FFXIV: Inventory Management Simulator

Just a few suggestions to alleviate some of the headaches garnered from having to manage your inventory in a game that allows one character to be all Jobs:

1. Larger Armoury Chest tabs. 3 expansions in and the armoury hasn't gotten any larger to account for it. Its fine for players that have an abundance of time to level every Combat/Gatherer/Crafter to max level every expansion and can thereby purge their inventory of old equipment they will never need, but those of us with Jobs that span the spectrum of levels, its a major hassle. The fact that the Ring tab itself was not inherently larger than the other tabs to begin with hints at lack of forethought, given every job wears two of them.

2. Inventory Access Restrictions. Why is it, when I'm accessing my Glamour Dresser can I not delete equipment without having to close the dresser first and completely losing track of what I was doing?

3. Better Dresser Management. Please add the ability to filter the Dresser inventory window by categories like "By Job" or "Level" or both. Im referring here to both the actual Dresser interface and the second window that opens that you select from to add to the Dresser.

4. Better Chat. Why are we still restricted from sending tells to characters while they are in a "restricted area". I'm gonna go ahead and guess this is an artifact of old code that wasn't optimized with something like this in mind. However, why can you not take messages sent to people in "restricted areas" and place them in something of a queue for when the person exits the area so that they can receive them. Having to play guessing games, watch their icon on the friends list or having to rely on things like Discord to get in contact with someone is suboptimal.

1 - Actually they have increased it. There used to only be 25 slots. They upped it by 10 in SB. Agree that it should be even bigger though, especially for rings.

2 - Terrible coding, probably. The inventory code in this game is mindbogglingly bad.

3 - That would be nice.

4 - Again, probably terrible coding and some insanity with the way instance servers work. Probably the same reason you can't open FC menus while in a duty.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JoeBot

Why are we still restricted from sending tells to characters while they are in a "restricted area".

---

I believe it is to prevent players from using Tell to harass a party member while in duties. Hard to justify a kick for harassment when no one else can see the messages.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MrMagic

I believe it is to prevent players from using Tell to harass a party member while in duties. Hard to justify a kick for harassment when no one else can see the messages.

---

It's also hard to offer advice discreetly. That one cuts both ways.

RE: tell in duties:
I'd thought it was originally a technical limitation related to the fact that instanced content moves you to a different server and /tell <player name> <msg> could be ambiguous if there was someone in that duty with that name and someone else on your home world (possibly a friend or FC member) with the same name. But now that SE has already dealt with that problem as /tell <player name>@<world> <msg> in order to allow cross-world communication, it seems like it should have been enabled in duties as well as part of that update.

Yes please to bigger armory! I'm only using all crafters/gathers and 4 other jobs. I can already see the impending nightmare that is armory o.O

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Niwashi

RE: tell in duties:
I'd thought it was originally a technical limitation related to the fact that instanced content moves you to a different server and /tell <player name> <msg> could be ambiguous if there was someone in that duty with that name and someone else on your home world (possibly a friend or FC member) with the same name. But now that SE has already dealt with that problem as /tell <player name>@<world> <msg> in order to allow cross-world communication, it seems like it should have been enabled in duties as well as part of that update.

---

It's a bit of both. While the technical limitations were an issue at the time, that was also when Tells were the primary method of gil spamming. Many people had to move Tells to a different channel just to not have their chat bombarded by bots, since blacklisting didnt do much to alleviate the issue. While the technical limitations have lifted and gil spammers aren't able to send tells, mostly, SE was/is aware it could still be harassment if other players could do it while in a duty.

I’ve only been in the game for a year, but I’ve all the DoL and DoH, plus two jobs at level 50. I also use retainers quite a bit.

My sense is that more tiers of items are introduced with game expansions, but the inventory remains static.

In my situation, I like to have my tiers of materia organized in columns. So if I have gathering IV materia, I know to slot it into the fourth row. And I maintain a collection of low-tier materia, so that I have it on hand when crafting for other people.

But I see that there are now VIII tiers for materia, with inventory panes having seven rows. So eventually, my arrangement into columns won’t work because there aren’t enough rows.

So my suggestion is that, for the character and retainer inventories, that the number of rows be incremented when an expansion introduces a new tier of crafting items.

Not everyone would organize things like I do, but the principle is to increase available inventory when the game has technically opened the possibility for needing more storage.

I'm not necessarily arguing against an expansion to the armory chest, since it's not like it's a bad thing, but I have never understood this complaint. There are 29 classes in the game, and 35 slots in the armory chest. Even if you had every class at such varying levels that you needed a separate piece of gear for every job, you have enough slots, with a couple extra for you when you get replacements. (The only exception to this is rings, which I agree was a silly oversight.)

Make sure all of your classes have a gearset assigned and managing your armory chest is not nearly as hard as it seems. All you have to do is stop once in a while and clean out everything that doesn't have a page icon on it. Maybe keep a piece or two in advance for leveling up, but ultimately you can also store that on a retainer as well until you're at the right level.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Elamys

(The only exception to this is rings, which I agree was a silly oversight.)

---

It's also an issue for weapons. Anyone who wants to work on relics will have multiple current weapons per combat job, and there isn't enough space for that if you're also playing all the other jobs.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Tohe-Spidhire

So my suggestion is that, for the character and retainer inventories, that the number of rows be incremented when an expansion introduces a new tier of crafting items.

Not everyone would organize things like I do, but the principle is to increase available inventory when the game has technically opened the possibility for needing more storage.

---

They actually made a technical post explaining this issue in detail a while ago - the short version is that they can't just incrementally add more storage, due to poor decisions with the original programming.

The game doesn't just display items in pages of 35 items, it actually handles them in groups of 35 items. Increasing the inventory space means increasing that group size, and apparently 35 is the limit of what the game can handle well.

(The "changes in 4.2" that the post is primarily addressing is that while the group size had been increased from 25 to 35, the inventory menu hadn't been adjusted, so you had a weird cluster of non-slots at the end of the last page. They fixed that issue, but it had the side-effect of reducing our 'expanded view' inventory from a 10x10 grid to 10x7.)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Elamys

I'm not necessarily arguing against an expansion to the armory chest, since it's not like it's a bad thing, but I have never understood this complaint. There are 29 classes in the game, and 35 slots in the armory chest. Even if you had every class at such varying levels that you needed a separate piece of gear for every job, you have enough slots, with a couple extra for you when you get replacements. (The only exception to this is rings, which I agree was a silly oversight.)

Make sure all of your classes have a gearset assigned and managing your armory chest is not nearly as hard as it seems. All you have to do is stop once in a while and clean out everything that doesn't have a page icon on it. Maybe keep a piece or two in advance for leveling up, but ultimately you can also store that on a retainer as well until you're at the right level.

---

Keeping pieces for leveling up is what causes issues, and moving items away into other storage (inventory, retainers) makes it likely to get overlooked and forgotten, unless you remember to review and check if there are any stored pieces you need - and of course that adds another layer of annoying inventory management.

The issue with rings comes back to the inventory explanation above - they can't just double the size of the ring storage because it's not how the data works.

I assume that to have double the storage for rings, there would have to be separate "left ring" and "right ring" boxes and you'd either have to move them around manually to get the two best rings equipped, or potentially the rings themselves would need to be duplicated and only equippable on a designated hand. That would probably cause as many issues as it solved.

Also, this might be more of a personal problem, but I do tend to be carrying a few "just for glamour" gearsets that I don't want (or rather don't have room for) as glamour plates, or want to equip outside of towns. From memory I have a winter outfit, beach gear, general casual clothes and a formal dress from attending a wedding. Plus some gear I need to equip to my retainers, but first I need to glamour it, and that means remembering about it when I'm able to visit an inn room to sort that out.