Dear Square Enix: Please Remove the Glamour Dresser Cap

https://i.ibb.co/KNbLKd5/removethedressercap.jpg

Just remove the cap on the dresser.
you would free up alot of space for hoarders like me.

It would be a major improvement but we have the unfortunate issue that the game is still running on that old 1.X code that makes more major QoL updates like that pretty much impossible. In order to fix that code they're gonna have to do the same thing PSO2 did for New Genesis. Nearly 2 years of no new content.

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Originally Posted by sorawild34

It would be a major improvement but we have the unfortunate issue that the game is still running on that old 1.X code that makes more major QoL updates like that pretty much impossible. In order to fix that code they're gonna have to do the same thing PSO2 did for New Genesis. Nearly 2 years of no new content.

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Its not running on 1.0 code. Its running on 2.0 code. That is what causes all the headaches. 2.0 was made in less than 2 years. It has a lot of mess in it and causes lots of problems.

Also, on topic, if they could make it infinite, they would have. There are technical limitations.

They probably won't do that because then people would just use the glamour dresser to store items and not buy additional retainers anymore lol.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

Its not running on 1.0 code. Its running on 2.0 code. That is what causes all the headaches. 2.0 was made in less than 2 years. It has a lot of mess in it and causes lots of problems.

Also, on topic, if they could make it infinite, they would have. There are technical limitations.

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From what i heard for 2.0 they reused a lot of code from 1.x to save time so in a way its running on 1.x code.
What is very obvious is that the current code isnt very efficiently written.

Yoshi-P knew this was going to happen. He said in the most recent LL that he knew we were going to ask for more space and complain that 800 isn't enough. They have to cap the amount of gear in the glamour dresser because that gear is data and data takes up space. 800 slots PER character is a LOT. That is terrabytes' worth of data.

Redo the system completely as soon as you bound to the equipment it should be glamor.

I wouldn't expect an overhaul until the entire game gets one.

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Originally Posted by Caitlinzulu

From what i heard for 2.0 they reused a lot of code from 1.x to save time so in a way its running on 1.x code.
What is very obvious is that the current code isnt very efficiently written.

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No code was saved from 1.0, only assets. They literally threw the source code for 1.0 away, iirc from one interview a while back.

2.0 onwards uses a completely different game engine, old code would be useless.

There's no such thing as infinite resources, my dude.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

There's no such thing as infinite resources, my dude.

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However a properly made glamour dresser would take significantly less space than what the current dresser does.

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Originally Posted by JaydeDancer

Yoshi-P knew this was going to happen. He said in the most recent LL that he knew we were going to ask for more space and complain that 800 isn't enough. They have to cap the amount of gear in the glamour dresser because that gear is data and data takes up space. 800 slots PER character is a LOT. That is terrabytes' worth of data.

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lolwhat, were talking compressed data linked to character files, thats like 200kb maximum, what they were worried about was loading times when opening the dresser, the systems inbetween that link character data to dresser are innefficient and cant handle it.

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Originally Posted by JaydeDancer

800 slots PER character is a LOT. That is terrabytes' worth of data.

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I doubt, that 800 items will take more than a few kilobytes in a database for a character.


Cheers

I don't know why you guys even hoarding the accessories... Meanwhile my armoury is enough for accessories i want, also I have my own retainer to store the weapons for all jobs...

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Originally Posted by Knot_D

I don't know why you guys even hoarding the accessories... Meanwhile my armoury is enough for accessories i want, also I have my own retainer to store the weapons for all jobs...

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you should not need to buy more retainers to store weapons and gear.
the glamour dresser should be able to store everything.

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

I doubt, that 800 items will take more than a few kilobytes in a database for a character.


Cheers

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It shouldn't, but we've seen on multiple occasions that they have massive problems expanding the glamour dresser, the armoire or our inventory. So one has to assume that their database was rushed when creating ARR and is incredibly inefficient at this point.

Devs: "Oh, our poor databases have TOO MANY values to deal with! It's dying every time you look in your inventory! Please understand! ;A;"
Also Devs: "Hey, you can buy up to 8 retainers for a monthly fee and each come with a ton of storage! :^)"

It's too tiring to be angry about it anymore, though I do enjoy laughing at situations like this. lol

At this point I'm just looking forward to their next MMORPG with upgraded and better everything. Will a new FF mmo be a thing eventually?

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Originally Posted by RecoveryPotion

At this point I'm just looking forward to their next MMORPG with upgraded and better everything. Will a new FF mmo be a thing eventually?

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Hopefully, the average "gamur" will flock to the newest toy and hopefully XIV gets the XI treatment and a few years after the move the servers will have a more cozy feeling to the playerbase. Though XI didn't have the backend for a cash shop while XIV has a cash shop intertwined with it. Worst case scenario, after the playerbase moves on the whales will stick around while the devs milk them until the end of service. That would be pretty sad but I can totally see it happening, lol.

Glamour dresser isn't for storage. Stop hording items you'll never glamour and the cap is no longer a problem.

Guild Wars 2 is the definitive example of how to do a glamour storage.

These posts always remind me of that one meme where the guy is saying something obvious and the other one is acting like his mind is blown. The devs are fully aware that, yes, infinite is greater than 800. But have you considered they can't do it? They're not limiting it just to spite you.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

There's no such thing as infinite resources, my dude.

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You're right, but other games have had this issue solved for a decade now. There's no excuse for ffxiv to not keep up at this point.

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Originally Posted by JaydeDancer

Yoshi-P knew this was going to happen. He said in the most recent LL that he knew we were going to ask for more space and complain that 800 isn't enough. They have to cap the amount of gear in the glamour dresser because that gear is data and data takes up space. 800 slots PER character is a LOT. That is terrabytes' worth of data.

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Hmm, not sure how much of that is true, but lets math it out.
A boolean variable generally takes up 2 bytes in an sql database. So lets go with 2 bytes as a true or false if you made the glamour system like WoW's. Where you can collect every look automatically just by equipping it. Then you don't need a seperate storage database you just need one list that matches up to the total item list...so just one boolean, ie a yes or no on the have you collected this look list.

So for say a 400 booleans would just be 800 bytes per user which would work out to 35.8 million subscribers * 800 bytes = 28.64 GB. That is the total size if it is just a boolean for every active account. Now because it is not attached to the total list you might also need a number in there to record the data of the look to reference so lets double it and just say 56GB

Ok so how big if we apply it to a list of every item? Well how many items are there that have looks? I looked on the erozea database and found this.
Arms 4693
Tools 1007
Armor 11215
Accessories 3928
total 20913

So with that we could just take the entire database of those items and add a yes collected look column, or a new table that corresponds to the full look list. So...
35.8 million subscribers * 20913 equipable items *2 bytes = 1497.37 GB for the entire currently active population. It would require account wide sharing of the unlocked looks, but I also don't think every item has a unique looks so I think it could be done. Say double for old accounts, and that is totally doable. Each server would only need an extra TB and they would have a ton of space to handle it.

So storage size isn't it, but technical systems might be I just can't figure out what weird reason that would be though.

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Originally Posted by znushu

you should not need to buy more retainers to store weapons and gear.
the glamour dresser should be able to store everything.

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I just... use 2 retainers. 1 for rare mats and tokens, 1 for weapons. Most of the gear I collected goes to dresser, and my dresser right now is 389.

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Originally Posted by Raoabolic

Devs: "Oh, our poor databases have TOO MANY values to deal with! It's dying every time you look in your inventory! Please understand! ;A;"
Also Devs: "Hey, you can buy up to 8 retainers for a monthly fee and each come with a ton of storage! :^)"

It's too tiring to be angry about it anymore, though I do enjoy laughing at situations like this. lol

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Let's face it. This right here is why we don't have more dresser space. They make money on not giving unlimited looks by making people pay for extra storage.

I have said it before and i will say it again. I dont believe that they arent giving us more free retainers just to keep selling them to us. What if the the servers cant handle 3 retainers for each character?
Most wont pay for extra retainers so if we count all the paid for retainers together i bet we still would have less of then then we have players. So in essence less extra server load then an extra retainer would be.
It would be really interesting to see how many paid retainers there actually are.

::: looks at glamour dresser with less than 300 items in it:::

::: looks at two free retainers and no more:::

Sometimes I think some of you really have a hoarding problem.

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Originally Posted by JTWrenn

Let's face it. This right here is why we don't have more dresser space. They make money on not giving unlimited looks by making people pay for extra storage.

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If they wanted to be ultra-greedy they could add on an "Unlimited Glamour Dresser Fee" as an extra sub fee, like extra retainers are. I reckon most people who hit the glamour limits would shell out an extra, say, 10 a month for it.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

No code was saved from 1.0, only assets. They literally threw the source code for 1.0 away, iirc from one interview a while back.

2.0 onwards uses a completely different game engine, old code would be useless.

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From what I remember reading and understand, this is correct. Iirc it came up prior to one of the rising events and the dev team was asked about recreating the 1.x experience, and they mentioned that 1.0 was entirely scrapped, so it wasn't really possible. Then we got the event where they released, 'you are definitely going to die in this FATE' FATEs to kind of give us the craziness that happened when Dalamud fell.

The 1.0 spaghetti code excuse is one of those things that if said enough, it becomes the truth. I for one have no recollection since subscribing back in 2015 of the dev team mentioning having any limitations due to residual 1.x code that they can't work around. Furthermore, I believe their 'limitations' are based on a lowest common denominator among the system capabilities of their target playerbase. If everyone had the cash to get top of the line OS's and the hardware to run them, the devs would be in heaven with what they could do. Within budget, of course.

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Originally Posted by Saimeren

You're right, but other games have had this issue solved for a decade now. There's no excuse for ffxiv to not keep up at this point.

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Except there is excuses. I mean. As pointed out, it's not being withheld just for shits.

The item system in this game is a complete mess, and that system is so deeply rooted into the core of the game that fixing that mess would essentially require another shutdown to overhaul.

Pointing to other games/systems isn't helping. Those are presumably examples that were better equipped and built to handle those systems by design.

The design of the item system in this game is a cobbled together disaster with no foresight or future proofing. And with the glamour system tied to the item system, the only result you're ever going to get from it is a disaster.

Pretty much. My assumption is that when they were working on the engine for ARR they had to cut corners, otherwise they would've never finished in time, and the item system is probably one of those.

I like to compare it with WoW's standard inventory bag that was limited to 16 slots. No idea if they managed to fix it now but I remember them trying to expand the bag and it flat out broke the game.


In the end nobody actually knows if this is the truth or if it's all just an elaborate scheme to sell retainers, but considering the amount of complaints they have to deal with due to the inventory system I highly doubt they wouldn't just fix it if they could.

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Originally Posted by Ransu

Glamour dresser isn't for storage. Stop hording items you'll never glamour and the cap is no longer a problem.

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The glamour dresser is literally a glorified bank.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

No code was saved from 1.0, only assets. They literally threw the source code for 1.0 away, iirc from one interview a while back.

2.0 onwards uses a completely different game engine, old code would be useless.

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Then they lied. Because they admitted, that the 2002 error issue during the EW launch was caused by some old 1.x code in the client.


Cheers

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

Pointing to other games/systems isn't helping. Those are presumably examples that were better equipped and built to handle those systems by design.

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Mhhh, i do not think, that when Blizzard made the Warcraft 3 engine, that they had a glamour/transmog system in mind. ;) And yes, World of Warcraft still runs on a heavily modified WC3 engine. But they have made some huge refactorings in it. They normalized the data in the database etc.


So i can understand, that the players are upset about it, that other companies can implement better features in older engines and SQEX cannot.

Cheers

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Originally Posted by Raoabolic

Devs: "Oh, our poor databases have TOO MANY values to deal with! It's dying every time you look in your inventory! Please understand! ;A;"
Also Devs: "Hey, you can buy up to 8 retainers for a monthly fee and each come with a ton of storage! :^)"

It's too tiring to be angry about it anymore, though I do enjoy laughing at situations like this. lol

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The problem is, the data in a retainer isn't refreshed every time you zone. Your character Inventory is and with the poor implementation on how server data is made, that causes problems.

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However a properly made glamour dresser would take significantly less space than what the current dresser does.

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But the system is poorly made due to the underlying engine. To redo that would take a lot of time, possibly stopping content for all that time. Would you want to wait 1-2 years with 0 content so they can rewrite the engine?

Searching the Eorzea Database crafting log section with the filter for item level 1-610 gives 5546 results for gear that is marked in a log with either "have crafted" or "have not crafted". This log is accessible in duties.

Saying that a glamour log is not possible is a lie. There is no reason we could not have a log of several thousand item skins that could be used as an addition to the glamour dresser similar to the Armoire, where you pull the appearance of an undyed item directly onto a plate.

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Originally Posted by Reinha

There is no reason we could not have a log of several thousand item skins that could be used as an addition to the glamour dresser similar to the Armoire, where you pull the appearance of an undyed item directly onto a plate. (Emphasis added)

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Wow, greedy much? You want them to implement and maintain TWO glamour systems, and make them work together?

And no reason not too? What, you think they can just implement it in an afternoon with two interns, and then it will maintain itself?

Everything takes resources to implement, and what gets resources, from among the undoubtedly long list of bug fixes and new features that need to be implemented, is almost always a matter of prioritization.

Compared to the other things they can and might be doing -- like the graphics upgrade, new content, and so on -- I think the revising the glamour system, which I and everyone I play with consider "good enough," falls very low on the priority list for resources. And that's all the reason necessary for it to not be done.

And don't give me that billion-dollar-company-so-no-resource-limits nonsense. Have you ever worked in a billion dollar company? Managed projects in one? The internal competition between business units and within business units for resources can be brutal, and if you can't show how your team's product or feature will meet or exceed the expected profit margin of someone else's product or feature, then that someone else gets the resources and you don't. And why is it that way? Partly because execs have a duty to the stockholder to maximize the value of the company. And partly because, in the big US corps I worked in, middle management is full of ladder-climbing sociopaths eager to stick knives in the backs of any competitors for the next open C-suite position.

Reinha, the world isn't the simple place you seem to think it is.
There's never "no reason" not to do something, because there is always some way someone can gain an advantage or make a profit from something not being done.

Small idea of sorts.

Given that the glamour dresser likely isn't going away, what about an in-game 'catalogue'? One where you could maybe 'sacrifice' items to an NPC, and get a 'mark' in exchange that lets you rebuy that gear (or a replica of it) for say, 1000 gil?

That way, people aren't clinging onto old gear for the sake of glamour, it frees up inventory/retainer space, and also lets them replace items at will if they need them for a specific glamour?

Bear in mind that most people who own additional retainers are likely not doing it for the sake of holding a few extra glams, but because they're omnicrafters who want 10 retainers gathering materials for their Day 1 Savage precrafts, whilst they're petting animals in Island Sanctuary, so I don't think SE would lose money from it ^^

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Originally Posted by DragonFlyy

Would you want to wait 1-2 years with 0 content so they can rewrite the engine?

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Honestly, yes. There are so many issues that could be solved with a codebase overhaul.

The dev team have been very open both in word and design that they don't expect us to be playing this game all the time, so an extended break to fix all this stuff probably wouldn't be too bad, for both us and them. I'm sure they get just as frustrated as we do sometimes with the code limitations.

Likely the Squenix execs/shareholders wouldn't allow it though. No way they'd let their cash cow go for that long.
Suffering from success once more I suppose.