QoL Suggestion: Currency Ideas

As I continue through Dawntrail, I am dealing with massive inventory bloat. I know a couple of these ideas have been previously suggested, but I am adding a few more:

Currency Ideas as follows:

• Turn Extreme tokens into a currency like beast tribes.

People will rerun these Trials and let's face it as newer content appears many of us will hoard our tokens for when they start releasing shiny weapons of the corresponding Trial. These can bloat our inventory. I don't see why we cant just have them in the currency tab.

Yes, the argument can be made that some of them are older content and not many people run these trials and therefore would not need to make them into currency. Which is fair statement, but how many of us still have unused tokens from beast tribes? This would open up at over 20+ bag slats

• Special Bag solely for fish and bait

All of these bloody fish. My lord are they picky and as such a lot of bait is needed. It would be nice to have a special bag just for the bait and what we catch, not to mention can we have the option for "Mass Fish Desynth" button would be amazing.

• Turn Dyes into Tokens or make a special bag/public retainer for them.

There are sooooo many dyes. They need their own space. While I think it would be simpler to see them as a "token" that would be a huge dialog box for the dye channel alone, so at the very least a bag just for the dyes.

• Make maps "Stackable"

This gets very annoying when holding map farms and being only able to carry 3 maps at a time: 1 in saddlebag, one in inventory and 1 opened, gets old when we have to teleport back and forth to grab more, then transferring them to a bag and or opening them.

The Moogle treasure maps can be stackable so why can't the same be done for the normal ones?

the problem i see with this is that they usually only release the better looking versions of the weapons the boss drop as craftable equipment.

1) Totems
Ex Totems etc into a single currency- I agree for older expansions in a similar way that tomestones get folded into Poetics. By the time we're level 100, nobody's actually going to be killing Ravana EX 50 or whatever times for that mount.

2) Bait bag/Dye Bag
Wish Granted: You have the chocobo saddlebag. That's why it exists, to give you space to stuff away whatever you want to hoard.

Speaking of hoarding, why do you even keep so many dyes?
The whole "public retainer" exists; it's the merchant NPC. Now, if they made it so you could just -craft- every single dye common, AND have every single common dye purchasable (Common being the NPC and currently craftable ones, not beast tribe or the special metallic ones)

Same with fish; just buy the bait you want to use that session. You never need to keep bait for later. Just like real life ;)

3) Treasure Maps

I mean I get why it is the way it is to prevent you from doing like 100 maps at once and flooding the market with drops, or inflating the price of maps buy buying so many. It slows it down...but it seems kinda unnecessary.

Then how would they sell you retainers in the cash shop?

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Originally Posted by GypsySunrise

Turn Extreme tokens into a currency like beast tribes.
People will rerun these Trials and let's face it as newer content appears many of us will hoard our tokens for when they start releasing shiny weapons of the corresponding Trial. These can bloat our inventory. I don't see why we cant just have them in the currency tab.

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Putting all those totems in Currency would be a massive waste of space in the currency table as those currencies are not something the vast majority of people will ever spend. Even those who do spend them will quickly run out of things to spend them on, since you only need, at the worst case most, 10 totems per weapon and 99 for a mount, which means in the end everyone reaches 0 need for any further totems. Permanently storing such temporarily needed items in Currency would be a bad decision.

However, a few years ago I did describe a scheme of cycling out older totems in a poetics-like way (note this was written pre-EW; advance everything I had previously written by two expansions):

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Originally Posted by Rongway

There are too many raid tokens and ex totems to just move them all over to the Currency tab. In their current state, they add no additional storage requirements to the character database because they are just items. If they were moved to the Currency tab the size of character data would increase quite a bit. If they want to add them to the Currency tab they're going to have to reduce the number of tokens and give older expansions' tokens the Poetics treatment. I described such an implementation a couple years ago in the UI forum:

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Originally Posted by Rongway

This would be a sensible change if totems were not effectively one-and-done currencies. But they don't have enough longevity to warrant a place in the permanent currency structures. The beast tribe currencies aren't really worth the data either, I think, but at least some of those are used on things like dyes.

It might be okay to currency just the totems for the current expansion's trials, but then they'd have to decide if they should be converted back to items or into something like a general all-old-trials currency when the next expansion comes out.

If we converted all the old beast tribes to an all-beast-tribe currency then we could have space in the currency structure to have all of the current expansion's beast tribes and current extreme trials. Just check for the appropriate reputation level for a given tribe vendor before allowing someone to spend universal beast currency at that vendor. As the beast tribes are entirely personal activities, this would not have a notable effect on beast tribe activities within the community. The worst thing that could happen would be that someone would be able to buy 4 times as much of one specific tribe's dye daily as they could now, but I mean if someone really wants that much of one specific dye for their glamour let them buy it.

Unfortunately, the effect a universal old-extreme currency would have an on the extreme trials that people run would be measurably larger; namely, people would spam HW extremes for currency to spend on the most recent old expansion trials. I'm personally not too torn up about this, as by the next expansion those mounts aren't super exclusive anymore anyway. However, I'd bet the devs would disagree because they want people to continue to have a reason to run all the extremes instead of just the HW ones. Of course, ARR trials don't currently drop totems, and HW trials might as well not drop any if they're going to continue to be easy after the stat squish. So maybe something like this would work with minimal objections:

1. Convert all ARR, HW, SB, ShB beast tribe currencies to a universal beast tribe currency. Require people to have a certain reputation with a tribe before they can spend universal currency on that tribe's items.
2. Remove totems from ARR, HW, and SB entirely, as they should be easy enough to farm for outright mount drops at cap.
3. Convert ShB totems to a ShB-wide extreme currency. Require someone to have completed a particular trial once before you can buy items from that trial using the extreme currency.
4. Make EW totems and beast tribe tokens individual specific currencies.
5. When 7.0 comes out, convert EW extreme currencies into a single EW-extreme currency and convert EW beast tribe currencies into universal beast tribe currency. Delete ShB-extreme currency.
6. Make 7.x totems and beast tribe tokens individual specific currencies.
7. When 8.0 comes out, convert 7.0 extreme currencies into a single 7.x-extreme currency and convert 7.x beast tribe currencies into universal beast tribe currency. Delete EW-extreme currency.
8. Make 8.x totems and beast tribe tokens individual specific currencies.
9. etc...

That way only the current expansion uses individual currencies for its beast tribes and extremes, all old beast tribes use a single currency, and the previous expansion uses a single extreme currency for all its trials. We shouldn't really need tokens for trials two expansions ago, because they will be easy enough to unsync and the drop rates will be high enough that we don't have to do them a million times.

The current Tribal currency tab tracks 14 beast tribe currencies. With these changes, it would track 1 universal old beast tribe currency, 3 current expansion beast tribe currencies, 1 recent expansion extreme currency, and 7 current expansion trial-specific extreme currencies, for a total of 12 currencies, and thus a reduction of currency data. Further, the tribal and extreme currencies would never expand beyond this because the recent expansion's beast tribes get absorbed into the one universal beast tribe currency and the recent expansion's extremes become a single currency replacing the previous-recent currency. People would continue to run super old extreme trials for outright mount drops, which should be fine with increased drop rates, and they would continue to run the recent expansion's extreme trials for that expansion's currency, even if they only need to clear each fight once to unlock each fight's shop. And finally the current expansion extremes would function as they do now, requiring each fight be run for that fight's specific currency. So all the expansions' fights would still get run.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

Putting all those totems in Currency would be a massive waste of space in the currency table as those currencies are not something the vast majority of people will ever spend. Even those who do spend them will quickly run out of things to spend them on, since you only need, at the worst case most, 10 totems per weapon and 99 for a mount, which means in the end everyone reaches 0 need for any further totems. Permanently storing such temporarily needed items in Currency would be a bad decision.

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We would need a full glam system rework, allowing us to permanently unlock the appearances of items that we've collected, for this to actually be true. There isn't anywhere near enough space in our glam dressers to permanently store all the ex/savage gear. Even just the ultimate weapons take up a large amount of the very limited space.

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Originally Posted by BigCheez

We would need a full glam system rework, allowing us to permanently unlock the appearances of items that we've collected, for this to actually be true. There isn't anywhere near enough space in our glam dressers to permanently store all the ex/savage gear. Even just the ultimate weapons take up a large amount of the very limited space.

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You speak as if anyone needs to have every single weapon from every single trial. Nobody does. And anything farther back than the current and one expansion previous is easily reacquired in just a few minutes when people actually want to use them and not hoard them, which is why my suggestion only bothers with totems for the current expansion and one expansion previous.

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Originally Posted by kaynide

1) Totems
Ex Totems etc into a single currency- I agree for older expansions in a similar way that tomestones get folded into Poetics. By the time we're level 100, nobody's actually going to be killing Ravana EX 50 or whatever times for that mount.

2) Bait bag/Dye Bag
Wish Granted: You have the chocobo saddlebag. That's why it exists, to give you space to stuff away whatever you want to hoard.

Speaking of hoarding, why do you even keep so many dyes?
The whole "public retainer" exists; it's the merchant NPC. Now, if they made it so you could just -craft- every single dye common, AND have every single common dye purchasable (Common being the NPC and currently craftable ones, not beast tribe or the special metallic ones)

Same with fish; just buy the bait you want to use that session. You never need to keep bait for later. Just like real life ;)

3) Treasure Maps

I mean I get why it is the way it is to prevent you from doing like 100 maps at once and flooding the market with drops, or inflating the price of maps buy buying so many. It slows it down...but it seems kinda unnecessary.

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2. That is your honest experience?
I don't know, 2 retainers + saddlebag is not enough to hold all the stuff I accumulated over the years, and yes I cycle them out but It's still a lot, ffxiv is the only MMO (I played) that has such a bad dye and glamour system, also most other MMOs do have a "material inventory" having everything in the same inventory is just bad design.

The thing is, it is on purpose, both ffxiv and ESO and other MMOs do this, creating a bad QoL feature to make you pay more, not enough room for the billion items we give you? pay us extra for more room.
In ESO it's the premium sub that gives you a crafting inventory.
In FFXIV it's more retainers.

They do it because they know it's annoying and people will be willing to pay more for a solution "Pay for convenience"

It's dirty. I agree we deserve more dedicated space for certain kinds of items like dyes and bait. RuneScape is an inventory management heavy game and both old and modern RS implemented things to reduce how brutal it was. Just give us dye and currency bags.

Also give out an extra retainer at some point in MSQ for free.
2 is an annoying number on purpose.

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Originally Posted by DaveFishnomer

2. That is your honest experience?
I don't know, 2 retainers + saddlebag is not enough to hold all the stuff I accumulated over the years, and yes I cycle them out but It's still a lot, ffxiv is the only MMO (I played) that has such a bad dye and glamour system, also most other MMOs do have a "material inventory" having everything in the same inventory is just bad design.

The thing is, it is on purpose, both ffxiv and ESO and other MMOs do this, creating a bad QoL feature to make you pay more, not enough room for the billion items we give you? pay us extra for more room.
In ESO it's the premium sub that gives you a crafting inventory.
In FFXIV it's more retainers.

They do it because they know it's annoying and people will be willing to pay more for a solution "Pay for convenience"

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I dunno, I've been here since the beginning and there really isn't anything you NEED to carry.

The only time I've had inventory issues has ever been because I wanted to keep surplus crafting supplies and every gear drop I get. In reality, all we need to do is learn to better manage what we have. Most of your active armor can fit into your armory bag.

So, what else are you carrying?

Outfits? That's kinda fair, but most of that can fit in your glamour dresser unless you're extreme.

Gear for later? If you aren't actively leveling that job, and don't love it for glamour, get rid of it. Poetic gear will carry you 1/2 way into every expac. You will likely get to end of expansion and get free gear in later expansions. No real NEED for dungeon gear except to fill in gaps. Doubly so with trusts.

Food? Why? Sell the food you don't use and buy a stack of like 999 whatever- outside of endgame savage stuff you only need food for XP buffs.

Crafting materials? Focus on what you want to make and just carry that. Sell everything else. It'll always be cheaper to get later or you can just get it yourself.

Dye? Learn to make dye on a crafter, then just carry the pigment bases. If you have regularly used colors, sure, keep em. How many regularly-used colors do you need?

The thing ultimately is, you have available to use:
140 inventory slots
175 x2 retainers
70 saddlebag
450ish in your armory
800 in the glamour dresser

Not even counting the glamour dresser, this is 1000ish slots for stuff; 500ish for whatever you want.

If you can't manage with that, you won't be able to manage with 5,000 slots.

Back to bait, you can buy bait for the fish in that specific zone from a vendor in said zone. You never need to stock bait. Buy like 50, fish 50 times, decide if you wanna fish some more...or not. Or buy 100, I dunno- how long is a fishing session for you?

Then the fish, sell 'em, eat 'em, desnyth them. Surely you're not walking around with like 23,342 fish in your pockets...?

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Originally Posted by Rongway

You speak as if anyone needs to have every single weapon from every single trial. Nobody does. And anything farther back than the current and one expansion previous is easily reacquired in just a few minutes when people actually want to use them and not hoard them, which is why my suggestion only bothers with totems for the current expansion and one expansion previous.

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You speak as if having more glam options available at any point in time is a bad thing. Even if you only include things that would be incredibly laborious to re-obtain, that's the majority of your glam storage gone.

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Originally Posted by kaynide

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Craft mats rarely get any cheaper, so I don't know what you mean unless you talk about 2 xPacs ago, and even then, that's not true for all items, right now you can sell mats from SHB that went up in price 10x in the last month because you need them for new recipes.
Sure they will get cheaper, in about a year when no one plays, but right now when crafting is on and master recipes are coming soon, no, they will only go up.

You can't craft most dyes, so ya, save them.

Materia is the one resource that you need from pretty much all xPacs if you want to overmeld. It always goes up in price. I have at least three pages of it in one retainer, use them regularly, and add and remove new stuff all the time.
You cant buy most good baits from vendors, you need to buy them with scrips, which you need to buy ahead of time or you will run into the limit, I really don't know what you are talking about.

I don't have any fish, don't know where you brought that from?

Also, you really think 800 spots in the glamour dresser is a lot? what? I'm not even that much into to glamour and I know it's nothing, people run out of space there all the time.
If WOW, a game I consider inferior by a lot of metrics figured out a way to make the "glamour dresser" they have infinite, so does ffxiv can.

In any case, the fact that they decided to monetize extra inventory space proves that they know people need it, and because they monetize it they have more reason to give you items instead of currency like this post suggests, which is why currency is rarely used for stuff that can be currency.
For example, just doing boza and collecting fragments and field notes can take a page in your inventory.

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Originally Posted by kaynide

I dunno, I've been here since the beginning and there really isn't anything you NEED to carry.

The only time I've had inventory issues has ever been because I wanted to keep surplus crafting supplies and every gear drop I get. In reality, all we need to do is learn to better manage what we have. Most of your active armor can fit into your armory bag.

So, what else are you carrying?

Outfits? That's kinda fair, but most of that can fit in your glamour dresser unless you're extreme.

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I think it is too easy to dismiss people whose experience does run into this problem as extreme. Because so many of us would want to be able to collect one of everything -- especially that if you've ever owned a piece of gear, you should be able to unlock its appearance for glam purposes forever without hitting an artificial glam dresser capacity limit at a few hundred items in a game that has thousands.

And while an armory of 450 spaces and a glamour dresser with 800 sounds like a lot, if you want to keep things around as a portfolio of options for future glams, it is a joke. It totals to 1250 gear pieces you can hope to keep around. Just the base Dawntrail expansion alone has added 1277 new pieces of gear, so even if you discarded everything you already had from ARR through EW, you do not have enough storage capacity to collect them all. And that is before any of the raid gear or master recipe craftables for the 7.x series have even been released.

And that is just talking about why people might want more space to not have to discard gear items.

For crafters, having to discard crafting materials that you know you will be collecting again in a few days is just annoying, more so if they are things that drop from fights instead of mining/botany nodes because getting those again costs more time and has some randomness to it.

As for fish, while most people do not go around carrying mountains of fish, the fact that the player-run Eorzean Aquarium with one specimen of every fish in the game exists proves that people like the concept of being able to create complete collections.


You make quite clear that your style of play is to only ever keep the best item you have for a slot, and to not care about forming collections of anything, but you can't just tell the whole player base that everyone should stop complaining because if only they were all like you, they wouldn't have the problems they are pointing out.

A big problem with dedicated inventory spaces is that, allegedly, they are just as demanding as full inventory spaces, so they just give more inventory when they can. Part of why items are so intensive in this game is there are so many qualities of them the game is constantly tracking (ex: Glamour dresser slots are kinda sorta still real inventory because they need to track things like dyes and the maker of the item), and especially held items are problematic because they actually cause your character's data to balloon quite a lot which affects your ability to transfer zones.

That said, I can't imagine there would be no way to convert some things into 'pseduo inventory,' or things can be done to just reduce the amount of clutter for systems that don't benefit from clutter.

Like for example, instead of having each individual bait be an item, perhaps they could just create 'bait grades and targets' so that instead of having some odd 10 baits per expansion we have 3, and higher quality bait can work on old content so we can ditch older stuff, sorta like dark matter. For some systems (crafting, crystals) clutter and inconvenience is part of the value proposition dedicated crafters bring to earn their gil, but that isn't the case for fishing. Bait as a system mostly functions as a gil sink, a way for crafters or gatherers to make money on lures or baits not easily obtainable on vendors, and to let you target certain fish. You don't actually need a ton of baits to make that work.

For glamour, I can't imagine a 'collection' system where you give up the right to do things like retain dyes in exchange for being able to re-create glamours of items you have in 'deep storage' would be as bad as inventory unless the rear end of XIV is truly a next level of hell of spaghetti code, because that is just a lookup list to see if the character ever owned the item (perhaps limited by requiring the player to talk to an NPC to update the list). That said, XIV's back end is from all accounts truly a horrible cursed thing, so it may legitimately be impossible. That said, they are also pretty opinionated about a lot of aspects of glamour for non-technical reasons, so another possibility is they just don't want you to be able to easily collect everything for some reason or another. We can only speculate because things that might be easy in other enviroments could range anywhere from 'easy' to 'literally impossible' due to the extreme level of technical debt XIV is working under.