Quote Originally Posted by lukesneeringer View Post
Some of this information is more important than the rest. For instance, it's not really that big of a deal of the positions of items in our bags don't carry over from machine to machine (we can hit sort to fix that). By contrast, the fact that gearsets don't carry over is a massive quality of life inconvenience. I am constantly having to update gearsets between machines.

It seems to me that storing this player data on an FFXIV server is being considered to be an all or nothing approach. It shouldn't be. Consider storing some of the more painful aspects of character data (gearsets first, hotbars a close second) first, and don't worry about doing the things that are just tangential improvements. You could give us 80% of the benefit here for 20% of the cost.
The thing that's the bulk of the information is what you're asking for, gear sets and hot bars.

The maximum size that they'd have to support(which is the problem) is 40 characters per account X 30 different gearsets (It can go higher it's just how many I know I have) X 14 different equips per gear set X 100 different hot bar skills(10 hotbars available with 10 skills per) meaning that 1 character takes 1.68 GB just for that information(assuming each piece of that information is 1 byte and its probably more than that) and since 60mil+ chars have been created so far that means to store that data just right now you'd need a min of 100.8 TB of storage.

Oh and before someone jumps on me for saying it's only 100 TB SE could afford that easily each of those things are probably 100 bytes minimum meaning the actual size would be closer to 10 PB.