Idea: Gear Swapping.

We all gearswap, it's part of the nature of FFXI, I have two ideas, one easy to implement, the other difficult, that would substantially help the quality of gameplay for most FFXI players in my opinion.

1.) Limit visual gear updates to once every 10 seconds, and/or make it so that your target doesn't blink when they change gear. - This will stop the constant blinking people do, and heck, that can be a client-side setting so that if someone doesn't mind the blinking, they can keep it like it is, this should be easy to implement.

2.) Integrate gear changing into the new FFXI UI. I was really hoping you guys would do this in the first place. I select my macro named "Cure4", click "Precast" pull up a menu with every gear slot, slot all my fastcast equipment into it, and then click "Midcast", put all my "Magic Attack bonus" gear in that box, then click "Aftercast", and put all my "Refresh" and "Defensive" gear there.

Both of these things (and a lot more functionality you may or may not want to add) have already been created and work very well by third party programmers. Many, many players use them, but it would be nicer for everyone if it was built into the game itself.

They already added an interface option in the Config menu for player models. There is static and dynamic. Static displayes everyone else in RSE and nobody blinks no matter how much they change gear. You are the only one that blinks in that case. This was done quite a while ago.

I'm aware, but wouldn't occasional gear updates be nicer than watching everyone run around in their underwear all the time and be almost as easy to implement? /shrug.

I would like them to make it so that the first gear I see someone wearing when they pop up on my screen is what they wear till I am out of range, rather than 1 set of gear for everyone. That way I could still see everyone looking different but not have blinking in combat, and we know for a fact its possible to do it, it has already been done.

The point of the current setting is to speed up loading of character models. By only having faces and weapons vary, only body models have to load, and only about 8 of them, so it's not churning the drive loading hundreds of pieces of gear in town. Since it loads generic models, it has the side effect of not causing players to blink.

Yes, SE could do a lot of what has been done with Windower add-ons and plugins, but they still seem very resistant to it. I recall the new UI is supposed to allow modification somehow, but that is slow going, and so I don't expect a different set of features and interface changes to happen quicker than that has been progressing.