Glamours

I talked to a GM about this the other day. and s/he told me it was a great idea. And to post it to the forums. so, here I is! Posting about Glamours!

I, as many others, would like to have a system in place for every job to have their own unique glamour. And not linked. Example: Glam to SCH, it will be the same for WHM and AST. And for tanks, and BRD/MCH, etc. Many of us wants diversity for each job we play. We have so many different outfits that we want to have. But, can't due to it being linked. We wish for it to be unlinked.

If a GM says its a great idea, and many of us wanting it. This needs to happen. Please, SE. Hear our plea on this!

I wouldn't mind class specific Glamour sets... At the very least they could do away with Job specific armor glamours (like Artifact gear and such) and make them appear like that regardless of class...

Thank you, Captain for your support on this idea. It just doesn't make sense to have an overabundant outfits just to be limited to one for each role.

Yes! Please please please please please! If they can't/won't give us more inventory space, at least give us this which will help greatly with management. This is a nice start, but it would be awesome to hear that they are putting thoughts into consideration with improving the glamour system.

It's not so much that they're linked, but that when you glamour, you glamour that specific item. The method you're suggesting would mean that glamours are tied to the gear set itself, but that in turn invites it's own mess of problems. For instance, if you equipped the ghost gear item from the first halloween quest and then saved it to that gear set, you would have to completely re-glamour all of the slots it took up because you essentially did an override of your glamour. You'd also have to re-glamour an item multiple times if you wanted it to be the same across all of your sets, which could get expensive once you start talking about something like a Tanking Headpiece. I'm sure that the development team is looking into this as an option, but I get the feeling that it definitely won't be cheap.

I would like to be able to make preset glamour and then be able to bind them to jobs or for easier terms, your Gearsetd.

Example say you have a snow style and you want to glamour it to gearset 1or whatever gearset of your choosing. They could make an system called wardrobe that holds all the presets that you make(glamour,makeup, hairstyles). Then you just choose from the wardrobe (located in your house, apartment, or Inn room) to glam the gearset

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Originally Posted by VraeliaValkyria

I talked to a GM about this the other day. and s/he told me it was a great idea. And to post it to the forums. so, here I is! Posting about Glamours!

I, as many others, would like to have a system in place for every job to have their own unique glamour. And not linked. Example: Glam to SCH, it will be the same for WHM and AST. And for tanks, and BRD/MCH, etc. Many of us wants diversity for each job we play. We have so many different outfits that we want to have. But, can't due to it being linked. We wish for it to be unlinked.

If a GM says its a great idea, and many of us wanting it. This needs to happen. Please, SE. Hear our plea on this!

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I'm sort of after the opposite. I'm not a fan of most of the Ninja sets in game, they often do not seem very rogue-like, or very lightweight at all and are usually way over the top. Yet there are many, many Bard or Machinist pieces I'd much prefer and visually look like they'd fit with a rogue. I'd like to see more sharing, as at the moment from a glamour perspective, it kind of feels like us Ninjas got the short straw when I see all the awesome stuff other classes have on offer.

This has been suggested before, I agreed with it then and agree with it now as well! :)

Many improvements to the glamour system should be made imo...will they be made?....

I wish I could be more hopeful, but we have been waiting for some needed changes/improvements (in all aspets of the game) for years now..ugghh

ಠ_ಠ

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Originally Posted by MistyMew

This has been suggested before, I agreed with it then and agree with it now as well! :)

Many improvements to the glamour system should be made imo...will they be made?....

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I m still waiting for having a feature where I can wear glasses AND a hat/helmet/headgear at the same time (face slot or something).

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Originally Posted by Caitlyn

I m still waiting for having a feature where I can wear glasses AND a hat/helmet/headgear at the same time (face slot or something).

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This right here.

This exact thing has been suggested before - and actually got a dev response. While I have no link to the actual article, the response was along the lines of, "Since these jobs all share equipment, each piece of gear would need to store the glamour data for each job. Each piece of gear would have three glamour slots, rather than just one. Maybe more, if we want to account for new jobs in the future who might also share that gear. This would greatly increase the amount of data associated with each piece of gear, which would require more storage space, impact latency, etc, etc. So we are reluctant to do this." In short: No.

Not the response we wanted to hear, obviously. But this is just one of many problems with the current glamour system. The whole thing needs an overhaul, frankly - and one of the things that I'm hoping for for 4.0 is that it gets that much-needed overhaul.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

This exact thing has been suggested before - and actually got a dev response. While I have no link to the actual article, the response was along the lines of, "Since these jobs all share equipment, each piece of gear would need to store the glamour data for each job. Each piece of gear would have three glamour slots, rather than just one. Maybe more, if we want to account for new jobs in the future who might also share that gear. This would greatly increase the amount of data associated with each piece of gear, which would require more storage space, impact latency, etc, etc. So we are reluctant to do this." In short: No.

Not the response we wanted to hear, obviously. But this is just one of many problems with the current glamour system. The whole thing needs an overhaul, frankly - and one of the things that I'm hoping for for 4.0 is that it gets that much-needed overhaul.

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I hope there is a lot of overhaul coming for sure ...the drop of PS3 will help a lot.

How would the PS3 getting drop help anything? It's not like the PS3 is holding EVERY.SINGLE.MOTHER.FING.THING back. That is not the fix to everything. Tho on topic, I wish the glamour system were more like skins instead of using those stupid crystals to put a look over gear. Why didn't they just make costumes and have those as skins you can just put on without something being over the top? Just a shame imho. But I'm used to skins as most games do that instead of what FFXIV uses.

I'd much prefer a system where we weren't glamouring a specific gear... just give us multiple outfits we can switch between a la Rift or WildStar... Why mess with something that works so well? @_@

Yoshi himself already said that would be impossible due to the way they made the glamour system, in 3.2 I believe. It has nothing to do with the PS3. He explained it a little better in detail but I don't remember.

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Originally Posted by RLofOBFL

Yoshi himself already said that would be impossible due to the way they made the glamour system, in 3.2 I believe. It has nothing to do with the PS3. He explained it a little better in detail but I don't remember.

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It's this level of terrible decision-making that I just don't understand. Are they entirely unaware of the multitude of examples of painless, streamlined systems in other games? I don't understand why they back themselves into coding corners and then pretend like they can't do anything to improve it because the first iteration of their failed system cannot be altered. They can ALWAYS take it out and replace it with something else.

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Originally Posted by Caitlyn

I m still waiting for having a feature where I can wear glasses AND a hat/helmet/headgear at the same time (face slot or something).

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Indeed, I'd love to wear my glasses with my Cait Sith ears.

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Originally Posted by cammi

How would the PS3 getting drop help anything? It's not like the PS3 is holding EVERY.SINGLE.MOTHER.FING.THING back. That is not the fix to everything. Tho on topic, I wish the glamour system were more like skins instead of using those stupid crystals to put a look over gear. Why didn't they just make costumes and have those as skins you can just put on without something being over the top? Just a shame imho. But I'm used to skins as most games do that instead of what FFXIV uses.

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In a way it actually is because of it's limited space and what not and its just overall limited everything within it's own design on this game. They can't add special things because or big things because the PS3 literally cannot handle it, they should of dropped it awhile ago. Have you even seen how long it takes people using PS3 too load as is?

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Originally Posted by Naunet

It's this level of terrible decision-making that I just don't understand. Are they entirely unaware of the multitude of examples of painless, streamlined systems in other games? I don't understand why they back themselves into coding corners and then pretend like they can't do anything to improve it because the first iteration of their failed system cannot be altered. They can ALWAYS take it out and replace it with something else.

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While I agree that a lot of the initial implementation was terrible, ripping it out and replacing it isn't necessarily as easy as you make it sound. As with any piece of code, when you remove a chunk to replace it with something else, you gotta be very careful that the code you removed wasn't being referenced by or having an effect on other code. This exact kind of thing is a major source of bugs when working with computer code. The glamour system was added pretty early in FFXIV's lifespan, and a lot of the game's content has been developed with the expectation that it is there.

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Originally Posted by UnstablePersonality

In a way it actually is because of it's limited space and what not and its just overall limited everything within it's own design on this game. They can't add special things because or big things because the PS3 literally cannot handle it, they should of dropped it awhile ago. Have you even seen how long it takes people using PS3 too load as is?

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PS3 may or may not have an impact on the current glamour system, but it's certainly the case that dropping the console will not necessarily improve matters. SE also wants to keep the game available to as big a chunk of the PC market as they can, and that market includes PCs with even LESS power than PS3s have. I personally know people who play the game on PCs more than ten years old.

If SE drops PS3, don't expect them to suddenly shower the game with new features that PS3 was supposedly holding back. They will continue to develop conservatively. Version 1.0, they tried to tool the game to appeal to higher-end computers - and that was just one of many disastrous decisions that was reworked for ARR.

Dropping PS3 will be a decision made because not because SE's tired of holding back on features. It will be made because it's no longer profitable to spend the development time creating expansions for a console that not many people use. At the moment, though, there are a LOT of folks still on PS3 - especially in Japan, where PS4 did not catch on quite as well as it did in the west.

I'm curious why they can't allow us to set a glamour to our job crystal.

Job crystal glamour set? Use that and ignore individual slot glamours.

No job crystal glamour? Use individual slot glamours.

This would be amazing!

I have that kind of conflict with my DRK and PLD. With DRK I love to use glamour with black color, something more dark. With PLD I want to use something more white or with more bright colors.

yes this is very much needed! it's annoying when you want to go with a different theme with each job that shares a gear set but can't since the glamours are tied to the item itself. i hope someone from the community team reads this thread and passes it to the higher ups

I'd like it if it were somehow possible to bind multiple glamours to a single piece of gear, then be able to select and set an appearance for a Gear Set. For instance right now I've got the Yafemi Turban of Aiming which I hate the look of. I glamour on the Aoidos Turban for my Bard. But that doesn't help my Machinist.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

"Since these jobs all share equipment, each piece of gear would need to store the glamour data for each job. Each piece of gear would have three glamour slots, rather than just one. Maybe more, if we want to account for new jobs in the future who might also share that gear. This would greatly increase the amount of data associated with each piece of gear, which would require more storage space, impact latency, etc. So we are reluctant to do this."

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Pretty much that. Still, he said "Reluctant". They're planning a system overhaul for 4.0, maybe if we keep asking for a more versatile glamour system, they'll work to include it then too?

They could make it possible (albeit difficult in some cases) simply by removing the "UNIQUE" tag from gear. Want a robe that has one look when wearing it as a White Mage, another when you wear it as a Scholar, and a third look when wearing it as an Astrologian? Just collect three of the same robe and glamour them differently. That version wouldn't require any change to how glamours work, would still allow gear sharing (by players who don't care about the different appearances), and would allow different appearances by players who are willing to get multiple pieces. The only thing holding it back is pieces that we're not allowed to get multiple versions of.

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Originally Posted by Istaru

I'm curious why they can't allow us to set a glamour to our job crystal.

Job crystal glamour set? Use that and ignore individual slot glamours.

No job crystal glamour? Use individual slot glamours.

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The job crystal idea is a good one, as it provides a good, predictable amount of required data storage. You only need to keep track of thirteen pieces of data on each job crystal, and never more than that, no matter how many new jobs they add. That's FAR less data storage to keep track of than even the current system, which tracks one piece of glamour on every single piece of equipment in the game (except belts). Of course, putting it on the job crystal means that you can't glamour CLASSES. Which isn't a terrible loss, really, since folks generally switch from classes to jobs at the earliest possible opportunity.

Another possibility would be to put the glamour info onto your equipment sets. The best part of this idea is that the equipment sets ALREADY keep track of glamour info (as well as material info), so we wouldn't be adding any new data storage to the game. However, I think that equipment sets are stored client-side rather than server-side; that puts a damper on the idea. Since the data is client-side, if we used that to track glamour it would be beyond easy for folks to use third-party tools to modify that data to whatever they want. Obviously, SE wouldn't want that - and really, neither should players, if they want the option to be able to show off their trophies.

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

They could make it possible (albeit difficult in some cases) simply by removing the "UNIQUE" tag from gear. Want a robe that has one look when wearing it as a White Mage, another when you wear it as a Scholar, and a third look when wearing it as an Astrologian? Just collect three of the same robe and glamour them differently. That version wouldn't require any change to how glamours work, would still allow gear sharing (by players who don't care about the different appearances), and would allow different appearances by players who are willing to get multiple pieces. The only thing holding it back is pieces that we're not allowed to get multiple versions of.

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My inventory space weeps at the notion. Additionally, I'm pretty sure this was a deliberate design decision, to prevent folks from lotting multiples of difficult-to-obtain items that could be useful to other party members.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

Of course, putting it on the job crystal means that you can't glamour CLASSES. Which isn't a terrible loss, really, since folks generally switch from classes to jobs at the earliest possible opportunity.

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DoH/DoL classes don't switch to jobs, though. I wouldn't want to lose the ability to glamour them.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

My inventory space weeps at the notion. Additionally, I'm pretty sure this was a deliberate design decision, to prevent folks from lotting multiples of difficult-to-obtain items that could be useful to other party members.

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I might believe the UNIQUE tag being for keeping people from lotting multiple times if it were limited to rare dungeon drops that people would keep once they got them. But when even tome gear and gear we can turn in for GC seals has the UNIQUE tag, it's clearly not serving that purpose. (Which in turn means I don't actually see any useful purpose for it.)

You're right about inventory (or more specifically armoury chest) space, though. My jobs are scattered enough in levels that I'm not sharing much gear for them anyway (except DoH/DoL and it wasn't too long ago that those were scattered across levels as well), and it makes gear storage a real pain. I think the Armoury chest should be sized to suit our gear sets. Someone with all classes/jobs unlocked can have up to 40 gear sets, so I think we should have 40 armory chest slots per type rather than the current 25. (There's been some vague talk of getting more inventory space with the next expansion. I'm hoping the armoury chest gets a good chunk of that improvement.)

And how about a Dressphere system on our gear sets that let us save glamours there instead on each piece of gear. And it may also let us save hairstyles and hair colours so we can have diferent styles for each of our clases.

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

I might believe the UNIQUE tag being for keeping people from lotting multiple times if it were limited to rare dungeon drops that people would keep once they got them. But when even tome gear and gear we can turn in for GC seals has the UNIQUE tag, it's clearly not serving that purpose. (Which in turn means I don't actually see any useful purpose for it.)

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I'm not sure I buy this logic.
1. The Unique tag makes sense for certain pieces of gear.
2. However, I have found some gear for which it does not make sense.
3. Therefore, I say it makes no sense for any gear!

I don't know if you raid or not, but if a piece of top-of-the-line gear that you've been waiting for forever drops, and another player wins it - not because they need it for the stats, but because they want to be able to glamour a second job - I'd say you have justifiable cause to be salty.

No, let's stay away from solutions that increase competition for items that are already extremely limited in the number doled out per week, even if there happen to be common items under the same umbrella.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

This exact thing has been suggested before - and actually got a dev response. While I have no link to the actual article, the response was along the lines of, "Since these jobs all share equipment, each piece of gear would need to store the glamour data for each job. Each piece of gear would have three glamour slots, rather than just one. Maybe more, if we want to account for new jobs in the future who might also share that gear. This would greatly increase the amount of data associated with each piece of gear, which would require more storage space, impact latency, etc, etc. So we are reluctant to do this." In short: No.

Not the response we wanted to hear, obviously. But this is just one of many problems with the current glamour system. The whole thing needs an overhaul, frankly - and one of the things that I'm hoping for for 4.0 is that it gets that much-needed overhaul.

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Edit : I see in a later post you suggest the exact same thing I was suggesting below. I'll leave my explanation in place, but recognize your suggestion here.

A fix that does require a bit more data, but not much, would be to greate a glamour set for each Gear set. Each gear set you create would have two item slots for every position, the first is the actual piece of armor/whatever that you are wearing for Stats, the second (if filled) is the glamor piece you are using. You still need prisms to apply that glamor piece to that set, but it's tied to the gear set, not the gear piece. So for every set you have the gear set and the glamor set. When a piece of gear is changed in a set, the corresponding glamour is lost - for that set only.

So, for example, Kos could have some utterly unflattering lump of metal armor in slot one as the actual gear, and then use a prism to put the Thavnarian Bustier in that slot for glamour. If I remove the actual piece of armor from that set, the glamor slot is emptied. But if I have all 3 tanks and want to do different glamors for each despite wearing the same armor piece, I can.

P.S. I'm pretty sure that glamour data is stored server side so that the server can send appropriate information to your client for other players glamours as soon as they appear in view.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

I'm not sure I buy this logic.
1. The Unique tag makes sense for certain pieces of gear.
2. However, I have found some gear for which it does not make sense.
3. Therefore, I say it makes no sense for any gear!

I don't know if you raid or not, but if a piece of top-of-the-line gear that you've been waiting for forever drops, and another player wins it - not because they need it for the stats, but because they want to be able to glamour a second job - I'd say you have justifiable cause to be salty.

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But that's the only place it makes sense. I'd have no problem with them keeping the UNIQUE on the 1% of items where it actually makes sense, if they'd remove it from the other 99% where it doesn't make sense. But since they haven't done that, I have to assume that's not the reason for it.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

P.S. I'm pretty sure that glamour data is stored server side so that the server can send appropriate information to your client for other players glamours as soon as they appear in view.

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That's not quite what I meant. I stated that equipment sets are stored client side. This is easy to check - just log on to someone else's computer, and you'll see that all of your equipment sets are gone. That indicates that your equipment sets were stored on your original computer, and not on the server. Whenever you switch to an equipment set, your client sends your set data to the server, the server checks to see if you actually possess the equipment listed in the set, and if so dresses your character appropriately (and if not, gives you the appropriate warning triangles indicating that your inventory of equipment doesn't quite match what your equipment set is looking for). A player using third party tools can edit their equipment set to, for example, dress their mage up in Heavy Darklight Armor (the actual armor, not glamour), and the server can look at that request and say, "Nuh uh - not only isn't that gear you can wear, but you don't even have that gear in your inventory. Red Triangle for you!"

Under the current system, glamour is stored on each piece of equipment, and each piece of equipment is kept careful track of on the server. But what if we track the glamour info on the equipment set instead? Now, whenever we use an equipment set to instruct the server how to dress our character, we are also telling the server what that equipment is supposed to look like. The server will glamour the characters however the equipment set instructs, because there is nothing stored server-side to contradict that. The server HAS to trust that you did glamour your character the way that the equipment set lists. After all, you could have glamoured and then threw away the original item, or the item might be on your retainer, or in your Armoire. This means open season for those third-party tool users. They might never have set foot in Coil, and still edit their equipment set to deck themselves out in full High Allagan (not Replica - the REAL stuff).

There are ways to solve this problem, of course - and all of them require server-side investment in which the devs may well be reluctant to invest. For an obvious example, they could store the equipment sets server-side. Heck, even without glamour, this would make a lot of folks happy, since they could then access their equipment sets no matter whose computer they play the game on. The fact that they didn't build equipment sets this way from the ground up indicates to me that it's too resource-intense to consider. Another solution would be to keep track of every piece of gear that you've ever owned, and only allow equipment sets that include those pieces of glamour to be valid. This "glamour library" is something that folks have suggested many times in many "Let's improve glamour!" threads. Again, though, that sounds like a lot of data to keep track of.

You are correct that the actual imagery of glamour is stored server side. Clients aren't constantly weighed down with the visual models of every piece of equipment in the game, only the ones that are nearby. They constantly download needed visuals on a need-to-know basis. However, we need to keep track of what glamour we're wearing, so the server knows what imagery to send to the other clients - and if we store that info client-side, the server has to trust that we're being honest about how we look. Server trusting clients is the basis of every third-party hack there is. Glamour would be no exception!

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

That's not quite what I meant. I stated that equipment sets are stored client side. This is easy to check - just log on to someone else's computer, and you'll see that all of your equipment sets are gone. That indicates that your equipment sets were stored on your original computer, and not on the server. **snippage**

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Indeed, you are correct.

As you say further into your post, a good solution would be to store gearsets on the server side, which would enable glamour per gearset to be handled server side without worrying about the sync between client and server, since the client would always take it's lead from the server, so to speak.

On the transmission of glamour data, I think the actual graphical assets are already client side, the server sends the data needed to reassemble any and all characters from those assets in your client. So it sends the item ID's for each gear slot for each character along with the appropriate IDs for the character's face and physique, and the client assembles it all piece by piece to render things. Transmitting graphical data from server to client would be very resource intensive and consume bandwidth like it was going out of style.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

Transmitting graphical data from server to client would be very resource intensive and consume bandwidth like it was going out of style.

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Why is this the only MMO that ever has concerns like this in such a way that both the players and the devs twist themselves into knots trying to work out some sub-par system to get around the "problem"?

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Originally Posted by Naunet

Why is this the only MMO that ever has concerns like this in such a way that both the players and the devs twist themselves into knots trying to work out some sub-par system to get around the "problem"?

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Every MMO has its foibles, just as every forum poster does...