POLL: Inventory Management

There's quite an active discussion going on over here on the inventory issue. Tell LL what you want here.

http://localhost/


Link dont work - sorry

Bah. Already fixed.

Bump. Come on folks... avoiding the topic isn't going to make it go away, unfortunately. At least make your voice heard.

We've been over this dozens of times. Storage is not limitless. People will habitually flood fill storage until they die. LL will eventually have to cap the amount of storage they let us use per account.

I voted for option 2 although I'd settle for them just setting a limit and leaving it at that.

Hmm. 82 views and only 21 votes? Should I have made this an anonymous poll?

I voted "other". I think it would be reasonable to have "inventory tiers" that work like land tiers. X bytes included in subscription, and additional units of X bytes cost Y$ each. For example, 10 MB included, each additional 10 MB unit $0.50 per month on your subscription. Only premium accounts can buy more.

Even a very small cost would have a huge psychological effect, and cause people to pay attention to the size of their inventory. (Of course, you'd have to know at all times what size that is!)

When something is free, people do not value it. Since LL disk space is free (to residents) they don't value it at all and squander it freely. That has to change. But I think a very, very small charge will do the trick.

I wonder what percentage of the database is bitmaps, because bitmaps are huge. If they gave us a way to easily manage "snapshots" (i.e., bitmaps that we don't want to paste on prims) in local storage instead of the asset database, that might cut the database size a bit. (In order to paste a snapshot on a prim, you'd have to copy it to "textures", which are bitmaps in the asset database, from "snapshots", bitmaps stored on your local drive. That would exempt snapshots from the per MB storage charge, and allow you to keep them locally without paying L$ to move them to textures and paste on a prim.)

Buster

That is a very good question, the bitmap one. They may well be able to save large space simply by moving to a more space friendly format. They already store textures in JPEG2000 format. Why not screenshots?

I guess my choice is between the first one and the last one. I'd like to see some sort of "bank", kind of like World of Warcraft, where we could deposit and withdraw items, and store items we don't use often.

I was all set to hold forth on my opinions regarding client-side data storage until I read Buster's post. Storing bitmap textures client-side makes a huge amount of sense. So, too, does tiering costs according to inventory size. I still voted for free inventory storage but then I probably don't have near the inventory bloat as someone who's been here for 2+ years.

If you put anything on the clientside, it will eventually be hacked. Count on it. I have yet to see a single MMRPG where client-side data storage wasn't hackable given enough determined players. It tends to destroy games and it would destroy SL. Storing bitmaps and perhaps even Notecards, on the other hand, would be harmless.

I agree with this idea completely.

When an item is copiable we often forget to delete rather than take it back. After some time the inventory becomes cumbersome. I sort by name and delete the extras, then clear out the trash bin. I also sort by date and drag the least used items into a prim storage box properly named, for example: name a box clothing storage and put all those old clothes in it.

An idea for a future update... force the least used item into a holding area that would take extra effort and time to retrieve. If an object hasn't been used in several weeks the system would not load it into inventory. Instead it would go to a storage area you could access by rezzing a prim LL would provide.

Just an idea...

Choosing other. There are three points to this that need addressing.

Step 1) Inventory System Awareness:

Residents should be given a real option to "ballpark" the size of their inventories. Lindens should publish methods to best reduce inventory load and better explain how the storage system functions to ALL residents.



Step 2) Inventory Decentralization:

Inventory is currently not scalable versus a finite asset server and potentially infinite resident scheme. At some point, storage will need to be decentralized on a per-sim basis, if it isn't already.




Step 3) LL relinquishes control:

Step 3 will be to provide storage on people's own PCs and dedicated servers. This is long-term oriented. Chances are I would have hit the "third party" option had I seen it before voting.

Education of your users is always a good thing. Especially when it can result in lessening the load.

I'm not sure decentralizing by sim is cost feasible, but it is an interesting idea. If they did this, then they could clearly tie inventory/assets to tier. If that is a compromise they choose, it would make sense to implement in that fashion.

Offline/Client management is still my favorite option for the long term. Cindy points out the usual issues (i.e., hacking), but I suspect that won't be quite as big an issue here because the things being stored are things you have purchased or have made, and for all intents and purposes, you have rights to those already.

On the other hand, there is the possibility for offline trading (hack and insert items from one user's db to another's) but with appropriate checksumming and a good set of encryption, the benefit would easily be outweight by the difficulty to accomplish.

One of the main issues that contributes to large inventory growth is the fact that the inventory management tools are severely lacking. We finally got inventory search after 2 years of begging, but the inventory window is still not appropriate for managing the amount of content that we have. Until serious efforts are put into revamping the inventory management in SL, our inventories will remain bloated because they are just too difficult to manage effectively.

Multi-item drag and drop has been an elusive challenge for the developers since beta, so I don't have a lot of faith that this will get better any time soon - it just has never been a priority for them, and you see the results.

I voted other cause of a few things

A) Keep it free and open.

B) Cap it but provide a high cap and allow offline storage.
- I also suggested a "preloader" Kinda like the matrix idea where all the guns are. Would help maybe with the upload/download of the data between computer and world. Maybe even concider it your out of world vault.

Cap it. That will clear out alot of needless objects.

I opted for the charge over a certian amount. I actually keep a tight reign on my inventory, and I still know there's 500 things I could delete and never miss. If I were being charged to store over a certain amount, I'd be a lot more inclined to delete rather than file and forget.

Other - LL allows me to download my inventory onto my system, manage and re-upload to my IW inventory.

Cat

PS if they start charging for inventory I will buy less.

You know what would be helpful? If I could see what size my inventory is in the following categories:

1) No. of Prims
2) No. of Scripts
3) No. and size of bitmaps - Photos and Textures
4) Notecards

The first step to controlling our own data bloat is knowing how big it is.

Agreed. I think that falls under the auspices of 'education'. From what I see and read and hear around the metaverse, everyone here (for the most part) wants to help SL succeed and grow. We don't always agree on how best to do that (on the outside looking in), but it's pretty easy to tell 'where our heart is at'.

To the extent this is true, LL should really take advantage of this sentiment and spend some time giving us insight to how what we do affects their ability to provide and maintain the metaverse. This would promote an on-going dialogue not only on issues like 'what we want' but also on 'how best we can help' -- which is as important and exciting a thing as any other that happens in SL.

You hit it dead on Cienna! It wasn't till the last two days that a final light bulb went off above my head and I saw the big picture. No more talk of creative artistic expression from me, nope nope. It would be nice to know where we are headed. Cus ya sure as hell cant tell from where we have been lol

Cat

Eh wot? I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or serious.

I'm all for creative expression, but I also understand that realistically LL cannot afford an exponentially growing asset database without finding some way to defray the cost associated with it.

There are several ways to accomplish that:

1) Charge the residents/players.

2) Actively seek advertising for the world to cover the cost.

3) Implement some form of client or third-party based asset management system.

Option 1 is the easiest for them to implement. Option 2 has potential, lots of it. Option 3 is likely the best long-term solution.

Which will they choose? No one knows.

why yes I am completly serious.

Cat

Bleh. No you're not.

ObTop -- It is interesting how many people want 'free'. I wonder if this is a result of the expectation that it would always be free, or a misunderstanding of what is required that would make choosing to support LL by voting for a compromise option impossible for them.

bumpage.