Can we get a storage slip…. For our storage slips?

[Cabalabob]

Just saying, there’s 28 of them, honestly I don’t see why they can’t just be key items, or why the porter moogle can’t just hold on to them for us.

[Cesil]

Seconding this, there is so many storage slips and it takes up quite a lot of space, can't we just store things in the moogle without slips somehow?

[Alhanelem]

The way item data is stored, this wouldn't work. Every item on a storage slip is stored via a string of 0s or 1s representing each item. What's actually happening is the item you trade is deleted, and a new one is created when you retrieve it. variable data is lost as a result. If you stored storage slips in storage slips, those slips wouldn't have anything on them when you retrieved them.

[Cabalabob]

I’m sure there is something they can do if they try. Even if it’s just letting us store the slips with the porter moogle like beastman seals with shami. Hell, push comes to shove they could create a new inventory that can only be used to hold storage slips (I’d take that over another paid mog wardrobe).

[Alhanelem]

I’m sure there is something they can do if they try. Even if it’s just letting us store the slips with the porter moogle like beastman seals with shami. Hell, push comes to shove they could create a new inventory that can only be used to hold storage slips (I’d take that over another paid mog wardrobe).

There is always something they can do, it's a matter of how much work it takes. If they can leverage an existing system, then it's easy to do and the development cost is low. But they can not use an existing system to do this. The storage slip system wasn't designed in a way that would allow this to work.
Everything has a cost and that cost has to be weighed against both the benefit it would bring and the impact it would have on the development of other things.

[Zenion]

There is always something they can do, it's a matter of how much work it takes. If they can leverage an existing system, then it's easy to do and the development cost is low. But they can not use an existing system to do this. The storage slip system wasn't designed in a way that would allow this to work.
Everything has a cost and that cost has to be weighed against both the benefit it would bring and the impact it would have on the development of other things.

Mm... this doesn't seem like a super, super complex system. You're ultimately asking for a system that stores ~30 integers per player, can change their values based on items traded to it, and stamp those integers onto items and produce them for the player. Divainy-Gamainy does that, albeit with "number of items in stack" rather than "object metadata."

You'd get some annoying edge cases where someone has a storage slip 01, and wants to retrieve a storage slip 01; what happens then? Does it fail? Do you swap the two? Or do you aggregate the two, potentially deleting duplicate stored items?

For that matter, are there items where there is a material benefit to being able to store duplicates? Is there anything dangerous I can do with theoretical access to three Naeglings, that I couldn't do already with theoretical access to two?

If FFXI had dedicated devs, this is the sort of problem one would hammer out in a boring afternoon. Unfortunately, having to borrow devs... it's not a big enough problem to say "please fix this", nor an interesting enough one for anyone to say "hey, I bet I can solve that in a day."

[Alhanelem]

Mm... this doesn't seem like a super, super complex system.

It doesn't have to be, even simple systems require work, which needs to be diverted from other things. Also, just because something seems simple to use, doesn't mean that it is simple in the context of how things can be implemented within FFXI's code and its scripting system. In particular, To make this system work, it would require changes to the item data structure. Changing this creates a world of oppertunities to break other things if you're not careful. Again, I"m not specifically saying that this specific thing would be 10 out of 10 on difficulty and resources required. But there is more to everything than just eyeballing how easy or hard it seems to you.

And I say this as someone who has worked in game development myself, I've worked on several games in QA and I would often ask if they could make XYZ thing, doesnt seem like it would be hard and they say no (or don't give an answer).

You have to understand FFXI is being run by a very lean staff, so every minute of development time matters and must be justified via cost benefit analyses. Even the smallest things can potentially derail a planned content release in order to make it happen for a given patch.

~30 integers per player, can change their values based on items traded to it,

FFXI's current NPC storage systems all take items from you, delete them, and modify another item's data or some internal character data with a bit or bits. If I were take a "storage slip slip" with however many bits there are to determine the presence olf howevermany storage slips there are, sure, you could store them, but when you come back the data that those items had would be lost. In order to prevent that, you'd have to store all of every item's data along with it- and at that point, you may as well just have one storage slip in the first place- and obviously they made a bunch of storage slips because they couldn't do it with one.

You have to realize these are conversations the developers almost certainly already had, and they settled on the systems they have after having these kinds of conversations. I.e. there is a reason it is the way it is.

For example, they already had storage systems like the event item storage, where everything is tracked in the game's NPC menu system. This is stored as additional character data, and every new feature you add like this makes the character data larger, and when you have thousands upon thousands of characters worth of data to maintain, just a tiny bit of additional space can add up. they likely went with the item based system (storage slips) because it allowed them the most efficient way to store the data, by minimizing the amount of information that needed to be retained.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying there's a better system than what we have or that they shouldn't do anything to improve it. I quite think they should, I'm just saying that this particular idea just doesn't work the way the game is designed. They would either need to build a new system from the ground up (expensive) or they would need to leverage some other already designed system to keep the cost down. The item slip system itself is definitely not the best candidate to solve the too many slips problem- it would need to be modified in a way that kind of defeats the purpose of the modifications in the first place.