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I was wondering if Blizzard has any plans to raise the limit for bank size from 8KB per player. Having a larger bank size means you can do more with your maps.

This includes but not limited to:

more item storage and more advanced item systems
more progress/stat tracking and more depth to your game
better multiple map storage (you can combine more information from maps if you want to make a map series or interrelate your maps in a way)
more space for future development post release

I know you can do all of these things to some extent with the current system but it feels limiting. Even a raise to something like 40KB per player opens up a lot more opportunities within a game.

Try linking banks together?

Ideally I'd argue Bank Size would be player controlled rather than map controlled. I'm not 100% clear how it works, but I believe it's stored locally. If that's the case, letting players decide the size (much like how they can choose how large an Internet Cache or Flash Cache is, for example) would be best.

I heard the limit would be greatly increased in 1.5. Is that not the case?

Thats great news!

Can you provide some more details on this?
Was the limit raised with 1.5 or earlier? How big could banks get before the limit got increased?
Does the 1MB limit per player still persist with 10+ players?

Im asking because it seems to be kinda hard to test this, since the playercount seems to effect how much data can be stored per player. It would be great to get some additional information from official side. :)

This is absolutely wonderful for the project my team is working on! Is this change in already? Or are we waiting for the next patch?

08/01/2012 05:40 PMPosted by Ramenth

Ideally I'd argue Bank Size would be player controlled rather than map controlled. I'm not 100% clear how it works, but I believe it's stored locally. If that's the case, letting players decide the size (much like how they can choose how large an Internet Cache or Flash Cache is, for example) would be best.

As a mapmaker, I can confirm that banks are stored locally. That said, allowing the player to choose the storage amount would not work. As mapmakers, we need to know exactly how much space we have for player's banks. If we ever go over the limit, the map can break and data can go missing.

Are there any plans, in the future, to have the bank system tie to the map creator's account on the Blizzard servers?

The reason I'm asking is that sometimes we want to save stats that we don't want the player changing. One of the most common being stuff like global ranking systems. There are some ecryption trigger libraries avaible but if a map gets popular enough these can always be broken into and changed.

While I believe the blues that the limit has been raised, my own test seems to imply that it is not 1 MB. I didn't made more tests at the moment to determine any specific maximum.

I just tested with 2 banks of 968 KB each. My own bank of 1 MB then a friend's bank of 1 MB. Both banks have 13,000 integers.

The end result was my test map only found like 20 of my integers of my bank and all 13000 integers of my friend's bank.

In the past (1.4.3 or earlier) when I did it with more players, it was always the last player's bank that was always fully loaded no matter what while all other players' banks had missing bank data. This latest test seems to strongly imply this problem again.

I base this finding on my custom test map named "Large Bank Test" which is an unlocked map. It naturally requires 2+ players.

Im not quite sure if the bank limit is already meant to be raised or not, however in my own tests we couldnt even load a 100kb bank per player with 2 players.

The limit might be ALOT lower though, didnt test even smaller banks.

So, is it already meant to be in or not? =/

While any real limit higher than 6 KB is better, a 1 MB per bank, per player is probably the current sweet spot for the most serious ones that really want to do something special with banks.

Ultimately, I don't mind using many bank "compression" techniques (ex : lots of integers in a very long string to cut down XML headers, multiple Booleans into a single number, etc.) to store even more data but I REALLY need a much better raw maximum than 6 KB.

In my case, I do aim to be able to keep like 75+ units worth of basic data per bank player for some potential future map using 1 MB banks.

EDIT : "I don't mind" rather than "I don't aim". Sorry.