Actual Inventory Space Problem

inb4 "Give us more free retainers" This is not that.

Please to help, Square. I've got all 8 retainers, and as I progress my primary activity in game (primarily, collecting) I'm running out of storage space.
As it stands, I have nearly every blue or green armor obtainable by tomes or dungeon drops from A Realm Reborn and have a good dent taken out of what was originally released in Heavensward. I've only got a few pieces of Law gear so far, and I already know i won't be able to obtain all of the Esoterics gear and Law gear with the space I currently have left (a bit less than 125 slots across all 4 retainers).

This is to say nothing for the gear obtainable through normal mode and savage modes of Alexander, the new relics, and the new gear inevitably coming with new dungeons being released, and future new tomes.

TL;DR; I need more space!

I offer a possible solution, which addresses both database concerns and storage space concerns, but will possibly have an impact on retainer sales on the mogstation. Please implement storage vendors similar to the vendors in FFXI. In FFXI there were storage vendors who would take a whole set of armor, and store it. This required (and should require) getting all the pieces from a set to store any pieces, as I assume on the backend, the actual armor was destroyed and replaced with a Key Item which could be traded, with gil, to get your armor back.

This may or may not be a good alternative depending on what your objective is for collecting the gear, but one good solution for this I've seen people suggest is to implement a glamour book system. People could add a piece of gear to the book (in some versions of the suggestion, this destroys the actual gear item in the process) but once added to the book, you could freely use the item as a glamour whenever. The book interface could include a checklist or completion percentage, allowing you to keep track of how complete your sets are.

But what if your storing it and want to use it later. So now you've destroyed it and it's only good to "look at" not use in lvling another job.

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Originally Posted by PirateCat

This may or may not be a good alternative depending on what your objective is for collecting the gear, but one good solution for this I've seen people suggest is to implement a glamour book system. People could add a piece of gear to the book (in some versions of the suggestion, this destroys the actual gear item in the process) but once added to the book, you could freely use the item as a glamour whenever. The book interface could include a checklist or completion percentage, allowing you to keep track of how complete your sets are.

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The glamour book also doesn't provide the same benefits to square in the way of reducing user data.

Storing the gear in the storage NPC manner reduces in-circulation gil by providing another sink when you want to get it out. It also reduces the database storage requirements in 2 ways:
-By requiring the armor to be fully repaired and dropping its spiritbond level, storing the gear requires one smaller "key item" slot. This consolidation of data would reduce data storage to at least 1/3, or maybe less.
-By storing the set as a key item, only one key item slot (a serial number) is used for what used to be 5 full inventory slots. This consolidation reduces data to 1/5 (for most sets).

The glamour book would be something of an improvement, but still requires at least 5 key item sized inventory slots in your user data by the same measure. This represents a 2/3 (approximately) reduction in stored data size, vs the storage NPC idea which both creates a gil sink and reduces storage requirements by an estimated 14/15 (about 94%)

The glamour book also doesn't address the reason for collecting in the first place, at least not in my case. That may change if some other announcements about housing were to follow, but that's off topic in this thread.

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Originally Posted by Takophiliac

database

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Which one is more efficient depends on how it's implemented. The glamour book is theoretically more space efficient for a large collection, but claim tickets might be more efficient in practice.

The most compact way you can store a claim ticket is as an item slot that contains a reference to which set of gear it is. This gets messier if you're proposing being able to store crafted gear this way, because then you need (at minimum) to store whether it's HQ and possibly what materia are on it - assuming we don't just take the easy way out and require the piece to be unmelded or remove the materia in the process. For the sake of comparison, I'm going to assume that all the gear has to match for quality and not have materia on it to be storable. So we're storing a pointer to the set and a bit for whether it's HQ.

The most compact way you can store a glamour book is with a bitmap. Each item that can be in the glamour book is stored as one bit of data - whether that item is in the book or not. By destroying the item in the process of adding it to the book, there's no expectation that it will store quality, materia, condition, or anything else. The downside is that for this data structure to work effectively, they need to (a) reserve space for every possible item that can go into it - probably at least a few KB at this point for each character with a book - and (b) be able to expand as new items are added. This means either adding a bunch of reserve space or having separate bitmap values for each update that adds gear. They are probably doing something like this already for Triple Triad card collections.

So which one is more efficient would likely depend on how much gear they are expecting players to store this way.

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Originally Posted by Kaihri

But what if your storing it and want to use it later. So now you've destroyed it and it's only good to "look at" not use in lvling another job.

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That would be a downside of the glamour book system, true. But it's a tradeoff - if you feel like the original gear might be necessary later, don't put it in the book. This would be primarily usable for gear that's either below the level for any class you want to use (I don't have any classes left that can make good use of the Foestriker set, but I still like the look of it) or is obsolete for the level it needs (I'm still looking to re-collect the Divine Death outfit for a caster glamour.)

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Originally Posted by Takophiliac

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Would making so that you could repurchase the unsellable dungeon and raid gear at the calamity salvagers be a viable option?

This sounds like the pilot for Hoarders: Eorzean Edition.

Eorzean hoarder and proud of it lol

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Originally Posted by PirateCat

This gets messier if you're proposing being able to store crafted gear this way, because then you need (at minimum) to store whether it's HQ and possibly what materia are on it - assuming we don't just take the easy way out and require the piece to be unmelded or remove the materia in the process. For the sake of comparison, I'm going to assume that all the gear has to match for quality and not have materia on it to be storable. So we're storing a pointer to the set and a bit for whether it's HQ.

So which one is more efficient would likely depend on how much gear they are expecting players to store this way.

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Similar to FFXI, it would not be possible to store materia in this way. While it doesn't matter to me either way, in FFXI, HQ gear could only be stored if you had all pieces HQ (assuming that set was storable as HQ). I don't see a reason not to implement it the same way. This means you don't need a bit for HQ, it's just a different serial number.

I expect them to be Square. I expect them to take the easy way out because it's easier to program that way. I wouldn't expect them to store the materia or any augmentations, nor would i expect gear with random stats (pinks, like diadem) to be storable.

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Originally Posted by Warghoul570

Eorzean hoarder and proud of it lol

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Ditto! :o:o

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Originally Posted by PirateCat

The most compact way you can store a glamour book is with a bitmap. Each item that can be in the glamour book is stored as one bit of data - whether that item is in the book or not.

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Depending how many bits there are in the bitmap, this isn't true until you pass a certain number of pieces of gear stored thusly. The bitmap takes up space all the time, whether it's in use or not. So, you're suggestion of a bitmap means that if one piece of gear is stored for a single character, all the space is used, regardless of whether you have any other items or not. While it's probably safe to assume the number is not huge, the impact of the bitmap on storage space could easily be in the range of 20-40 pieces of gear before it becomes relevant.
If you consider how many people would store one or two pieces of gear this way, and nothing more, the total system impact of the bitmap method is quite high and actually adds to the storage space problem.

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Originally Posted by MPNZ

Would making so that you could repurchase the unsellable dungeon and raid gear at the calamity salvagers be a viable option?

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That helps with the gil sink, though i'm not sure i'd want to pay the salvager's prices. It also doesn't preserve storage space any more than a "glamour book".

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Originally Posted by Takophiliac

The bitmap takes up space all the time, whether it's in use or not. ... While it's probably safe to assume the number is not huge, the impact of the bitmap on storage space could easily be in the range of 20-40 pieces of gear before it becomes relevant.

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That was my point in comparing the two methods. The glamour-book bitmap approach limits the maximum space per character but has a larger overhead. Which one is a more efficient method to implement would depend on how much gear is being stored by the average player (keeping in mind that it would likely be higher with an option like this, for either storage method), which they should be able to get numbers for since they control the databases. The best we can do on the forums is give an educated guess.

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Originally Posted by PirateCat

The best we can do on the forums is give an educated guess.

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And like this thread so it draws Square's attention!

YO devs might want to take a look at this if you keep adding armor.