Really tired of the inventory excuses.

Glamour wardrobe storage a la Rift, WildStar, CoH, or even GW2 would go a long way in helping, for sure. @_@

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Originally Posted by Zari

Are people just ignoring the fact that along with the retainer thing, he DID say they are working on fixing the inventory issue

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Come on. How many times are you going to give them for we are trying. Do we need to list all the errors of the 2.0 era. They get credit for making and maintaining a quality game. But they have definitely burnt the bridge of trust us we are working on it. You ever see them answer a truly bad question in the live letter. the closest they get is to some class balance issue. Otherwise they fluff the fan base.

Now if the statement was made "We understand inventory is an issue while retainers isn't a great solution we will be doubling everyone's retainers. While also increasing the number of bells to all aetherytes through all of Eorzea. We hope to try to come up with a real solution but current coding and infrastructure is hampering us." They alleviate some of the problem while truly interacting with the community.

As much as I want more inventory space, on or off character, I feel the need to reiterate that SE's reason for us not getting more inventory space was NOT server space. At one point, they might have said that, but the latest reason they gave is that they aggressively backup character data and a larger inventory means more network traffic. This reason is totally legit and reasonable. Sure, it may seem like they're backing up the data too often, but I'm not a network engineer. I don't know how often is required to prevent duping and prevent loss of progress due to sudden 90ks or whatnot. Do you want to lose an i170 crafter chestpiece you just made because you 90ked right after finishing the synth and your last backup was during the synth? Again, I don't know their network structure or how they've set up their data, but the backup thing sounds completely reasonable.

So, the reason they can give us more retainers while not being able to expand our armory chest or on-character inventory is reasonable/plausible. This is totally unrelated to their ability to provide more retainers. Retainer inventories aren't saved to server as often as our inventories, and only ones currently being accessed should be being saved since the others cannot change. Adding more retainers does nothing to the network traffic - you can still only access one at a time. So, the people who are saying SE is being hypocritical by giving us the ability to buy more retainers while claiming they can't afford to expand our inventories are incorrect. There's no hypocrisy there - you're comparing apples and popotos.

That said, the question "Why didn't we get a free retainer with 3.0?" is a totally legit question. Why didn't we? We've already established that their issue was with on-character inventory expanding, not off-character. Is it because off-character inventory needs to be saved and they don't have the server space for it? If so, then they couldn't have afforded to offer us more retainers, so that clearly can't be it. However, I feel that the people who are blaming Yoshida personally for it are being ridiculous. Yoshida isn't the god-emperor of Square Enix. Yoshida leads the development of Final Fantasy XIV, not the Square Enix Marketing Department. I find it very unlikely that it was Yoshida's deicsion whether or not to give the players something for free that they were already charging money for (cash-shop retainers predate 3.0, after all). Yes, being upset at Square Enix for a move that looks like nothing other than a money-grab? Totally valid. Being upset at Yoshida personally? Seems like a bit of scapegoating to me.


On the topic of a glamour guide, this is a feature I personally want desperately and I've posted suggested implementations of that idea in other threads. But, that would be a new feature. While yes, it would save space ultimately, it would also require development time. What I'd like to see more are implementations of ideas that take minimal development time. I feel like those are more likely to be done and more sensible to be done. Specifically, expansion of the Armoire. All the code's there, just let us store more items in it. It's off-character storage - it doesn't get saved every 5 seconds. I have never seen a sensible/comprehensible explanation for why they can't expand the Armoire to store 100x as many items. The data is compressed. The data isn't constantly being saved. The data would take up less space than other character-specific datasets that they've already implemented, like the Endless Journey feature, or the Calamity Salvager's sales list, or our achievement progress. They could add the on-character storage required for our Triple Triad card collection, decks, MGP count, tournament standings, race chocobo, cactpot ticket, mini-cactpot daily ticket count, and so on, but they can't add the off-character storage space required for an expanded armoire? Where's the difference?

As somebody who plays pretty much all the jobs in this game I can only agree with the OP, inventory and armory space is terribly low for a multi-job game. Additional free retainers would be more than welcome as well. I'm tired of the excuses as well, other games may have smaller inventories but they generally don't allow you to play multiple classes/jobs on a single character.

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Originally Posted by Nyalia

Yoshida stuff

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When you chose to be the face of something and i hope the highest paid person for said something. You take the blame plus the praise. I am not sure if you are posting from North America or not, but is the cultural standard in entertainment and sports. Is it fair? No but it is also the standard, no one is changing the rules on him.

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Originally Posted by Cyrusskorrey

Hey NEXT time, READ. i SAID: A NEW GAME character. as in what you START the game with.

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Perhaps, you should spend a bit more time thinking before you start throwing faulty comparisons out there in an attempt to make a (shaky, at best) argument. The only real difference between the example you listed and the one I listed, is the inventory in FFXIV can't be upgraded outside of purchasing additional retainers for real money. If you really want to bring semantics into it, you don't technically start with the two retainers. You have to progress the main story quest up to a specific point to have that option available. The primary discussion in this thread was about the total amount of inventory space given to each character that is covered within the basic subscription fee.

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Originally Posted by Raist

You are forgetting that that is global inventory. EVERYTHING you had went into those locations--including your gear. So, you would also have to take into account all the armory slots in XIV for a proper comparison.

Also, only one of those bags was immediately accessible last time I played. All the tools you needed on demand had to be in your main backpack (80 items): foods/meds if on a macro, any situational gear you might want to flip to via a macro--all had to be in that first 80 slot bag. Otherwise you had to stop and move items in and out or otherwise call up the separate bag and use it from there manually.

If you didn't keep gears in that first gobbie bag, when you job changed you had to hunt them down across the different storage locations.A full BLM and SMN gear/item set could basically consume an entire storage location alone. Then you had issues with other jobs as well that relied on a wide variety of weapons and situational gear that could make things tricky as well. And don't EVEN get started on weapons selections for triggering staggers. Some jobs had to carry a veritable arsenal on them for swapping out different weaponskills--some even had to keep differnt damage types on hand for certain content (like mobs that would only take piercing damage). Depending on how complex you gear sets were and how much you got into crafting/gathering, organizing inventory was quite a job.

It was far and away a much more screwed up system than XIV by comparison.

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The inconvenience of the system aside, the main point there was that SE's other MMO (which in my opinion is really the only suitable basis for comparison here) managed to continually add additional storage over the lifespan of the game.

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Originally Posted by Stormrider

When you chose to be the face of something and i hope the highest paid person for said something. You take the blame plus the praise. I am not sure if you are posting from North America or not, but is the cultural standard in entertainment and sports. Is it fair? No but it is also the standard, no one is changing the rules on him.

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Again, Yoshida is not the president of Square Enix. He's the lead developer for FFXIV. He is not in charge of the mogstation, billing, or pricing. Square Enix is a company that works on more than one game at a time. There are many lead developers at SE at any given time, but I doubt they each run their own marketing departments.

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Originally Posted by Nyalia

Again, Yoshida is not the president of Square Enix. He's the lead developer for FFXIV. He is not in charge of the mogstation, billing, or pricing. Square Enix is a company that works on more than one game at a time. There are many lead developers at SE at any given time, but I doubt they each run their own marketing departments.

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Tony Romo doesn't own the Dallas cowboys, a billion dollar franchise but anytime something goes bad he gets most of the blame. Actors who makes movies may not have any control of the crappy movie. Suits don't get blame faces get blame. When you choose to be a face you choose to get blame. Also i don't see any other developer for any other FF title going to every convention going, across the globe, and answering questions personally in live feeds.

You can believe he is not the face of the game for the company or not for this game. I never said he makes the decisions good or bad, I said he was the face. People get blamed in our culture all the time for things out of their decision making control.

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Q: Since 3.0, my inventory and Armoury Chest have been super full. Do you plan on adding more inventory space?
A: For each character, item data is the greatest source of data, both in terms of frequency of writes to the database and total data transferred. Particularly with the number of players connecting to dungeons following the reset each Tuesday, we need to take care that we don't exceed server bandwidth and bring the server down, and so it's taking us a long time to make large improvements on this front. With no visible changes, it must look like we're not making progress. But with each patch we have been making gradual optimizations, and I'd like to one day see an increase in space. But if, for example, increasing space introduced the risk of a server crash, or required us to put limitations on zoning into instances, these sort of things would ultimately lower the quality of life that you've experienced up until now, and therefore there wouldn't be any point to do it. So, although it's in small steps, we continue to make improvements, and we ask you for your patience.

However, we’re fully aware that item management is very difficult at the moment, so until then, we’re considering ways to greatly increase the retainer’s abilities. For example, a feature that stores and retrieves whole gear sets to and from retainers, a feature where you’ll be able to glamour from items stored inside your retainer’s inventory, or a feature where you can store all the gear you don’t use to your retainer. Once these types of adjustments become available, we’ll move onto optimization to increase the inventory and Armoury Chest. Minagawa is currently working hard on writing up the specifications for this, so please give us some more time.

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This answer makes me absolutely sick. I think anyone saying this should feel nothing but shame. To say that they have been slowly trying to work on ways to optimize inventory(to no noticeable effect) but they're looking at trying to make quality of life improvements that relate to the retainers... this is honestly just disgraceful. How can anyone read that, and not see it as the blatant cash-grab that it is? The only thing they've given us to alleviate space issues since launch, despite new items and entire new gear tiers every three months, is extra rented retainers. Then the only solution they're currently looking at to resolve inventory issues ties into those same retainers?

Making additional inventory may be difficult, I won't try to debate that. But making additional storage space in general obviously IS possible, and instead of giving us any of it for free, they're trying to sell it as a subscription bonus. It was bad enough when HW launched with this massive amount of new items and worse when the only thing they did was add four more RMT retainers, but to now say that our future inventory woes will be solved by that same cash shop system is insulting.

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Originally Posted by Bovinity

It's strange to me to see complaints about inventory space in FFXIV when pretty much every other MMO is worse about it. What the heck are people doing to use up all this space? :D

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I lol'd. Probably because of the emoticon.

But, yeah... crafting.