jpgames.de Gamescom 2015 interview with Naoki Yoshida

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and every 15 seconds data will be going to the servers and stored, so a lot of data is transmitted

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Have they considered programming the game better, then?

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Although we won’t be able to expand inventory straight away, we want to make it more convenient to use retainers. So you can e.g. access all retainers in certain areas, rather than one by one.

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Comments like this make me think they don't actually understand the problem at all.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

Perhaps part of the difference between us is that I am not looking at this from an endgame efficiency point of view, and perhaps you are. Yoshi clearly is, hence his comments abot waiting until the interviewer hit 60. I'm sorry, but I don't measure much of this game based on raid or end game utility. The look and feel, personality and how something plays matter more to me.

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Why don't you describe how you think WHM is or should be? Because nothing you said in your post screams "Protect and Stoneskin are essential parts of my identity!" Most people will say WHM's niche is as a powerhouse healer, both single target and (especially) AoE. Protect and SS has nothing to do with either. In fact, I never even noticed the difference between pro-shell and protect until T13, and that's because it's a cast-and-forget spell that's negligible for most fights. Stoneskin you could make an argument for. But I'm pretty sure stuff like giving Indom to SCH is what upset WHMs the most, since that directly detracts from their identity as a strong AoE healer. PLDs have legitimate reason to be upset, as their DPS is clearly inferior to DRK/WAR and some of their new toys are virtually unusable (Casting Cleme--Interrupted).

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Originally Posted by Krokov

No one can say dark side Hurts their eyes or anything anymore, You can just make it out if you are in a brightly lit area or even a bright background Environment.

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It's still obnoxious in cities. It's not so much the color or glow as it is just how stupidly far out from the character it is. Reduce the radius on it.

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JPGames.de: The Dark Knight ability „Darkside“ features red light floating around the character which is irritating to some players. Are there plans for allowing players to manually adjust the effect?

NY: It was fixed two emergency maintenances before, it should be fixed. (Naoki Yoshida goes to a TV screen where the effect is displayed and points at it.) When it was first implemented, the aura was really strong and people could not see through it. Now that we reduced it, the overall feedback settled down and players are fine with the color. Probably your friends

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Is there a video or screenshot of this. I am really curious.

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Originally Posted by zcrash970

4-5 day maintenance? T_T

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only for the Chaos server group (EU servers)

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Originally Posted by FaileExperiment

One example: HQ and non-HQ items. Do we really need them anymore? They don't really serve any valuable game play function that could be better accomplished in another way.

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Be happy that it is only NQ and HQ. And not NQ, +1, +2 and +3 (like it was in the first half of 1.0) ^^

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Originally Posted by pushin_tin

I'd rather pay a one time $10-15 dollar fee for an extra retainer and OWN it, instead of renting one with increased sub cost. Allow us to craft from retainers like in GW2, and make it less cumbersome to manage equipment sets from the retainer, and I'd happily pay for extra.

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Exactly! Not even F2P games do this. You just pay a one time price and get more inventory for good.

So they are claiming there is no way to make space...okay so...then what are the paid retainers for? Pretty sure that is space...o.O So confused SE :(

Comparing the inventory to other MMOs - FFXIV might have the biggest inventory, yes. I can't help but wonder though, how does the amount of items we can have compare to other MMOs? I doubt it's in the low, so yeah, well, thank you, but it's quite obvious that we should have the biggest inventory - in fact, that was the case at launch, let's just count how many times more items there are since then...? While the inventory remained the same.
That 15 seconds flush to disk is absolutely insanely ridiculous, no wonder their networks/servers are so stressed. 1 minute or even greater would make much more sense while significantly decreasing the load on both the network and the hardware, there is just literally no reason for it, especially with "oh so many" players and "oh so much" data on each item. It would mean no high server load, so they could work more on addressing this issue.
Idk what to say about the content server, tbh. A lot of items (COUGHAlextokensCOUGHventuresCOUGH) that don't even make sense to be actual items should just have placeholders in the inventory, so the free slots don't change, but that apparently overwhelmingly huge data doesn't carry over into instances. Crafting materials don't have to be carried into dungeons either.
And yeah...sure...make it more convenient to use retainers. Because there is the option to pay extra for more of those, and many people do pay extra for those. I mean to hell with all of us plebs who have only been paying our monthly sub... Because let's be real, this won't really be for the benefit of those who only have the default two, managing two is not that big of a headache, might even say no headache at all.

As for housing... eh. They completely fail to see, or refuse to care about the core issue with housing. Which is the fact that the ward system is simply not viable on the scale it should be viable; code can only be tightened so much, and the servers/zones still have to be on 24/7. It's just not something that can be done when there are "few 100,000 players in all worlds at the same time" - yeah, ok, a great chunk of those are RMT bots and AFKers (re: flushing entire inventories to disk every 15 seconds, one more reason why the auto-kick should be a permanent feature), but the other great chunk of those are legit active players. More wards/servers can be added, sure, but it'll only create even greater/more issues than it is creating now - more hardware for maintenances, more space to store that hardware, more bills to pay... And as big as it currently is, it's only 1440 plots per server. Vs the hundred thousands that are on at any given time, probably not a bad indication of the total number of players on each server - literally less than 1% of the population has access to it - would have access to it, were it not for the fact that it's shared between individuals and FCs. And the dead, decaying plots/houses, and the several-plots-owned-by-one-person phenomenon of course, because why on earth should such a limited feature have any kind of restriction on it, that'd be completely illogical, right...? Yeah, no, this system for individuals should just completely be scrapped, those who spent on it refunded with their items shoved onto the Salvager to be reclaimed. Free the wards up for FCs (see several new ones being created every day), and instance it for individuals, end of story.

Another good solution would be for the inventory to not send in its entirety, but only send the difference from the past 15 seconds. Either the game client can report to the server, "No change, forget about me and move on to the next guy", or it could send a hash of the inventory contents (perhaps per tab, how often do you change the crap in that first tab anyway?) to compare against the data stored on the server. Such a hash would be counted in bytes, not kilobytes, and only force an update if it's not a match for what the server has.

There are numerous ways of doing a quick check to save data; perhaps Square is a bit blinded by the insanely awesome net connections in Japan.

You know maybe... just maybe...

Yoshi didn't say EVERYTHING about the problems they're facing, just the ones that the team says he can say. MAYBE, that makes it hard for him to actually discuss solutions with us Network Experts.

You know. Just maybe.

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Originally Posted by Moonleg

Another good solution would be for the inventory to not send in its entirety, but only send the difference from the past 15 seconds. Either the game client can report to the server, "No change, forget about me and move on to the next guy", or it could send a hash of the inventory contents (perhaps per tab, how often do you change the crap in that first tab anyway?) to compare against the data stored on the server. Such a hash would be counted in bytes, not kilobytes, and only force an update if it's not a match for what the server has.

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I'm no programming expert, but wouldn't that end up sending the same amount of data anyways? 100 comparison checks (+ updates) vs. 100 updates.

Step back that people don't realize is this though, why does XIV have more inventory space? Because unlock other mmos where let's say they use the same amount of slots, which mind you we have an armory chest for we have the following going on.

21 different potential gears to work on in XI

Most MMOs only have to worry about maybe 2-3 gear sets based on the type of MMO but for the most part let's put that into perspective.

Say an MMO, one class, one person, 11-12 based on offhand, so let's just say 11.

FFXIV 11x21= 231.
Other MMOs 2= 22
3= 33

That adds up a lot, because we only need 1 player to play everything, that adds up to issues with inventory overload, if this was any other MMO let's say in an MMO where you have 100 slots. then you have this. at most 33 is for gear, and then the rest for storage. In XI you already are using 231 for gear, 300 armory chest and 100 inventory, 400 inventory slots.

If this is still true, WoW inventory spaces are :
120 total bank spots
147 Inventory spots

267 total. That alone doesn't even equate to how many slots we use in the armory chest for all our job gear.