First off, hey Drax. Long time no see. I'm not doing the forum thing so much lately, but I'm on ICQ most evenings. If you lost my #, should be in my profile still.
Secondly, this is just idle musing, figured I'd toss it out there in case a Dev really did end up reading this thread. Read if you wish, but don't blame me if you feel you've wasted a couple minutes of your life reading unsubstantiated guesswork.
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"...out of a pool of 20-30(?) different possible ones, which can have up to 25 or so different intensity levels per property..."
In terms of the number of options...there's around 60 differrent Tailor items, 16 Armor items, and I don't how many wep and shield items. Might be 150 total in the BoD pool. Regardless, the number of items or options for each field does not impact storage. There might 25 different intensities but your storing only 1 per Jewel. Similarly there may be 150 different BoD items but you still only store 1 per BoD.
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I think you missed my point. I understand that you only store one intensity per property, 5 properties per jewel, etc. My point was that just for intensity of a single property on a single gem, you'd need 5 bits (assuming >16 <32 graduations in the intensity level). Then there needs to be room for 5 properties, which assuming there are between 20 and 30 of those takes 5 bits each. Then 2 bits for which jewel type it is (or maybe they are just a different object/datatype name, so this part might be unnecessary).
Now for a BOD, you'd need 3 bits for ore type, and at most 7 bits to specify which item it is (I'm guessing high, I really don't remember). And if each individual BOD knows what set it belongs to (I wouldn't have bothered, but maybe they did), that only takes maybe 4 bits (I don't think there's more than 16 types of combined sets, if we ignore color which was handled earlier).
So basically, looking at it with respect to item size, jewels could be around 5(which property will be chosen) * 5(identifier for the property) + 5(one intensity for each property) * 5(intensity value) = 50 bits. Whereas BODs could be around 3+7+4 = 14 bits.
But in the end, this is just random guesswork. I really don't know how they structure their items, etc. I just figured that BODs could be stored into a relatively small footprint, whereas items with randomly generated stats and properties don't have the same luxury. And seeing as jewel boxes have been requested but not implemented for quite some time, I tried to put together a possible contributing factor. Even so, this would be at most a contributing factor. There would have to be other reasons to put it off, might just be a priority thing. I mean, even with the given numbers those are very small storage spaces. But the point I was making is that jewels scaled poorly with respect to BODs, I can't say myself how much memory/disk space they have on their servers.
