[TO DEV TEAM] 80 gear and inventory slots..

[Lithera]

I don't personally experience much, if any, slowdown with the retainers, but the reason it can be a little slower to pull up retainer inventory etc. is because unlike your character inventory and armory chest, the retainer inventory is not already loaded before hand. When you log your character in it automatically loads up your entire inventory and armory chest because the game needs access to your gear and items dynamically for things like gear set swapping and use of items in crafting and from hot bars.

The retainer inventory is only loaded each time you call your retainer and your items need to be quickly delisted from the market board as well so the "lag" you experience with the retainer is the time it takes for your client to send the request to the server to open retainer inventory, the server to delist your marketboard items, and then the server to actually pull your retainer inventory from the database. The more stuff you have stored on the retainer the longer that will take especially if a LOT of people are pulling up their retainer inventory at the same time as a server can only retrieve so much information at the same time. This is likely why they're adverse to increasing the Armoire storage ability as whether it's retainer or Armoire it's pulling from the same database so it's an increase in server side load regardless.

Look at it this way. In FFXI you have immediate access ANYWHERE to 320 item slots if you include equipped gear. and that last 80 was only just added (likely because the declining server populations made the load bearable for the servers). RIght out of the gate in FFXIV we have immediate access to a combined 399 item slots. Your Mog House gave you access to an additional 240 slots (Safe, Locker, Furniture Storage). In XIV the two retainers combined are another 700 storage slots. This is on top of the fact that shards/cyrstals/clusters store in their own separate inventory, and this game doesn't require a million gear swaps.

What it really boils down to is for the player base there will NEVER be enough storage because as soon as you add more storage people will just packrat until they're full again and ask for more. From 8ish years playing FFXI I know this very well. People would use up the inventory on every alt available on their FFXI account plus sometimes completely separate accounts (for dual boxing) and whine for more inventory...