Idea: Merge PLD Sword and Shield into a Single Item

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Originally Posted by Sjol

When I say they're imaginary I'm saying the slot space isn't taken up when the item isn't present. Yes, there's a hard limit on what the game will let you put in there because I imagine there's an enumerated list of spots for the item to go into, but if there's no item in that spot, there's no data to represent them. Items take up storage because they represent data. Empty item slots don't have data associated with them, so no storage cost.

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I'm not a programmer, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but that doesn't sound right to me for this game.

If it was an inventory that behaved like a plain list or like the key items pouch where everything auto-sorts itself and there are never any gaps in the list, that would make sense.

But in the main inventory, there can be gaps, so presumably the game has to remember that "nothing" is the thing in that individual space, and wouldn't remembering that take up as much memory as any other item?

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Originally Posted by Iscah

I'm not a programmer, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but that doesn't sound right to me for this game.

If it was an inventory that behaved like a plain list or like the key items pouch where everything auto-sorts itself and there are never any gaps in the list, that would make sense.

But in the main inventory, there can be gaps, so presumably the game has to remember that "nothing" is the thing in that individual space, and wouldn't remembering that take up as much memory as any other item?

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I've modeled stuff like this before. What you get is records (e.g., rows in the database) that are something like this:

[INVENTORY_ID][SLOT_ID][ITEM_ID][COUNT]

where:

INVENTORY_ID is the inventory being affected (the ID for you, your saddlebags, or a retainer)
SLOT_ID is where it's being stored in that inventory
ITEM_ID is the ID of the item being stored
COUNT is the size of the stack

Databases aren't implicitly ordered and so you need to store the ordering or location information explicitly and if you're doing that, you might as well not waste space on empty data. You can infer an empty slot from no record of data being there.

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Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu

Yes. And that's as it should be. It's not the job of customer to ask a developer to clean their code up. It's the developer's job to deal with their code in whatever fashion they deem most efficient in delivering a product now and in the future.

So, pray tell, how do you propose to deal with low(er)-level casters that want a rod/stick in one hand a shield in the other?

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Admittedly, what I'm talking about is as much design debt as code debt and I'm mostly focused on the design debt. What I would say to lower-level casters that want a one-hander and shield is, "It's not something we support anymore." It would be different if the designers decided to support the idea for the jobs forever, but they didn't. They decided that all jobs would get a single droppable item even if it represents two separate physical objects (e.g., two daggers for NIN). The one exception remaining is the GLD/PLD which they probably didn't have the time or inclination to address that particular thing at the time. That one exception makes for a clunky experience whenever it comes up and they're having to add a bunch more exceptions to make it less weird.

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Originally Posted by Sjol

That one exception makes for a clunky experience whenever it comes up

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It literally doesn't. GLD/PLD is no different from the other classes and jobs. Keeping it geared is the exact same rigamarole as all of the other jobs. Buy your weapons. Buy your armor. And if you somehow think a shield is a "weapon" and not a piece of armor, that's a fundamental misunderstanding on your part of what a shield is.

If anything is "clunky," it's all of the other jobs that think "main hand item" should encompass multiple separate pieces to be held in two (or more) hands. There should simply be "left hand item" and "right hand item." Voila. Maximum flexibility.

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Originally Posted by Sjol

I've modeled stuff like this before. What you get is records (e.g., rows in the database) that are something like this:

[INVENTORY_ID][SLOT_ID][ITEM_ID][COUNT]

where:

INVENTORY_ID is the inventory being affected (the ID for you, your saddlebags, or a retainer)
SLOT_ID is where it's being stored in that inventory
ITEM_ID is the ID of the item being stored
COUNT is the size of the stack

Databases aren't implicitly ordered and so you need to store the ordering or location information explicitly and if you're doing that, you might as well not waste space on empty data. You can infer an empty slot from no record of data being there.

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My friend, there is no meaningful notion of "SLOT_ID" on the server. Anyone who's played this game on multiple devices knows this. The way your inventory is sorted isn't shared between devices.

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Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu

It literally doesn't. GLD/PLD is no different from the other classes and jobs. Keeping it geared is the exact same rigamarole as all of the other jobs. Buy your weapons. Buy your armor. And if you somehow think a shield is a "weapon" and not a piece of armor, that's a fundamental misunderstanding on your part of what a shield is.

If anything is "clunky," it's all of the other jobs that think "main hand item" should encompass multiple separate pieces to be held in two (or more) hands. There should simply be "left hand item" and "right hand item." Voila. Maximum flexibility.

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In ARR the sword and shield relics seem to be able to have different light levels. You have to turn them in separately. Clunky doesn't mean unusable, just that there's friction. I mentioned several areas where they've had to make adjustments because they're two items. The designers really seem to want to treat them as a unit rather than as separate items, but it seems like the legacy code/design has left them stuck with work arounds.

A shield is an offhand, but for some reason not in the "off arm" section of the market. The shield is the only main/off arm that's not with the rest. That's clunky. It's also the only job with two arms post-ARR meaning you still have to pay for an extra item -- the PLD tax.

Stats are also split between the sword and shield, needlessly. You could get the exact same effect by putting all the stats on the sword and making the shield literally cosmetic, which is where this idea spawned.

Also, shields are listed under the Weapons tab of the Armor dialog [e.g., Allagan Tomestones of Comedy (Dow) => Weapons tab]. Also, clunky.

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Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu

My friend, there is no meaningful notion of "SLOT_ID" on the server. Anyone who's played this game on multiple devices knows this. The way your inventory is sorted isn't shared between devices.

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I have played on multiple devices and I'm aware that the final view of your items is stored locally, but the items are coming back contiguously on a fresh installation (based on my memory), so either the game is randomly assigning them a position (why?) or they do have a slot number for the purposes of the server and initially experience. And if my memory is wrong and they're just a random contiguous block of items, then there's definitely no such thing as slot on the server and slots aren't reserved. Either way my point was that inventory slots aren't reserved.

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Originally Posted by Sjol

In ARR the sword and shield relics seem to be able to have different light levels. You have to turn them in separately. Clunky doesn't mean unusable, just that there's friction. I mentioned several areas where they've had to make adjustments because they're two items. The designers really seem to want to treat them as a unit rather than as separate items, but it seems like the legacy code/design has left them stuck with work arounds.

A shield is an offhand, but for some reason not in the "off arm" section of the market. The shield is the only main/off arm that's not with the rest. That's clunky. It's also the only job with two arms post-ARR meaning you still have to pay for an extra item -- the PLD tax.

Stats are also split between the sword and shield, needlessly. You could get the exact same effect by putting all the stats on the sword and making the shield literally cosmetic, which is where this idea spawned.

Also, shields are listed under the Weapons tab of the Armor dialog [e.g., Allagan Tomestones of Comedy (Dow) => Weapons tab]. Also, clunky.

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Yet are they priced the exact same as all other tome items(?), except you pay twice(?). Once for the Sword, once for the shield, ending with double the cost and Needing the same amount of Special Tomestone(from raids).(?)

Aren't Said Weaponry now a days sold as a coffered unit on the market board.(?)


I don't get what conception there is with this paladin tax?

First I ever hear of it(Then again, I ain't specifically looking for it, if it exist. But I guess I heard it now, regardless if it's Accurate or not. From you)

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Originally Posted by GTK0HLK

Yet are they priced the exact same as all other tome items(?), except you pay twice(?). Once for the Sword, once for the shield, ending with double the cost and Needing the same amount of Special Tomestone(from raids).(?)

Aren't Said Weaponry now a days sold as a coffered unit on the market board.(?)


I don't get what conception there is with this paladin tax?

First I ever hear of it(Then again, I ain't specifically looking for it, if it exist. But I guess I heard it now, regardless if it's Accurate or not. From you)

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It was more a problem before with loot drops since you could get the sword, but not the shield and vice-versa. Though, they are still separate crafted items and are listed separately on the marketboard and different amounts of supply. E.g, on my server is the Diadochos PLD sword is 70k which is line with 70-100k for most of the weapons, but the shield is another 60k on top of that, making the PLD with its sword+shield combination the most expensive of the jobs by about 30%. That's where I come up with the concept of the PLD tax. That's been a fairly consistent experience for me.

That said, my original point didn't really include the "tax" as a critical point because I don't think it is. To me, the issue is a matter of having this weird one-off that requires a lot of weird little one-off things in the various bits of UI. Shields are classified as both armor and weapon. They appear in the weapon area when upgrading, but the weapon tab of the armor area in another. At this point I'm simply re-iterating my previous points and if those aren't compelling, it's fine to just say, "yeah, it never bothered me".

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Originally Posted by Sjol

It's also the only job with two arms post-ARR meaning you still have to pay for an extra item -- the PLD tax.

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Originally Posted by GTK0HLK

Yet are they priced the exact same as all other tome items(?), except you pay twice(?). Once for the Sword, once for the shield, ending with double the cost and Needing the same amount of Special Tomestone(from raids).(?)

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Originally Posted by Sjol

[...] they are still separate crafted items and are listed separately on the marketboard and different amounts of supply. E.g, on my server is the Diadochos PLD sword is 70k which is line with 70-100k for most of the weapons, but the shield is another 60k on top of that, making the PLD with its sword+shield combination the most expensive of the jobs by about 30%. That's where I come up with the concept of the PLD tax. That's been a fairly consistent experience for me.

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The "tax" you're describing is completely player-invented for crafted item sales and does not exist for items where the game devs set the price. There is no "double the cost"; the same cost is split across the two. If anything, for glamour purposes later on, it's a discount if you only want one of the things and not both.

For examples at current endgame:

• Current tome weapons cost 500+tome, but the sword costs 350+tome and the shield is 150 with no tomestone required -- I assume this is why it gets grouped with the armour and not the "weapon exchange" tab as a holdover from previous iterations where one was a purchase and the other was bartering.

• Trial weapons normally cost 10 totems but the sword costs 7 and the shield costs 3.

• At the "augment your crafted gear" stall a weapon normally is worth 5 tokens, but the sword is 3 and shield is 2.

• Level 80 weapons from the vendor in Sharlayan cost 45,417 gil but the sword is 30,278 and the shield is 15,139.

Glamours aside, different sets of the same ilvl often have a different substat distribution. Now imagine that a player wants to mix and match the sword and shield of two sets to minmax. With the proposed change they wouldn't be able to do so.

In other words, in exchange for freeing some armoury slots that are barely used (and thus needing no freeing) and a tiny bit of convenience we would lose customization. I don't think that it's worth it.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

I think you're both mistaken.

If they hypothetically could merge shields into swords and get rid of crafter/gatherers' secondary tools, they could get rid of the offhand slot and redistribute its slots to the other sections of the armoury chest, just like they did with belts. Even now it seems like they should reassign some of those slots, perhaps to the main hand weapons.

But yes, slots are "real" and actually quite restrictive or else we wouldn't have inventory issues. They could just keep expanding forever.

What you're thinking of is specifically the Key Items pouch. Those are illusory slots because the items you have in that space are derived from your active quests rather than ownership of an item in the game. You can't reorganise them or put them in other inventories like a normal item; they only exist in that one space in predetermined order. The UI has three pages just in case some madly determined person goes around collecting sidequests that put multiple key items in the pouch and never hands them in.

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I don't think Key items even need that much of space, given there's only so many quests you can take at some point. Even with non-quest key items, I don't think it's even possible to fill that much.

On that note, I didn't even think how useful those 35 additional slots from offhand items, turned cosmetic only, would be. If we have at least 2 new jobs per expansion (3 in DT), we're due more weapon slots.

Also I wonder they could just find a way to make soulstones an UI feature only, because theoretically that's an absolute waste of inventory space plus after Dawntrail's PIC, VIP and BST we'll only have 1 slot left there.