Lets talk about the Bait Box for fishing

Unless I am missing something the entire point of this button is to search your inventory to pick a bait right? Why is this not treated as a separate storage system akin to how armor is stored?

Why can I not just store the bait with my retainer then have the bait box search that? This thing makes zero sense and the bait only serves to take up valuable inventory space which is a constant issue in this game because the Currency tab is used for 1/50th of its actual potential.

Proposed fix in 2 steps!
1. Buy bait
2. Bait has been added to your bait box for storage

Had you bothered to search this forum for tackle box or bait you would have found dozens of threads on this subject. It dates back to 2.0 and I, for one, am so tired of seeing it.

It isn't going to happen, drop the subject.

You know you could just buy the bait and lures when you're ready to use them instead of hoarding.

I'm much happier having generalized inventory space I can use for whatever I want than have part of that inventory space reserved for items I almost never use.

The separate inventory space for gear makes sense since this is a gear dependent game. Separate space for bait does not because it's not a fishing dependent game.

Learn to manage your inventory. I keep the dozen or so scrip baits/lures I use most frequently in my saddlebags where I can easily get to it when I'm ready to fish. Anything else I buy (or craft in the case of some lures) when I need it and discard the leftovers when I'm done. None of it is hard to get, and most of it is really cheap.

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Originally Posted by Shadygrove

Had you bothered to search this forum for tackle box or bait you would have found dozens of threads on this subject. It dates back to 2.0 and I, for one, am so tired of seeing it.

It isn't going to happen, drop the subject.

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So your saying it has been bad game design since 2.0 but that does not make it good game design. It is an unfinished feature that needs to be fixed.

Yup, but it aint gonna happen.

Maybe if every single question for an entire fan fest was asking about a bait box, over and over, then MAYBE they'd understand how frustrating it is...

but even then they wouldn't FIX it.

What ff14 sells, is glam, and space.

That's why you pay for retainers, for expanded saddlebags, and so forth. They WANT to fill your invintory, and make you buy more space.

Well it is worth a try since on the last few patches they have been doing clean up of super minor annoyances from the game and adding some convenience changes like wording, duty finder UI layout and also mining.

I figure since they are cleaning things up I might as well give it a shot.

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Originally Posted by ICountFrom0

Yup, but it aint gonna happen.



but even then they wouldn't FIX it.

What ff14 sells, is glam, and space.

That's why you pay for retainers, for expanded saddlebags, and so forth. They WANT to fill your invintory, and make you buy more space.

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Yep. And people here love to get fleeced so much they even beg for more items in the cash shop.

I stopped hoping for a storage fix. It's monetised, people eat it up, it's gonna stay.

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Originally Posted by Puremallace

It is an unfinished feature that needs to be fixed.

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Everything in a game is technically an unfinished feature subject to change when the developers want it to be different. That SE has stuck with the bait/lure system all this time, only supplementing it with boilies for those who don't want to have to carry all the different baits/lures for random fishing, would indicate they tend to see it as a mostly finished feature.

It's not something that needs to be fixed. Inventory management is part of most RPGs and related game types. You choose what's important for your character to keep and what they should get rid of when they run out of room.

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Originally Posted by Puremallace

Well it is worth a try since on the last few patches they have been doing clean up of super minor annoyances from the game and adding some convenience changes like wording, duty finder UI layout and also mining.

I figure since they are cleaning things up I might as well give it a shot.

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Never hurts to ask but it also pays to do a forum search first to see if the topic has been brought up before and what the response has been. As Shadygrove has said, it's been a frequent request over the years.

Probably the best suggestion I've seen (when it comes to simplifying inventory related to fishing) is not to create a bait/tackle box but instead to remove bait as an item going into inventory and instead making it something you select from a menu attached to the fishing log once acquired. I don't see SE doing that seems they want bait and lures to be consumable items that require management (why else is there a chance for else to lose our lures?).

with the boilies they introduced you barely even need to have specific bait in most cases.

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Originally Posted by Puremallace

Unless I am missing something the entire point of this button is to search your inventory to pick a bait right?

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Ok, ill stop you right here. You missed the point of the button. The point of that button is to allow for different baits to be used for different things. For that to work, you need to be able to switch baits. So the button is to switch baits. Nothing more.

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Originally Posted by Frizze

Ok, ill stop you right here. You missed the point of the button. The point of that button is to allow for different baits to be used for different things. For that to work, you need to be able to switch baits. So the button is to switch baits. Nothing more.

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So my counter to this is the button seems unfinished. It looks as if the original intent was not to have the player be required to open their inventory then right click select apply to switch bait. The issue here is if this was the intent then why was the bait still included in your inventory.

Clearly they can add separate space for these items and this is not an isolated issue to fishing but to all gathering professions. I prefer to have a little more faith in Square then some of the other posters and pray it is not a game to gouge players for money to add more bag space.

If their intent is to fix professions to be more fun and user friendly then this is a core issue with all gathering professions currently. Even something as simple as what WoW did with a separate bag that holds only crafting items helped a huge amount.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

It's not something that needs to be fixed. Inventory management is part of most RPGs and related game types. You choose what's important for your character to keep and what they should get rid of when they run out of room.

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Typical forum reply. It's not the design that's bad, it's the player. I'm surprised you didn't follow up with 'if you don't like it play something else'. lol

We have how many crafters? Each have their own materials and the game encourages you to level multiple. Then there is like a million tokens even if you only carry current content ones. Even glamour prisms use up one spot for new reason. And don't get me started on The Diadem.

I can see they are trying ease it a little bit by consolidating earrings and such but that's the bare minimum. And why can't we have more inventory space but I could literally rent 5 retainers now because that works for some reason. It only works be 'cause it brings money.

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Originally Posted by Payadopa

Typical forum reply. It's not the design that's bad, it's the player. I'm surprised you didn't follow up with 'if you don't like it play something else'. lol

We have how many crafters? Each have their own materials and the game encourages you to level multiple. Then there is like a million tokens even if you only carry current content ones. Even glamour prisms use up one spot for new reason. And don't get me started on The Diadem.

I can see they are trying ease it a little bit by consolidating earrings and such but that's the bare minimum. And why can't we have more inventory space but I could literally rent 5 retainers now because that works for some reason. It only works be 'cause it brings money.

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Typical forum response. "It's all money greed on SE's part, they could do it if they wanted to but they just want to milk us for more money".

It's a for-profit business. If you don't like paying businesses who want to make a profit, stick to doing business with non-profit organizations. You might want to think about just how much money you'd personally be earning if Western economies didn't revolve around the for-profit business model.

Why can't you have more inventory space? Because it clogs up communication between server and player clients when inventories are opened and items changed. The more that has to be communicated the slower the servers respond to inquiries in general, whether inventory, chat, combat or just about anything else we do in the game. Because data doesn't take up zero room on the servers, especially when you're multiplying that data by the millions of existing characters whether or not they are currently active. There's a point that SE needs to acquire more server space to accomodate the increased data and that space doesn't come free.

SE does add in more inventory when they can find solutions that ease the communication issue. That's why we have a chocobo saddlebag now.

Why not just leave all inventory information stored solely on the player's local client until the item is removed from their inventory so the need for server-client communication is reduced? Because cheating - imagine if players had free reign to edit their inventories without some sort of authentication from the game servers.

Why are fees charged for extra retainers? Because it makes more sense to only charge those players adding to the problem with their hoarding instead of charging every player, most of whom don't need the additional space.

Believe what you want instead of researching to understand the problem. Your complaints don't make the problems go away. SE will implement improvements as they find solutions to those problems.

IIRC Yoshi P has explicitly said this is a feature they'll never add.
For better or worse we should direct our energies elsewhere.

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Originally Posted by Payadopa

And why can't we have more inventory space but I could literally rent 5 retainers now because that works for some reason.

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This ends up being a spaghetti code answer. Every time your character zones, moves an item in your inventory, picks up or throws away anything(and probly a dozen more interactions) the server checks verifies and relays your entire inventory, armory chest, currency count and probly a few more things too. Adding more general space means that every active player has more slots that need to be checked/verified every time they make a server interaction. During a play session how often do you acquire, use, lose, or arrange items, switch classes, or change zones/instances? Multiply by tens of thousands of players at any given moment. So adding general inventory isnt easy. On the other hand, retainer data is only checked when you open them or do an item search. Your chocobo saddlebag is only checked when open. Would another free retainer or a bigger bag be nice? Sure. But you can get by without them. Im a full omni crafter and i have open space on my 2 retainers, im not paying for extra.

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Originally Posted by Puremallace

Unless I am missing something the entire point of this button is to search your inventory to pick a bait right? Why is this not treated as a separate storage system akin to how armor is stored?

Why can I not just store the bait with my retainer then have the bait box search that?

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The answer is in your first sentence.

Bait is used from your inventory. It can't reach across to your retainer storage and use bait from there.

The Bait button is essentially an inventory filter with a neat little interface. It's not a separate space, it's not moving your bait "into" the bait box while also still occupying inventory space, it's just finding the baits that are currently in your inventory and displaying them for you to pick.

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Originally Posted by Puremallace

Clearly they can add separate space for these items

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The devs have said before that to create a dedicated space outside of the inventory for fishing tackle would take up inventory slots that could otherwise act as general storage for any kind of item.

They could have given us a tackle box but instead gave us the saddlebag, which is far more useful as far as I'm concerned.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

The devs have said before that to create a dedicated space outside of the inventory for fishing tackle would take up inventory slots that could otherwise act as general storage for any kind of item.

They could have given us a tackle box but instead gave us the saddlebag, which is far more useful as far as I'm concerned.

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General inventory >>>> specialized inventory. We got more inventory once the PS3 was dealt out. We got another with the saddlebag. But yet this requests persists.

They will not give fishers an inventory that only benefits the truly serious fishers who cannot manage their inventory.

At this point, I do agree that the saddlebag can fill this function when you're fishing in a lot of areas with different bait requirements as it has more than enough slots to carry a good amount of lure variety unless you need all ARR/HW/SB/SHB/Ocean bait with you at all times (personally I've never done this and sell/store my bait if I wasn't going to an expansion's areas for a while, but maybe there are people who would like this). I do think it would be nice to have a method of managing bait that didn't need you to swap the items between two inventories so a tackle box could be a small quality of life inclusion just to save some time/fiddling with buttons on that front (this is assuming you can't use bait that's in your saddlebag vs being in your inventory, which I don't remember if this is the case or not as I've not been fishing in a while and I obviously can't check in game at the moment).

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

Why are fees charged for extra retainers? Because it makes more sense to only charge those players adding to the problem with their hoarding instead of charging every player, most of whom don't need the additional space.

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Do consider that not everyone buys the extra retainers for inventory space though - they might want the extra ventures per hour for materials/greater chances of various minions etc, I know I've been tempted to get another because having multiple retainers collecting various crafting materials that drop from mobs is appealing. Maybe that still justifies the fee charge, but it's not just hoarding that can make an extra retainer (or two) appealing.

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Originally Posted by Ormolt

Do consider that not everyone buys the extra retainers for inventory space though - they might want the extra ventures per hour for materials/greater chances of various minions etc, I know I've been tempted to get another because having multiple retainers collecting various crafting materials that drop from mobs is appealing. Maybe that still justifies the fee charge, but it's not just hoarding that can make an extra retainer (or two) appealing.

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True but they're also frequently using those retainers for the marketboard listings as well, which ultimately are yet another form of storage tied to our retainer. If it were truly a separate system, you'd be able to have your retainer selling one timeworn map while holding another of the same map in their inventory. You can't because the MB listing is still treated as being in the retainer's inventory and the maps are unique.

Some of those crazy outrages prices you see on the MB aren't players engaging in RMT. They're players using it as storage since we're free to list and delist as often as we want without incurring any fees. The post the item at a ridiculously high value so no one will buy it. If by some miracle someone does, the player is that much richer and can just go buy the item again. After all, if they've already got a lot of gil and/or don't have any items to actually sell with the listing, might as well use it to store things so other things that might be bound to the character can stored in inventory instead.

I'm not entirely sure that a tackle box, properly constructed as an array, with data values for the amount of each bait stored in it, (game's already capable of doing that, it's how crystals are setup), would take up the same amount of space in a player file as generic invintory spots that can hold anything.

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Originally Posted by Puremallace

Unless I am missing something the entire point of this button is to search your inventory to pick a bait right? Why is this not treated as a separate storage system akin to how armor is stored?

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Because they sell storage, not only one time, but as a subscription. There are a dozen ways they could make storage better and more convenient in this game. The game would be nearly unplayable without either the armory storage or else a lot more general storage, making one of the biggest selling points of the game (ability to have every class/job) the most frustrating, immediately causing the game to sour for most people. Other games use gear profile systems that just pulls from regular inventory or bank inventory, but if they gave us that much general inventory it would make other inventory option less desirable and eat into that income. Being an extreme fisher or dedicated omni-crafter is considered kind of niche.

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Originally Posted by Payadopa

We have how many crafters? Each have their own materials and the game encourages you to level multiple. Then there is like a million tokens even if you only carry current content ones. Even glamour prisms use up one spot for new reason. And don't get me started on The Diadem.

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Honestly though, once you've reached endgame, there aren't that many materials you need. More than 80% of the stuff I've hoarded is junk from past expansions I'm keeping around on the off chance I want to craft an old item for glamour purposes. Yet that chance never seems to materialize. I could just as well throw away all those items and re-acquire them in five minutes if the need arises. I have maybe one retainer's worth of items which are actually relevant and took effort to obtain (though YMMV depending on what you think is important).

Bait takes up way too much space in my inventory. I just want a separate tackle box. Plain and simple.

I do appreciate the Bait & Tackle screen box, but just wish it was not taking up space in my normal inventory.

Please just separate the two from each other.

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Originally Posted by ItMe

IIRC Yoshi P has explicitly said this is a feature they'll never add.
For better or worse we should direct our energies elsewhere.

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If this is true, why is he stubborn against improving the game?

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Originally Posted by Arohk

If this is true, why is he stubborn against improving the game?

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The short version is that they struggle to add more inventory space. So if they manage to squeeze in more, they would prefer to do it for inventory that can hold anything rather then space that can just hold one type of thing - bait in this instance. The typical advice to newer players is not to hoard bait. You only need it while you are actively fishing(and indeed, you will typically only need a couple at a time during any active fishing session), and most of it is SUPER replaceable. Let the market board/junkmonger act as your extra inventory space.

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Originally Posted by Frizze

The short version is that they struggle to add more inventory space. So if they manage to squeeze in more, they would prefer to do it for inventory that can hold anything rather then space that can just hold one type of thing - bait in this instance. The typical advice to newer players is not to hoard bait. You only need it while you are actively fishing(and indeed, you will typically only need a couple at a time during any active fishing session), and most of it is SUPER replaceable. Let the market board/junkmonger act as your extra inventory space.

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If creating more inventory space is such a big problem, they need to create more currency tabs instead.
Makes Baits a currency instead of an item. How that wrks? the same way as Scrips or Tomestones.

the problem with currency is that it's more data that may or may not be useless that your character has to drag around everytime they teleport or go into an instance, etc. All that data moves with you wherever you go. They want to limit how much is attached to your character. That's why retainers work the way they do as well as the chocobo saddlebag.