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Hello, I want to make a suggestion to consider for future patches for heavy crafters (such as myself) who entrust various crafting materials to (all) retainers..
How technically feasible is it to auto-fetch requisite crafting mats from retainers without having to summon them?
Thanks!
I wouldnt mind the idea, but currently anything that makes it easier for bots to, well, bot, I would have to be against.
at least until SE does something useful against them.
this is not possible with the way retainers and inventory works.
stuff on a retainer is recorded that you have it yes, but it effectively does not exist when the retainer is not called.
since you cannot craft when a retainer is present you will never be able to automagically grab stuff from it.
They told us that they will not make purpose build extra inventory and instead would rather give us more inventory which we can use for everything.
BUT then we have purpose build inventory with the glamour dresser and for the special actions from Eureka and Bozja. But this extra inventory is only accessible on a few specific maps.
So I was thinking: What if we would get a special map for crafting? A workshop where you can store materials and while you craft there the materials will be drawn directly from that special inventory?
It would probably be more pragmatic to ask for the craftable equivalent of the Armory Chest on crack.
Basically, any non-equipment item used for crafting would automatically go into a virtual inventory that's further organized by expansion and perhaps even the craft they're primarily used in. It could be accessed from anywhere, be traded/sold from, and of course looked into when you're crafting. Pair it with a 999 cap and removing the ability to store craftables on retainers and you get a middle-ground that bots won't overtly have an advantage with.
Though, similar to SE's "issue" with revising the glamour system, I feel like this would mandate changing how character data is saved/updated. Instead of every fractional second interval they use, item data should only be accessed when you go to view it or change it in some way (something drops, you craft something, etc.). The idea of breaking the system down into sections is to also cut down on needless data access while making it organizational friendly for the player. It also eliminates the occasional enigma of whether or not you have something on your retainer, let alone what tab. Something /itemsearch kinda helps with, but is still mediocre. In terms of data management, no characters craftable inventory should likely exceed a few KB in size since something like Rubber would have an ID like 01713A:086 with 01 meaning ARR, 7 Alchemy, and 13 just being where it's iterated on the list. A or B would determine NQ or HQ. the 086 would be how many you're carrying. Nothing real fancy about the process and I'm sure some encoding could even shrink the data requirement even more.
From the game design perspective some might think limited inventory is meant to force us to sell things and not hoard, but if we honestly analyze a lot of the craftable materials commonly dropped, easily gathered, or obtained from desynths, there's not a whole lot of profit to be gleaned for anyone but the bots who don't care if something is boring, takes a while, or have to do something pesky like sleep or go to work. And while they influence the market in part, limiting them to 999 or something instead 999x200 or whatever total base inventory/retainer size is actually a nerf to them, too.
Given that your retainers can only be accessed at all while on your home server and not inside an instanced area... and that soon we'll be able to scatter over every server and data center....