Pleeease, No Battlenet Character Expirations. [NT]

[entranced]

..........

[sicilian]

Unfortunately, this is the type of feature that would likely require a pay to play model. Blizzard won't have unlimited server capacity and they're likely to have a LOT of players.

This could perhaps be a purchaseable upgrade however, where you could give them $10 and get an additional eight character slots and have your existing characters made permanent.

[NKlint]

I don't really know anything about building a server network that can provide service for a video game... so this is just a guess. I don't know what B.net's current storage capacity is so I'm just basing my estimation on storage reserved for accounts for Diablo II.

Currently Diablo II's character save files are approximately 2KB. If eighty million accounts were created the resulting use of storage would be approximately 160GB.

Lets go for a ridiculous number like 80 billion accounts, that's about 13 accounts per person in the world. 160TB of storage would be the storage needed to save the character's files. But that's only character saves, I don't really know the storage needs for temporary files for the maps or whatever else is needed but I know that even if you quadruple the statistics to 640TB to create a buffer then it would require...

356 "ST3450856FC Cheetah 15K.6 FC 4-GB/s 450-GB Hard Drive"(s) from Seagate would cost about $352,440 and would fit their storage needs.

But that's the storage alone, they'd need servers to put them in. Approximately 45 servers with 8 hdd raid configurations costing approximatlely $7000 each (with base specs - no extras). Costing approximately $315,000.

We won't add in the cost of software since they already have it, and are working on b.net 2.0 but the production of that isn't cheap, either.

Altogether cutting into their wallet with a whopping $667,440. Who wants to foot the bill?

I am hoping that we can use the current server technology with the updated software and we'll just be limited to one account per copy of the game, personally.

[entranced]

I think you're vastly overestimating the cost... 320 billion accounts is a ludicrous number, overestimated by at least a factor of 1000. Your original 80 million makes a lot more sense.

So instead of needing $352K of HD + 315K worth of servers, you end up just needing 1 server and 1 HD at a cost of ~8000$ (absolute peanuts).

In any case regardless of the paltry cost i have no problem paying for this feature. *Anything* is better than forced expiration. If bnet chars unequivocally expire, i and others will not be playing on battlenet - sticking only to SP/MP.

[phool]

The current system - chars will not expire unless unplayed for ~90 days and someone else on the realm attempts to make a char with the same name - is very reasonable, considering no attempt to limit how many chars players can have (this could well change in D3) and assuming in D3 char names will still be used as a unique identifier (may also change).

[sicilian]

The current system - chars will not expire unless unplayed for ~90 days and someone else on the realm attempts to make a char with the same name - is very reasonable, considering no attempt to limit how many chars players can have (this could well change in D3) and assuming in D3 char names will still be used as a unique identifier (may also change).

Ah, so that's why a character has said "expired" but I was still able to salvage them. Good to know.

[vetrox]

I'd like to see a single HDD handle 80 million read/write requests...

[Akse]

If they make the account stash system it will result into a lot less accounts and characters / player because no need for mules.

[mince pies]

80 billion accounts? Where the hell did you get that from? That would mean that EVERY person in the world would have around thirteen accounts