Suggestion - Make Relic items unlocked rather then possessed.

Hear me out.

I feel relic weapons and armor and Ultimate items should be treated like hairstyles and emotes. You would manage them through an "antiquarian". None of these items are functional once you have passed the patch in which they are acquired; and really they are more like unlocks given that they are ALWAYS class specific and cannot be stored like other items in general and often are more trophies then functional items.

So I simply suggest once you acquire one of these items they go into antiquities; option available when glamouring or displaying on Mannequins. This would also go a LONG way to preventing trophy ultimate displays from permanently eating up retainer slots and saving on the abnormal inventory management issue they introduce given that as it stands to possess all relic/ultimate weapons devours a large amount of glamour space and that will only increase as more classes are added.

Counterpoint - making them unlocked rather than possessed puts them into the same data category as currencies and job levels.

Possessed means it sits in one of your 140 backpack slots, 70 saddlebag slots or X * 175 retainer slots as dedicated backpack space and regardless if you have them or not, it will not require them to allocate more data space for all characters on all servers on all datacenters just to tick a checkbox that you have "unlocked a usable relic/ultimate item". Keeping it as posessed also means you can make multiple stat-stick relics for synced content with different stat allocations.

Would it be nice if we could free up backpack or retainer space for it? Yes. But we have to be realistic, it isn't free.

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

Possessed means it sits in one of your 140 backpack slots, 70 saddlebag slots or X * 175 retainer slots as dedicated backpack space and regardless if you have them or not, it will not require them to allocate more data space for all characters on all servers on all datacenters just to tick a checkbox that you have "unlocked a usable relic/ultimate item".

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A very salient and worthwhile point; this indeed is not free. It makes me wonder how a game like WoW manages to have their glam system, where it literally keeps track of every possible piece of visible clothing from the game? I am far from a data-compression expert, but I presume that they've found clever way to make a system like that work without breaking the bank. All of which is to say, I wouldn't entirely write off a system like this. It certainly has requirements that would need to be fulfilled, but inventory management seems to one of the most frequent boss fights in FF14 for many players, so if the devs can find a way to shift that burden from the players to the code, the juice might be worth the squeeze for both players and the devs.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

A very salient and worthwhile point; this indeed is not free. It makes me wonder how a game like WoW manages to have their glam system, where it literally keeps track of every possible piece of visible clothing from the game? I am far from a data-compression expert, but I presume that they've found clever way to make a system like that work without breaking the bank.

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I can't speak to WoW, having never played it, but "without breaking the bank" is actually quite apt in terms of how this could work:

A bank offers/claims to hold X dollars in deposits for its customers, but the reality is that it only actually keeps maybe 10% of X on hand. If the bank's customers come knocking and ask for their money back all at once, the bank falls over and breaks, because it doesn't actually have enough money on hand. And yet, keeping only 10% of X on hand usually works out in practice because the probability of every customer asking for every dollar back all at once is near zero.

Similarly, SE could offer to every player that it'll keep track of which Ultimate weapons they've unlocked, but they need only have the storage to track the weapons people have already unlocked plus some small buffer to account for new unlocks. The probability that every account unlocks every Ultimate weapon in a day is near zero; SE can acquire more storage as it slowly gets consumed, and they need not pay for storage for accounts that might never need it.

EDIT / TIL: While "without breaking the bank" is often intended to mean something like "not too expensive," the phrase has its origins in situations similar to what I just described. :p

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Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim

Counterpoint - making them unlocked rather than possessed puts them into the same data category as currencies and job levels.

Possessed means it sits in one of your 140 backpack slots, 70 saddlebag slots or X * 175 retainer slots as dedicated backpack space and regardless if you have them or not, it will not require them to allocate more data space for all characters on all servers on all datacenters just to tick a checkbox that you have "unlocked a usable relic/ultimate item". Keeping it as posessed also means you can make multiple stat-stick relics for synced content with different stat allocations.

Would it be nice if we could free up backpack or retainer space for it? Yes. But we have to be realistic, it isn't free.

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Are you certain? I ask because as I understand it the things I mentioned (Hair/Achievements) as I understand it DB wise are not character bound; just flagged as "accessible" or "not accessible"; the former giving you the option to use it; whereas a possession adds the item directly to your characters inventory database (stuff like location in bags/whether its on a glamour plate etc) As I understand it from my very limited understanding of DB management the actual data overhead would be less as a flag versus as a possession.

I am curious about it; as someone pointed out later in the thread this is essentially how WoW manages their transmog data in that the avatar merely holds the data of (color/location and which mog ID is at location) whereas it *seems* like Glamours in FF actually stamp the item on the character and each item has its individual ID. As I understand it this is why we don't have glamour dressers as a housing option because you would add copious amounts of item data to the housing system.