What Everybody Wants: Shorter, Simpler Macros

[Jenenibui]

Yes to /equipset or something like it! or let us equip multiple pieces of equipment in one macro line. or could maybe get rid of the whole command "/equip XXXX"(XXXX is armor slot), since the game knows what type of armor a certain equip is, and be able to do "/equip "Optical Hat";"Wahlara Turban"" in one line to the character limit. Something like that alone would make like way easier.

[Arcon]

I think this is a really excellent idea. FFXI macros have been bugging me for a really long time, the <wait #> thing was a great addition, and if something like /equipset is implemented, I would finally start using them again.

As for the memory thing... I don't think it would be an issue. There's a certain memory space allocated for macros right now, and it's rather big.. 20x10x2x10x(6x60+8) = 147200 characters. A gear set could be stored very efficiently.. there's 3000 different weapons in the game right now (distinct weapon names) and 5257 pieces of armor, meaning 8257 pieces of equippable items. Stored numerically, this could be done by easily a 16bit value for each item (and would still leave tons of space for future items), storing one gear set would require 256bit, which (pessimistically speaking, since I'm not sure how characters are stored) would equal 32 characters. And that's for a whole set, 16 items worth, in about half a macro line.

So even if we stored a set for every single macro button, it would still probably be less memory than we currently use for macros. So if we cut macro lines by half (which shouldn't be a problem, since most macros are gear swaps anyway), we'd still actually saved some space. Thinking about it, SE could even store the items in the set by 16 character names, like it does in the inventory list, it would still be enough to store one set per macro line, although it would take up ~71% of the current macro space, but if they limit the maximum number of available gear sets to, say, 2000, which is more than enough for every spell in the game (1542 and some other actions like healing, ranged attack, tp, eva, etc.), and still an unrealistically high number, it would only exhaust ~36% of the whole current macro memory.

All in all, great idea and sounds viable (feel free to point out errors in my math), let's only hope SE implements something like this, I'm sure it would be greatly appreciated.

[Xilk]

This is a fantastic solution.
I would go 1 step further in suggesting how it is implemented. When you are at your Equip screen, Have another button or category so you can simply asign your currently equiped gear to a slot for an equip set.
This way, players are not endlessly going through names and text. You equip it like you normally would, then you pretty much say "save as... set01" or something like that.

any blank slots in the saved set, simply will not be switched (this allows for swapping or not swapping tp affecting slots)