Misc Store Under Review

We all know how large and expansive the Ships Store can be. It has (currently) no limits and over time we have used it to deliver all your loots and various activity rewards. A general ‘drop all here’ type of thing.

Some Backstory…
Way back when Prev and I laid out some initial scribblings for Core-Exiles, we knew very little about the magic voodoo of SQL and we made some ‘how shall we say’ poor choices when it came to data management for certain table storage systems.

We have since over the years learnt our lesson and migrated all the ‘Ukkkky’ tables to a more sensible format.

This however leaves us with the items stored in your Misc Section of your ships store… When we started CE the misc store had no more than ten items and all was well. We didn’t think the game would grow as it has and a decade and a half later I’m left to solve a few issues created way back when

In essence if you had lets say 40,000 items in your Ships Misc store (some of you ‘had’ over 250,000), every time we query your store or you open it to ‘do anything to it’ it queries through all 40,000 items not just the one your looking for. Needless to say this is not good lol.

So a few years back we created the Secure Store. In there ‘life is good, life is sweet’ and all those 40,000 items are stacked up in neat little boxes

The challenge has been to get players moving their items in to the Secure Store and not use the Ships Misc store as a Titanic Warehouse attached to the back of their ship. Recently this came to a bit of a head when I noticed the sheer size of that table, it was larger than the rest of CE added up. CE consists of some 443 tables, so that’s BIG!

To fix this issue I’m taking two approaches.

Number 1: The syphon program. Last week I contacted all those in game with over 40,000 in their Misc store. For these folk I asked them to try reduce (move) their items in their misc store, either by hand (long lengthy process) OR to raise a hand and sign up for the ‘Syphon Program‘. This is a small temporary program that I assigned to BOB #29541. He’s not the brightest of the BOB bots, but he is capable of moving items slowly over time from your Ships misc store to the Secure Store.

His remit is to move items from your Misc store (only) until its reaches a balance somewhere between 18-20K. At that point he will keep it balanced around that point till he’s instructed to stop.

This is a far more painless and non time consuming option for those of you with larger to monumental Misc stores.

Of those I contact 90% said ‘Yes please’ sign me up. Bob has been busy moving these items for these players and they can at any time ask for Bob to Stop (through me at this time).

Number 2: The main reason you have such large stocks is NOT your fault. It’s mine and mine alone The game has grown and grown and grown over the last decade and half. Each time I used the same insert code that moved the ‘shiny new loot’ into your Ships store instead of the Secure Store.

Well that’s started to change…

A few days ago I edited the code for a number of ‘activities’ to ensure the ‘rewards’ went into the Secure Store. These are ones like…

Mining Barge Events and Mining Barge Mining ‘extra Misc loots’ are now sent to the Secure Store.
Ship crew Missions have also had the same treatment.
Also Exploration ‘Level Rewards’ same.

Where these items have been ‘redirected’ and there is text on screen, this has been altered to reflect these changes.

This is a small change and over time I will edit more and more of these ‘put it over there not here’ type changes. This will over time slow the massive influx of items into your Ships Misc store.

What Now Coops….

Well I’m going to add a new Bar to the top of the misc screen. This will link back HERE to this post. It’s a heads up for anyone looking in their misc store and thinking… hmmmm I could have sworn I had more ‘stuff’…

I will continue to attack / edit / mame the code that currently adds items directly to your misc store.

The Syphon Program is temporary, its purpose is to aid those with Behemoth large stores to move them painlessly over the period of a few days without their interaction or aid. IF you WANT – you can contact me and ‘opt in’ – I will pass your name on to BOB and he will start to move your items to.

You can press pause or tell me to stop at any time and I’ll let Bob know. The Syphon program will only be with us for a while, whilst we get these large store rooms under control. But feel free to opt in whilst the programs on offer.

Lastly….

Thanks for Reading all the way down here. I know this topic isn’t shiny or new and for some of you this will be a ‘Meh’ post, but its important that we all do our little part in this to assist in keeping the CE Database as trim and as responsive as we can. I’m now doing my part so have a think about yours.

Coops

P.S for those that didn’t respond to my in game PM last week I have passed your name on to Bob. You can expect your items to have been moved for you.