That seems like the sad, sad truth…
Wow, so now they also removing slots??? This goes worse and worse, bad dream. Wake me up please. Idd Storage issues are the WORST excuse ever nowdays. They just want to have something extra for expansions (like they decide with Mystic)
You get a 4th and 5h slot when buying the expansions.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/3967947405?page=1#15
Maybe this is why they develop the game so slowly, that code **** takes up too much space.
Blizzard’s being stupid on this one, 3 bags on a game that focus primarily on collecting loot? Who are they kidding here? I can max that out easily and I don’t even consider myself a hoader.
Just……WTF!?!?