Request: Crafting From Retainers

Historically I think there has been a lot of support for being able to craft with items that are stored in our retainers. I am not sure what implications it might have for the servers but it would definitely resolve some of the inventory issues plaguing the game. We can already check to see if we have an item in a retainer on the market board which means the game must save that information for use outside of checking the retainer's inventory itself. Has there been any official discussion from developers on moving forward with it? If you have any interest at all in this I implore you to make thread(s) on it known so we can make retainer use more robust.

I want to like this a million times.

i think it's due to the way the game constantly updates and keeps track of inventory. constantly accessing a retainers inventory by keeping those kinds of inventory connections open and having multiple people doing that would increase server load and would probably highly likely crash the server.

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

i think it's due to the way the game constantly updates and keeps track of inventory. constantly accessing a retainers inventory by keeping those kinds of inventory connections open and having multiple people doing that would increase server load and would probably highly likely crash the server.

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I think there might be a way around that, but it would require adding a menu item to the retainer menu, and needing to be at the summoning bell. Make an option where you can have your retainer basically hand you items while they are summoned to craft. Not sure how that would work with coding...but that the suggestion that I can come up with for it.

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

i think it's due to the way the game constantly updates and keeps track of inventory. constantly accessing a retainers inventory by keeping those kinds of inventory connections open and having multiple people doing that would increase server load and would probably highly likely crash the server.

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I don't really understand why there would be constant "open connections", the inventory is only updated when you add to it, remove from it, sort it, and...that's it really. When you perform the action "check the number of items in all inventories", once the request is done it's done, there's nothing "left open", because those interactions are (supposed to be) event-based.

As a game developer myself, I don't understand why this wasn't implemented from the beginning since half the job is already done (and yes GW2 has it and it's awesome QoL)

I'd totally pay for that I don't care I NEED it now!

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Originally Posted by _Mandra_

I don't really understand why there would be constant "open connections", the inventory is only updated when you add to it, remove from it, sort it, and...that's it really. When you perform the action "check the number of items in all inventories", once the request is done it's done, there's nothing "left open", because those interactions are (supposed to be) event-based.

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You'd think so (because that's how a normal person would design it) but no. We know from SE's previous communications that all inventory data is updated and written every 15 seconds with the auto save tick regardless of whether anything about it changed. Now I don't know exactly how their database is structured, but I promise you it makes no sense.

It should be a simple enough matter to load and edit retainer inventory during crafting. But given what SE has done lately, I'd expect there to be "technical issues" with doing it that magically disappear if you pay more for your subscription.

Oh ok, I didn't know they already talked about it. I just stumbled upon this thread because I find crafting very tedious atm just because of that.
Thanks for the clarifications o/

(I still need this in my life tho, please SE make it happen...somehow)

Maybe works if you're a premium user with the FF14 app :)

They already mentioned this one before. They said its a server load issue. Its the same reason we cant access every retainer at the same time and have to work on them separately.

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Originally Posted by Mysticales

They already mentioned this one before. They said its a server load issue. Its the same reason we cant access every retainer at the same time and have to work on them separately.

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But wait, there's more! Throw $5 a month more at us and we'll give you the ability to do this via the smartphone app (if I remember rightly, they said you can move things directly from one retainer to another via the smartphone app, without it going through your personal inventory, provided you're on the premium subscription for it). At this point I think the "Server load issues", "Server limitations", etc are a load of bumph, because apparently if we pay extra they can support it. It's not a "Server load" or "Server limitation" issue at all, it's a "We want to siphon more money out of you" issue.

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Originally Posted by Callinon

You'd think so (because that's how a normal person would design it) but no. We know from SE's previous communications that all inventory data is updated and written every 15 seconds with the auto save tick regardless of whether anything about it changed. Now I don't know exactly how their database is structured, but I promise you it makes no sense.

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Yup. It was a monumentally poor design decision in 1.0 that we've been stuck with ever since. Crafting actually locks your state while you're doing it. So, no retainer access, no accepting invites, no rearranging items in your inventory, no nothing. That's all due to the initial mistake of not using an event model for state.

Technical debt like that is hard to fix after so long. Important, but hard. I'm not sure they have the will to actually do it at this point given how many things it could affect and how it could caused reduced stability initially (even if it'd pay off massively in the long run).

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It should be a simple enough matter to load and edit retainer inventory during crafting. But given what SE has done lately, I'd expect there to be "technical issues" with doing it that magically disappear if you pay more for your subscription.

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Or they'll just put crafting itself into the phone app, which doesn't carry the same technical debt and would likely be easier. Plus then they can charge $2/crafted item for it.

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Originally Posted by Paladinleeds

But wait, there's more! Throw $5 a month more at us and we'll give you the ability to do this via the smartphone app (if I remember rightly, they said you can move things directly from one retainer to another via the smartphone app, without it going through your personal inventory, provided you're on the premium subscription for it). At this point I think the "Server load issues", "Server limitations", etc are a load of bumph, because apparently if we pay extra they can support it. It's not a "Server load" or "Server limitation" issue at all, it's a "We want to siphon more money out of you" issue.

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That will only send datas from your retainers to your smartphone and back, without all the other datas of the game that you would need ingame.

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Originally Posted by Felis

That will only send datas from your retainers to your smartphone and back, without all the other datas of the game that you would need ingame.

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THAT SHOULD BE HOW THE BASE GAME WORKS

I'd actually bother with crafting to begin with if this was a thing. I'm not going to run around with a huge amount of mats in my inventory and constantly go back to my retainers just to get an item I suddenly need.

Let me access all the mats I have at anytime.

What if they seperate marketboard listings from the retainer interface and reduced retainer count to 1 with the option to have more "bags". Would that reduce server workload

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Originally Posted by Marcellus_Cassius

What if they seperate marketboard listings from the retainer interface and reduced retainer count to 1 with the option to have more "bags". Would that reduce server workload

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No because the issue isn't the number of retainers or the market board, it's their database design and their client-server setup.

Want to know how to fix the server load problem associated with multiple large inventories? It's really simple.

Don't re-send or re-write unchanged data.

That's all. It'd probably cut their bandwidth usage by a third if they just stopped re-saving data that wasn't changed.

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Originally Posted by Raim

I am not sure what implications it might have for the servers but it would definitely resolve some of the inventory issues plaguing the game. We can already check to see if we have an item in a retainer on the market board which means the game must save that information for use outside of checking the retainer's inventory itself.

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Since I play on both PS4 and PC, I've noticed that retainer inventory is cached locally for searching. (i.e., if you change your retainer inventory on one system then log in on another and /isearch, the results will be of what the retainer had last time you looked at them on that system rather than the up-to-date reality.) That's fine for search, but you can't trust people's local cache for crafting, meaning that every craft would require loading at least one retainer's inventory. You can optimize this by using the same cached search data as a starting point, but even so you could craft an item with ingredients spread out across half a dozen or more retainers, which would have the same server load as summoning all of those retainers at once each time you start a craft.

Note that none of this relates at all to how often the server saves inventory data, since it clearly does not do that with retainer inventory on a regular basis. In this case "server limitations" seem like a legitimate reason not to make this an option. (Not that I wouldn't want it to be!)

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Originally Posted by Callinon

No because the issue isn't the number of retainers or the market board, it's their database design and their client-server setup.

Want to know how to fix the server load problem associated with multiple large inventories? It's really simple.

Don't re-send or re-write unchanged data.

That's all. It'd probably cut their bandwidth usage by a third if they just stopped re-saving data that wasn't changed.

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To reiterate, they aren't sending or writing unchanged retainer data. Retainer inventory is only ever checked when you summon a retainer, as far as I can tell.

More generally, the way they bend over backwards with stuff like the /isearch implementation to avoid making extra server calls definitely supports the claim that they are worried about server limitations.

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To reiterate, they aren't sending or writing unchanged retainer data. Retainer inventory is only ever checked when you summon a retainer, as far as I can tell.

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The reason why retainer inventory has to be seperate is because they sync and save all data so frequently, including unchanged data. It's also why chocobo inventory was implemented the way it was: it's specifically unavailable in lots of situations so they don't have to sync it when they sync your main inventory. The main inventory works as he describes: the server is overly frequently sending the entire state back to the client and saving it, including everything that's unchanged. That's the problem that causes all this other stuff.

If they treated retainer inventory as part of your main inventory, it'd get synced constantly as well, and since it's so much bigger, it would create tremendous load problems.

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More generally, the way they bend over backwards with stuff like the /isearch implementation to avoid making extra server calls definitely supports the claim that they are worried about server limitations.

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Right, but fixing the underlying problem so they don't constantly sync and save unaltered data would eliminate the problem at the source. That's the reason why games like WoW can give you so much more bag space. It's not because Blizzard has unicorn powered servers: it's because they don't create unnecessary traffic and load in the first place.

"Server limitations" has a hardware connotation to it, but it's really a software problem. Do the hard work required to fix the underlying issue with how the client and server are interacting on this, and you'd see a vast improvement in what can be done.

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Originally Posted by Tridus

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Oh I agree that a different server setup would potentially alleviate these issues. But that's not going to happen anytime soon (or ever), and we should be realistic about whether requests like this will be implemented as a result. Criticizing their years-old design doesn't solve any problems. I'm not sure it's at all practical to ever change basic server design issues for a running game anyway, because they've likely taken advantage of this design in other ways that a redesign would end up breaking. I do hope FF17 or whatever has a better basic design, but I'm not holding my breath for this game.

I'm not sure this is even possible le without massive code rewrites. Just an FYI, the /iseach function only searches a saved inventory list updated when you access the retainers inventory. It doesn't check the actual inventory. This kind of hints at how disconnected retainer inventory is from the rest of the game.

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Originally Posted by Talraen

Oh I agree that a different server setup would potentially alleviate these issues. But that's not going to happen anytime soon (or ever), and we should be realistic about whether requests like this will be implemented as a result. Criticizing their years-old design doesn't solve any problems. I'm not sure it's at all practical to ever change basic server design issues for a running game anyway, because they've likely taken advantage of this design in other ways that a redesign would end up breaking. I do hope FF17 or whatever has a better basic design, but I'm not holding my breath for this game.

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Yup, for sure. It's a hard problem to fix now. Very hard. It'd be worth doing, but that's not to sell short the scale of the work.

Why not to just add something like 'dedicated crafting material inventory'? Something where obtained crafting mats would go to, when you buy/gather/monster-droped/quest-rewarded them. Mats used directly from that inventory when crafting. Cannot be dragged to main/retainer/saddle-bag inventory, but can be put on market (from retainer dialog)/sold to vendor/disgarded. Pure server-side - no data send to client, except chat log notice and gathe/drop rnotification. No need in constant client-server syncronization. A lot of space will be cleaned in main inventory, which also will reduce syncronization data.
This crafting materials inventory could even have category tabs for better UI, usability and network bandwidth (logs, minerals, alchemy,cooking, e.t.c) - so not all mats will be requested from server at once, when you open inventory, but only those in active tab.