Purchased Items take inventory space
Purchased items (or passcodes for them) take inventory space, and can't be dropped.
It makes me reluctant to buy bundles or use codes that contain items I dont want to use, as they take space.
Could you add a recycle for all items, or make them not take space?
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I have said this before, as have a number of people. There shouldn't be anything preventing me from spending money in their store. If I want to buy 500 beacons, let me! And if I want to recycle them all, let me.
I still love the story of @NinthAnt leveling up to Level 8 using nothing but Toast Beacons, but I have no idea how he managed that inventory.
I dropped all my inventory on the ground in a random neighbourhood with no portals around -- something I routinely did when I played ingress -- and kept only my most precious supply of VR hackmods. Even so I could only buy them in batches because leveling up gives you a tonne of gear especially if you don't use any. So at stoplights or in portal-sparse areas I would be frantically buying as many as I could.
I concur. I would spend a lot more money on stuff if purchased items didn't contain inventory space. 25-packs of frackers are a no-brainer purchase except that I don't want to invest that much inventory space.
I would also buy a lot more stuff like beacons if I could buy them in bulk packs. I once spewed around 500 of them in a day during a bus event, and the three-at-a-time thing drove me bonkers. I'm sure I would have gone through 100-200 more if I hadn't had to spend so much time buying them as I went.
Either a free single Powerup Capsule that holds purchased items that don't count towards inventory, or simply don't count the first 100 items.
I can understand them not wanting to give everyone unlimited purchasing space, for the same reason giving people unlimited inventory space is troublesome. They have to record the GUID of each item individually, and across a million people, that takes real space and real $$.
@Hosette :
I would also buy a lot more stuff like beacons if I could buy them in bulk packs. I once spewed around 500 of them in a day during a bus event, and the three-at-a-time thing drove me bonkers. I'm sure I would have gone through 100-200 more if I hadn't had to spend so much time buying them as I went.
At least they finally made the animation dismissable, which was a big plus, for me.
cant be hard to make premium items not take up your precious inventory space.
If qn item can't be dropped, it should not count towards inventory, seems as simple as that to me
Anyone knows if you recurse and change factions those undroppable items dissapear?
no those should not be affected or anything...
Purchased items such as resonators can be dropped (in capsules) to save space when not needed.
But I find it distressing that agents can take your purchased items, along with items farmed with frackers; Gear theft has real monetary impact. Which makes me reluctant to buy gear.
A solution that resolves both inventory space issues would be preferred.
I wouldn't really think it necessary to separate 'purchased resonators' and 'hacked resonators'.
I'd assumed you mean the stuff in the Boost category only. Frackers, Beacons, Apex etc. Stuff that cannot be dropped or recycled, and only available by purchase.
Specialist separation for resonators and the like is likely impossible.
Yes, I'm specifically concerned about the Boost category of gear. I'd like the option to recycle it, to save space. Or for it not to take space, so I don't need to care.
I'd prefer key lockers didn't take space.
Yeah, so fun after buying a bundle spending the next two weeks saying "damn, I forgot to get rid of the fireworks again." I think Brian has responded to this before by saying that it's because of people who accidentally recycle premium items. To which I'd say, have an extra confirmation prompt for recycling premium items then, like the billion times we have to confirm that we want to recurse. If they delete it after being asked twice, that's on them.
C.O.R.E. comes with Apex? I dont want Apex... if I cant recycle them or give them to someone else, its taking more and more space.
Its making me consider dropping the subscription.
I suggest removing it from C.O.R.E., or
make boosts not take inventory space.
Just activate apex before going to sleep, you can activate up to two hours at the same time and recycle little by little :)
For me the whole part of not wanting Apex boosts is that I don't want unearned AP. I'd just use them if I got 0AP for doing so.
I take you complain about getting AP from submitting new portals and pictures or scans aswell...
Rendering them spaceless would be better and easier.
@GoblinGranate Nope. I don't complain about getting AP for submitting portals, photos, edits. Those are deliberate actions that I took in order to affect a change to the playfield. They're an accomplishment. Every single action that gains AP either accomplishes something on the playing field or it nets me gear that I use for accomplishing something on the playing field. The Apex accomplishes nothing in terms of changing the playfield or gaining me gear to do so.
Rendering purchased items spaceless is perfectly fine with me. Allowing me to not get them is fine with me. I just don't want to have 100 of them or 100K of unearned AP a year from now.
Submitting portals and scans are actions... they deserve points.
Buying AP via Apex, devalues AP that is earned thru game play.
Except that you still have to take the actions to get anything out of an Apex. And really, Niantic has few enough options to offer people ways to give them money.
AP is largely irrelevant to anyone's play after the first 40 million, so who really cares?
So are we in agreement?
If Niantic need to offer ways to make money, they should make purchased items not take space, so we're encouraged to get C.O.R.E. and buy items.
And AP doesnt matter. Especially now you can buy it.
I'm with Hosette. I want to earn my stats the hard way.
Apex and other items I dont want.. e.g. fireworks, often come bundled with things I do want. I want the temporary inventory space that comes with C.O.R.E. but not the Apex that takes away from it permanently.
I'd like to recycle Apex. Yes I'm sure.
Or drop it, so someone else can have it.
Or get a refund from the store.
Or have it not take space.
In the mean time, I wont buy things from the store that include an Apex and I've cancelled C.O.R.E.
I've said this elsewhere but here's my philosophy: If I can't recycle it then it shouldn't consume inventory space.
Having extra AP in events is even less deserved according to that logic and I don't see anybody complaining.
Hard way? So easy! Just don't use them :D
They stack up? No problem, just use them before going to bed, eventually you will have 0.
I agree to this.
We were always "close" on the topic of the post. I agree that Boosts should not be affected by the 2000 item inventory cap, however, I'm cognizant that a better implementation would put a separate cap on the number of boosts you can have (or have before it does cut into inventory). Data still costs money, and if someone bought 2000 Apex it would be good for a short burst of cash for Niantic, but would cost more data storage in the long term.
So one, or two, or even 3 "Boost Capsules" that don't count against inventory, would be great.
However, there's good reasons for why Boosts should not be recyclable, and there's easy workarounds to get rid of your boosts. Activate your Apex before you go to bed, throw your beacons and fireworks on local portals.
As to how to use a beacon without getting AP... my sympathy doesn't extend to "Awww but I don't want AP".
The server side storage cost for a quantity of an item is likely zero. For each type of item in your inventory, it has a count. The storage cost of the count is fixed.
But even if they used a unique item with serial # for each item its likely on the order of a few hundred K bytes for your entire inventory, and most of that would be keys, not purchased items.
But even if they used a unique item with serial #
They do. It's called an Item GUID. And it's a string.
And if you made Boosts not count towards inventory, I'm sure that people would buy heaps when they're cheap.
The type of data storage you're talking about is EXTREMELY inexpensive. Even with a unique GUID being tracked across the system, it is not expensive. Compressed bits are quite cheap, even in a distributed system.
When you're squeezing every single byte because the product isn't making a profit like it's little brothers, cheap is still a cost.
When you're trying to make a product profitable selling just one more item to someone will probably cover the entire cost of storing their inventory for at least a year. Let's do some math using a well-known cloud provider.
DynamoDB storage is $0.25/GB/month. S3 storage is about a tenth of that, but let's assume it needs to be in a database so a gigabyte of storage is $3/year. I don't know how much storage it takes to consume one object but let's use an estimate that's probably an order of magnitude too high and say 1K. If that's the case then that $3/year would pay for storage for about 350K items worth of storage, or the inventory of 140 players. The cheapest non-recyclable item is fireworks, at 333 CMU per. The cheapest CMU I can find is 200K for $100. That comes out to $0.17. If I've done the math correctly, buying one fireworks 3-pack would pay for the storage of around 25 players for a year. (Note, I'm too lazy to check my math.)
I'm only including storage costs, and not access, compute, etc. for the inventory. However, I also grossly overestimated the size of storing an object-- a GUID is 16 bytes, not 1K, so I've overestimated by a factor of 64 so I'm probably overestimating even including compute and access costs. Thus, I conclude that the cost of one single firework is more than enough to pay for the inventory of eight players for a year.
Until we Niantic sort out this issue I wont be subscribing to C.O.R.E.