Inventory Suggestion

I would be surprised if they dont include the new inventory changes with 4.0 at launch

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Originally Posted by Moonlite

Not to be mean, but I did laugh. They have serious game design issues or at least we have been told. They would need to cancel stormblood and rebuild the game from scratch. I truthfully don't understand it. Is it because of playstation, japanese company, lack of skill they can't seem to get some simple features that are in other games.

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The main reason for the limitation on the inventory system was the fact that the game saves character data twice as often as most MMOs do (every 15 seconds instead of every 30). As you increase inventory space you increase the amount of data to be written by a substantial amount and therefore it made it difficult to give us more space. Yoshi-P has said that they're reworking the way the game saves data to make it more efficient, which will allow them the ability to give us more space, but the change required new hardware infrastructure to do so which has been put in place for the 4.0 launch already.

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Originally Posted by Malzian

The main reason for the limitation on the inventory system was the fact that the game saves character data twice as often as most MMOs do (every 15 seconds instead of every 30). As you increase inventory space you increase the amount of data to be written by a substantial amount and therefore it made it difficult to give us more space. Yoshi-P has said that they're reworking the way the game saves data to make it more efficient, which will allow them the ability to give us more space, but the change required new hardware infrastructure to do so which has been put in place for the 4.0 launch already.

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I read the corporate speak as much as you. That doesn't explain the poor decisions of the design team. Just to point out a few how many beast tribe tokens, how many recipes reuse 2.0 items, I could literally spend a day pointing out bad itemization of this game. They also felt the need to charge when the increase retainers yet did not increase the number of free ones.

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Originally Posted by Moonlite

Not to be mean, but I did laugh. They have serious game design issues or at least we have been told. They would need to cancel stormblood and rebuild the game from scratch. I truthfully don't understand it. Is it because of playstation, japanese company, lack of skill they can't seem to get some simple features that are in other games.

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The amount of data your character hauls around in the form of equipment, materia stats, items, and item arrangment makes for a pretty large file. Making sure you don't accidentally lose something means that data is being saved like every 15 seconds. For every character. That takes a large, high performance storage array, and at least the way things are coded and the with the hardware in use now. They've been pushing the limits.

Hotbars, gearsets, macros, and ui settings are stored client side. Retainers and other storage chests are separate because they are accessed rarely, and only on demand.

Should make is so things like crafting mats, Ventures, etc go higher than 99.

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Originally Posted by Moonlite

Not to be mean, but I did laugh. They have serious game design issues or at least we have been told. They would need to cancel stormblood and rebuild the game from scratch. I truthfully don't understand it. Is it because of playstation, japanese company, lack of skill they can't seem to get some simple features that are in other games.

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Yes, having bag slots being filled with bags of multiple sizes is truly a shining example

Increasing the stack size would already make a huge difference, besides that SE should make most things that are not unique, like equipment, be stack-able, that way we would have more space and they couldn't use as excuse it uses too much data!...

Two bytes of data per item would do fine, it could go up to 65,535 units per stack!... :D

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Originally Posted by SigmaOZ

Four bytes of data per item would do fine, it could go up to 65,535 units per stack!... :D

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But.. That's two bytes!

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Originally Posted by vp_cmc

But.. That's two bytes!

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You're right, corrected!... :o

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Originally Posted by Moonlite

I read the corporate speak as much as you. That doesn't explain the poor decisions of the design team. Just to point out a few how many beast tribe tokens, how many recipes reuse 2.0 items, I could literally spend a day pointing out bad itemization of this game. They also felt the need to charge when the increase retainers yet did not increase the number of free ones.

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I'm not speaking entirely from the perspective of someone who just read the corporate line, but as a programmer and a network administrator as well.

For the most part people get the idea that 'saving data twice as often' is equivalent to 'writing down twice as much information'. Unfortunately, that's really now how these types of systems work. Speaking from the technical perspective there's a lot more to consider.

First you have to understand how data is saved which is not always 'we have new data here, write it next to the old data there' but more 'what of has changed that we need to record and how do we organize that data to record' even before going through the process of sending that data across the network to be written to a disk, all of which takes time that increases closer to exponentially than to linearly.

For the itemization, yes it's bad, but it fits into the current schema of how they process this data. If they add a new token that goes into your inventory, it's easier to fit into this schema than adding some new form of storage, i.e. A currency wallet for those tokens. Granted, they very well could add those tokens to the currency tab for seals and such, but they don't want to put you in a position where you've collected a thousand tokens from a 2.x beast tribe that you can't ever get rid of. The current system allows you to get rid of those tokens you no longer needed.

Personally I think they should itemize those tokens in the same way they did crystals, but there could be a dozen other reasons we're not aware of for why they didn't... Likely the whole turn-in system they set up for those is incompatible with the way crystals are stored, though let it be known that the whole 'drag the item here or right click' system was supposed to go away after Beta and never did.

So honestly, it does explain many of their decisions once you realize how that whole 'twice as often' bit affects the system at large and not just the small inventory part you're considering.