Please, let us cast glamor plate anywhere.....!!!

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Originally Posted by Krotoan

That's assuming it works how you think it works. True it should just be 3 or 4 flags with appearance, color, maybe a few more for durability, soulbinding and such, But knowing this and understanding this information yet having the devs themselves stating data bandwidth being a concern, the only way your explanation works is if they are outright lying to us about everything. While that's a possibility of course as no company is beyond suspicion, WHY would they go with such an outlandish explanation then?

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Read my previous replies. I go into that detail to why they would make a claim.

But to sum it up. As I said, some coder got a slight ego trip (this isn't uncommon among some of these types of people) and decided this is how it is going to work. Its even possible he designed a system that doesn't work efficiently, but I'm not going to make that sort of accusation just yet. They were initially resistant when their community reps came to them and said "hey, the players want to use appearances over their items." I'd even say that the coders were like "well they can't do that, what they wear is what they look like, how can you tell what someone is wearing if it looks like something else?" And then they were pressured into making the change.

Except they didn't make the change like its been done in many games before. They went out of their way to request a furniture item to be used and crafted a whole system that requires alot of leg work from the player. The idea was to make the player work for it. The idea was to make it cumbersom.

Do you all remember when we had different glamour crystals types and different tiers? What was the point in that if not to make it stupidly hard for players to utilize? Well that system was nixed because understandably it isn't what players want.

We WILL get what we want. They can cry about server lag and all that all day. But the truth of the matter is they will eventually cave. But only if we get pressure on them. By the way I had this argument about a year ago concerning housing. I was told that instancing housing wasn't possible because of the scope and size would cause server load. I debunked that by pasting the entire .txt file into a reply showing an entire guild hall the size of one of the housing districts with over 1000 items placed.

Yes, it fit in the reply here. debunking the idea of server load being an issue.

Since we do not need to worry about placement of an item in a 3 dimensional space, complete with pitch, yaw, and roll as well as translation in 6 directions, just inventory location (which doesn't change on a per item basis except for rings going on left or right), the amount of data per item is negligible.

itemID
colorID

Are the only fields needed for each slot from the server when referencing a look. ItemID is an alphanumeric value about 11 characters long (you can check this on the lodestone yourself). So that's about 11 bytes. And then it looks like characterID is about 7 characters long though I'm gonna say 8 and assume the leading zero isn't shown (again you can see this in the lodestone). But that's going to be less than a few bytes as it is a numerical and has no alphabetical characters in it. And then color is likely a single byte as there isn't more than 255 colors to choose from.

Suffice to say, the amount of network packets this would take for Crystarium characters to be shown is 1 or 2 to each person. During primetime. I'm sure the server can handle this just fine. In fact. Its already handling it. It does this already.

As for the argument of "maybe they don't do it that way". This is basic networking and databasing. Not doing it this way implies an alien form of computing. Besides, as I said above, the lodestone shows the IDs, they've been pretty transparent on how its referenced in the database. Maybe unintentionally.

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Originally Posted by Kaethra

Read my previous replies. I go into that detail to why they would make a claim.

But to sum it up. As I said, some coder got a slight ego trip (this isn't uncommon among some of these types of people) and decided this is how it is going to work. Its even possible he designed a system that doesn't work efficiently, but I'm not going to make that sort of accusation just yet. They were initially resistant when their community reps came to them and said "hey, the players want to use appearances over their items." I'd even say that the coders were like "well they can't do that, what they wear is what they look like, how can you tell what someone is wearing if it looks like something else?" And then they were pressured into making the change.

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And I said that the chances of the entire team accepting "well that's how it's gotta be" as a reason for a game mechanic are low. People don't just make AAA product affecting decisions on their own and implement them.

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Originally Posted by Kaethra

Except they didn't make the change like its been done in many games before. They went out of their way to request a furniture item to be used and crafted a whole system that requires alot of leg work from the player. The idea was to make the player work for it. The idea was to make it cumbersom.

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What leg work? it's a hub you have to go to in a limited server traffic area (no fighting, no player interactions). I'd say that speaks to a prioritizing of certain traffic or a need to isolate, not necessarily a need to make it needlessly complex.

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Originally Posted by Kaethra

Do you all remember when we had different glamour crystals types and different tiers? What was the point in that if not to make it stupidly hard for players to utilize? Well that system was nixed because understandably it isn't what players want.

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OK, yes. It was crazy annoying, but it also gave crafters some power over markets that a player who didn't have crafting leveling didn't have. It's part of why I leveled all my crafting disciplines in the first place cause I wanted to glamour things. The amount of players asking for this not to be a thing or the decision to unify the prisms has technical merit, but the original premise also did, it just didn't work for enough people.

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Originally Posted by Kaethra

We WILL get what we want. They can cry about server lag and all that all day. But the truth of the matter is they will eventually cave. But only if we get pressure on them. By the way I had this argument about a year ago concerning housing. I was told that instancing housing wasn't possible because of the scope and size would cause server load. I debunked that by pasting the entire .txt file into a reply showing an entire guild hall the size of one of the housing districts with over 1000 items placed.

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Housing items aren't player equipment. Ideally they would have the same limitations with item, appearance, color, etc etc flags but considering the generosity with which they raise furniture limits as opposed to the rate at which we get inventory storage increases, it sounds like it's a whole other ball of wax. I UNDERSTAND THAT IT SHOULDN'T BE, but as someone who isn't intimately involved in the development of FFXIV I cannot make statements like "it should be easy" with any authority and it always surprises me when people feel they can.

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Originally Posted by Kaethra

Since we do not need to worry about placement of an item in a 3 dimensional space, complete with pitch, yaw, and roll as well as translation in 6 directions, just inventory location (which doesn't change on a per item basis except for rings going on left or right), the amount of data per item is negligible.

itemID
colorID

Are the only fields needed for each slot from the server when referencing a look. ItemID is an alphanumeric value about 11 characters long (you can check this on the lodestone yourself). So that's about 11 bytes. And then it looks like characterID is about 7 characters long though I'm gonna say 8 and assume the leading zero isn't shown (again you can see this in the lodestone). But that's going to be less than a few bytes as it is a numerical and has no alphabetical characters in it. And then color is likely a single byte as there isn't more than 255 colors to choose from.

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Are we absolutely certain that the website reference to our character is the same as the game?

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Originally Posted by Kaethra

Suffice to say, the amount of network packets this would take for Crystarium characters to be shown is 1 or 2 to each person. During primetime. I'm sure the server can handle this just fine. In fact. Its already handling it. It does this already.

As for the argument of "maybe they don't do it that way". This is basic networking and databasing. Not doing it this way implies an alien form of computing. Besides, as I said above, the lodestone shows the IDs, they've been pretty transparent on how its referenced in the database. Maybe unintentionally.

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As someone who works with company databases layered one on top of the other, going back 5 company iterations and translating between entirely different programs, I can say with confidence that the end result isn't always indicative of the optimal process being implemented. I don't know what item information is transferred back and forth (it's possible they have LOTS of superfluous information going back and forth that we would consider unnecessary but the system requests, or it's possible there are several intermittent database transitions when hopping from one server to the next) , I don't know how the systems that keep this information organize it (it should be simple text but who knows what the database is structured like) , and I don't know what challenges the system they've built on the charred bones of the last presents.

It would be nice to let us at least use it in any sanctuary, even if not just anywhere out of combat.

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Originally Posted by Krotoan

Are we absolutely certain that the website reference to our character is the same as the game?

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There's no advantage to referencing character and item data in two completely separate databases with different referencing in each one. Especially when those databases talk to each other CONSTANTLY (hi2u, Lodestone). There's just no chance the item and player IDs aren't being used as referents between the game and Lodestone systems.

I mean let's be real.. there's always going to be a certain amount of wackiness in any kind of large program, but that would be truly absurd.

/signed

Yes please.

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Originally Posted by Krotoan

True it should just be 3 or 4 flags with appearance, color, maybe a few more for durability, soulbinding and such ...

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We know that it doesn't store things like durability, spiritbond, materia, or creator's signature. That's the reason none of those things can be restored when you take something back out of the dresser. All the dresser or plates keep is the item IDs and color.

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

We know that it doesn't store things like durability, spiritbond, materia, or creator's signature. That's the reason none of those things can be restored when you take something back out of the dresser. All the dresser or plates keep is the item IDs and color.

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Converting it from it's usual mishmash of we don't know to something more compact, sure. I don't know how the two link, if at all though. So I feel weird talking about how easy it is when I don't work on the system.