Inventory Cap: How Many Items Do You Have?

I was just thinking about the possible cap on inventory items by the Lindens. I thought it would be useful to poll citizens to see how many items they each have in their inventories, to get an idea of what the usage distribution looks like. (I predict a gamma distribution, k=2, with a mode of 2500 items.)

To find out how many items you have in your inventory, search for something and read the number from the title bar above the search window.

As a topic of discussion, what limit do you think would be reasonable to set on inventories?

~Ulrika~

I don't know really. I think they need to be careful though. If they set the limit too low those people who run stores are going to find their business taking a nose dive big time.

People will be forced to manage their inventories alot closer and may not want to delete things to make room for more items.

This could make things difficult for large projects that require many prims as well.

I did clean up my inventory last week, deleting building materials mostly. I figure any item that you can't really give a name other than "object" should be deleted. =)

I believe there should be several limits. Not to be harsh, but non-premium accounts should be more limited than people paying monthly. I also believe some sort of benefit for "inventory cleaning"/reduction should be implemented so people are more responsible. Once 1.6 with inventory search came out, I reduced my inventory from over 15000 items to under 6000 with just a few minutes of work a day for a few weeks.

Regards,

-Flip

A second thought:

Many people don't even know you need to empty your trash. I think an auto-delete of items sitting in trash for over, say, 2 weeks would be appropriate.

Regards,

-Flip

I selected 500 or less, but thinking about textures and pics too, its more like 1000.

100,000?

I think mine comes in at just over 6000, last time I had the patience to sit through a search. The majority of mine is stuff for my business. Clothes, box textures, copies of the boxed items for when they mysteriously turn up deleted from the world, etc... I can probably get rid of the copies of box cover textures since I save them all on my hard drive, which would probably cut my inventory by a third.

Having a cap would be great for load time and resources, I imagine, but would have a bad effect on sales. If my inventory is capped by having to keep safety copies of my own items, that would mean less purchasing of other peoples' products. I keep a pretty tight rein on my inventory as it is, so it isn't filled with a lot of junk I could just delete to make room for new items. I empty my trash often, I don't Take rather than Delete copiable items, and I don't think there's anything in my inventory just labeled Object.

As for what the cap should be assuming one is implemented.. I have no idea what would be fair and reasonable.

I try to work from both ends. My new dogwood for example has three textures, optional wind effect and three sizes including "Tiny." It's essentially eighteen different plants wrapped up in one copyable, nomod/trans item. Even if thousands of people take hundreds of copies each into their inventories, The Asset System just refers them all back to the common record.

This doesn't work for modables like most clothing and such. But some of us deal in items that can be compressed into nomod multiuse products to help reduce the overall burden The Asset System has to shoulder all day every day.

On top of that, I try to sweep my inventory monthly. Folders seem to help because if there's not an existing folder to put something in, it's like having a piece of paper there's nowhere to file. It must be important enough to drop into File 13 and have done. I don't keep a lot of inventory initally because "I've nowhere sensible to put it."

One more note: Alts are cute and all, I enjoy playing with mine. But keep very very little inventory on them, only what they need to roam around and play. LL seems to have a problem identifying alts; but Flip's idea of limiting per account type should include them as low level accounts where inventory is concerned.

Ok, since this is a public poll, I have to ask, Maeve Morgan, what in the hell do you have in your inventory???

We need to be really careful not to damage in world business.

We also need better inventory management tools *first*.

More clothes, shoes and hair than any human being needs, Various nifty gagets I have picked up over the last year and a half and a ton of stuff I made I have been either too lazy to sell or didn't think was good enough. It's rumored if I quit shopping the SL economy would collapse.

Agreed, Flip. Those paying tier should be entitled to greater flexibility with any future limitations placed on inventory, as their monthly dollars help to keep the wheels of SL turning.

I think that letting the asset server continue to balloon unchecked will cause problems as the service adds more users. I mean, honestly, how many terabytes of storage can Linden Lab be expected to buy? Will they have to start a bidding war between the major drive manufacturers to be able to deliver an 8 exabyte storage truck?

One significant problem with inventory that Flip has also touched on here is the difficulty of inventory management. Once inventories became searchable, it was a lot easier to clean out the heaps of shit that gather over the course of months. We need more inventory tools to empower organization and cleanup, otherwise we're going to have a significant mess on our hands as the years wear on. Stuff I'd like to see? Duplicate detection and find by date, for one thing. The ability to examine my inventory based on assets that haven't been touched in months would be very helpful in keeping inventory clean.

edit: I'd also like to know how many single, unlinked, un-textured prims are sitting in my inventory. I'd love to get rid of them, but it's hard to figure out what's a un-edited prim and what's a group of prims named "Object".

I vote there be no cap at all.

Imposing a cap is no more than a "GOVERMENTAL CONTROL" Wake up People

Shadow

I agree that the inventory management tools need to be improved, and I think they should be made better before LL starts taxing for it.

As for duplicate detection, there are people who purposely store duplicates in hopes of avoiding the dreaded "ERROR: ASSET NOT FOUND" problem. There are things I can't afford to lose.

Another idea to motivate people to delete things is to offer upload refunds for texture/animations expunging. It's not unusual for me to spend L$1k on animation uploads to get it right. Hey, those other 99 uploads might come in handy (like if someone has different proportions than my avatar) and I spent L$990 to make them.

Francis while I disagree with a "CAP" I do agree with your Refund Idea, as I have spent many a Linden on something that did not work and was never used that just cluttered up my inventory.

Shadow

The refund idea only makes sense if it's limited to textures, sounds, animations, and other uploads which were personally uploaded by that particular account. The moment the Lindens begin refunding money paid for objects purchased in-world, we would see a rather drastic devaluation of the L$. The money refunded would either have to come from the pocket of the original item creator, which is inappropriate as not all merchants offer refunds, or from the Lindens themselves, which means that there will be a massive source of essentially free L$. Not to mention the abuse potential.

If a merchant chooses to offer refunds, so be it. But a Linden-funded refund for items which you didn't personally upload makes little to no economic sense.

A mode of 2k? Possibly, but only if you include all the alt accounts, tourist accounts, and people still in the system who don't really play anymore accounts.

coco

Agreed, the biggest contributor to the size of my inventory is just the fact that managing it is a complete pain in the ass.

You know what - the idea of limiting inventory for basic members is the ONLY thing I've ever heard of, in the way of limiting basic members any more than they are already limited, that makes sense to me.

Assuming the limit was still fairly reasonable (and what's reasonable to a new, basic player is probably less than what would be reasonable to active, regular players, particularly if they have a business or two to take up large hunks of their inventory), the basic members wouldn't mind much, and when they did start to mind, well - that would be a good sign to go to premium, very much the way owning land now serves as an incentive (and - importantly - as a carrot, rather than as a stick).

I mean, there probably are a whole bunch of basic members who spent a month or so filling up their inventories, then rarely if ever signed on again. Yet they and their inventories are still there, taking up space, right?

coco

Didn't they implement that awhile back? I vaguely recall that they added an auto-empty thing at some point.

You know Cris, I'm really not sure if it ever went through. I vaguely remember some mention of it, but I'm not sure it ever happened.

Shadow, I find I'm completely missing your logical argument and don't see how a cap would be "governmental control"; that sounds like paranoid banter to me. I've never seen anywhere that will give you unlimited disk space and unlimited rows in a database that needs to scale and be well tuned for a one time fee of $9.95 other than here. A cap to keep economies of scale and a well tuned, responsive product are much more important to me that any kind of unlimited free storage. That said - I miss your trivia!

Regards,

-Flip

I actually recently dumped about 18,000 items I collected over my entire SecondLife. The problem is that I still need to sort out all of my crap as a whole, organize it into proper folders, and get rid of older versions of projects I'm working on. I also need to trim down my scripts library.

I agree with having limits on basic accounts.

I agree with needing better inventory managment before caps.

I agree with ~2 week trash auto-delete.

I also keep multiple copies of one object because I can't trust SL to prevent one copy to go missing, especially when those objects maintain financial survival. This is also why nothing I sell anymore will be no-copy.

I have 1,000,000 items just named 'object'. Is that bad?

I think SL needs to seriously consider the advantages of downloading content rather putting caps on inventory.

I think if they really look into it, they'll find that it's not that particularly of a bad idea.