Has there been any mention of overhauling the Glamour system?

[Duelle]

They could make it so you still need the appropriate glamour prism to apply a glamour, you're just selecting the item appearance from a book instead of your inventory. Everybody wins?

This is what I was thinking could be done to keep crafters in on things while reducing the amount of inventory space connected to glamours. I'll admit that I could go for this, as it would cause me to SB and shard the gear I'm currently hanging on to that exists only for glamours.

I disagree entirely. We need to get rid of glamour prisms. They're stupid. I should be able to have my base armor on and have wardrobe slots I can toggle. I shouldn't have to have more than one copy of any specific armor if I want to have it glamoured to look like multiple things. Crafters would make money by being able to craft specific vanity gear, such as non-combat clothing (casual, formal, holiday, wedding, specialty, whatever) and other outfits.

A problem I have with this is that the most popular stuff is either really common or stupidly difficult to craft due to item rarity (the lv1 items come to mind). The only "steady" part of the process is, regrettably, glamour prisms.

[kyuven]

As much as this would be nice, it's not going to happen anytime soon. Definitely not before 3.2.
They've mentioned time and time and time and time and time and time and time again that the major reason for the lack of customization options is due to the character files becoming too bloated.
To put it another way, in order to add GW2's system to this game, they would basically have to cram what amounts to a half-sized inventory system that could potentially contain every item model in the game within in, when they don't even have enough capacity to add something like a tacklebox, something they actually want to add and have expressed as much in an official response.

To put it another way: You'll get your "glamour book" when fishers get their tacklebox and not one moment sooner.
"But that doesn't make sense! They have nothing to do with each other!"
Both solutions would end up with a catalogue of items used for a specific purpose. The tacklebox, however, would only need the item names and icons, while the glamour book would also need the item's appearance files.
A box full of worms has more in common with a fashion magazine than you'd think.

[Antonio_Xul]

I like the glamour crystal system honestly. If it ever does get changed, I hope glamour crystals continue to be necessary to change appearance. It's great having an easy way to make gil just by having a level 50 craft.

Though I must say, I'm really not sure how people have so much trouble with inventory space in this game...one of my retainers is full of outfits I glamour too, but the other one just has random mats that I'm just too lazy to sell. Her inventory would be completely empty if I did some spring cleaning.

Do people just keep every little material they get?

What I have in my inventory are clothes to use for classes & jobs that I'm leveling up. It gets crowded with gear for Disciples of War, Magic, Hand & Land! Not to mention their weapons or tools incase I want to use it on a retainer. My armory is super packed with items for all these classes & jobs and it's hard to switch from inventory to armory gear when their level goes up and can now use better gear. Some weapons I keep, because I like the way they look cool, as well.

I would totally like a vanity system similar to DC Universe Online. It's the only MMO I played before this, even though briefly, but their vanity system was really well done. Once you attain the item, you unlock it's use for vanity forever and can get rid of the actual item once it's useless. Vanity had a separate page from leveling gear, so you would place what item you want whether on vanity or gear. They also allowed to change the color of the item in three different spots for three different colors. Really cool!

[Caraway]

As much as this would be nice, it's not going to happen anytime soon. Definitely not before 3.2.
They've mentioned time and time and time and time and time and time and time again that the major reason for the lack of customization options is due to the character files becoming too bloated.
To put it another way, in order to add GW2's system to this game, they would basically have to cram what amounts to a half-sized inventory system that could potentially contain every item model in the game within in, when they don't even have enough capacity to add something like a tacklebox, something they actually want to add and have expressed as much in an official response.

To put it another way: You'll get your "glamour book" when fishers get their tacklebox and not one moment sooner.
"But that doesn't make sense! They have nothing to do with each other!"
Both solutions would end up with a catalogue of items used for a specific purpose. The tacklebox, however, would only need the item names and icons, while the glamour book would also need the item's appearance files.
A box full of worms has more in common with a fashion magazine than you'd think.

I admittedly do not buy this "the data structures will get too big" claim. I find myself perplexed how their database could be structured that this could actually cause a problem. For an example, there are other games with more intensive item structures where appearance sets are much more flexible and they have significantly larger inventories to work with.

A "Glamour Book" (or a tackle box) should not be a large data construct and should have a rather small memory footprint.

Example: Demon Tabard of Aiming.

The Demon Tabard of Aiming has a unique ItemID of 9. In one table of the database there is a row 9 that then has columns detailing everything about the item; its stats, its equipable classes (a hex flag likely; 0000F1 means bards and archers can wear it), whether or not it can be converted/projected/dyed (likely a binary flag; 001100), which crafter can repair it, whether it's tradable or unique, if it can be sold, iLVL, required level, etc. This is the main database entry that everybody's Demon Tabard of Aiming points to.

Each character has an inventory database where it lists what items you have, their ItemIDs, where they're located currently, whether they're bound or not, whether they've been dyed.

These are small values. And even spread out amongst millions of characters still don't account for a very large amount of space. The item structure in this game should be very simple because our items are very simple and we can only do so many things with them.

Something like a Glamour Book could be as simple as a binary 1/0 (Yes/no) next to each ItemID to indicate whether or not you have that item added and available to use as a glamour.

But without knowing how their data is structured we'll of course never know (though I would absolutely love to!).

[Callinon]

snip

That sounds perfectly logical, and it's more or less how I'd set that kind of structure up too.

I'm actually a little concerned by SE's response here. If they're ALREADY running into database bloat issues before we've even launched an expansion... either their servers are even more feeble than we ever imagined, or their database design work is absolutely awful. Either way, this is going to bite them fairly quickly as the game expands.

EDIT: I made words bad

[Slirith]

That sounds perfectly logical, and it's more or less how I'd set that kind of structure up too.

I'm actually a little concerned by SE's response here. If they're ALREADY running into database bloat issues before we've even launched an expansion... either their servers are even more feeble than we ever imagined, or their database design work is absolutely awful. Either way, this is going to bite them fairly quickly and the game expands.

Agreed /10chars

[Fenral]

snip

This is the exact principle already in place for the Armoire. It essentially trims all the unneeded data (dye, SB, durability) to store just the presence of the item. Something similar is in place to check what items you can buy from the Calamity Salvager.

You'd think an extra kilobyte or two of binary flags per character wouldn't bloat their database too badly. (An extra kilobyte added to the database for each of the 4 million registered accounts would total... 4 megabytes. Of server-side storage. So, yeah.)

The only "large" items in the game are Relic weapons and Aetherial gear, which have to store all their info on the character itself. Which means... in spite of using a lookup table for most items, they've structured their inventory system to hold the complete item data for around 1000 pieces of gear. I suspect that's where the trouble is.

[Hyrist]

There's been no mention of and overhaul, so I would not expect one anytime soon. Overhauls take a great deal of time, and usually involve difficulties your average player will never see or think of.

However I should note that the Glamour system does a service as it is now that I would like not see removed - I provides a consumable crafting service for the corresponding DoH (Prisms). Remove that, and you remove a healthy portion of the economy.

As far as inventory space: Semantically, this is incorrect. Pieces that are used for Glamours may be stored with your Retainer and not occupy your active Inventory or Armory Chest. So it's storage that's suffering. Those who's active inventory is suffering is either already consuming the entirety of their storage, or simply not utilizing it.

I could see potentially the creation of say a Glamour Storage, in which the appearance of a piece of gear could be 'stored'. However again, that adds to the Character Data problem they're running into when it comes to their backup processes. Ignoring that, the idea would work that you sacrifice a piece of gear to the Glamour Storage (you could never remove the piece from Glamour storage, you break it to unlock it, but that gear becomes permanently available for use for Glamour.) Prisms would still be used, preserving a market for crafters, but storage would be alleviated for those who are pushing the edge of their retainer space.

[Terin]

@Caraway: Exactly what I was thinking. As far as Relic and Zodiac weapons, I would actually treat them as any other item, letting you Glamour previous versions of them if you wanted, as well, once they've unlocked.

Also, it seems to me that they would be freeing up even more data by treating those items on the Account-wide level, so they're not even having to keep a separate "unlock-list" for each individual character.

[Callinon]

The only "large" items in the game are Relic weapons and Aetherial gear, which have to store all their info on the character itself. Which means... in spite of using a lookup table for most items, they've structured their inventory system to hold the complete item data for around 1000 pieces of gear. I suspect that's where the trouble is.

Even those large items are not that large.

I did dev work about 18 years ago on MUDs (the text-based precursor to MMOs) and we managed to handle items with extraordinary levels of customization without blowing up the servers of the day.

Basically when the server was booted, every object in the game was read into a big list (today you'd use a database for this, but it was a simpler time). When a player was loaded with a modified version of the item (even just a durability hit), the player's file only stored the modified components. So the file would be loaded, the base item would be added to the player, and then modified by whatever changes had been made to it.

A basic item might look something like this in the player's file:

#OBJECT
Vnum               1003
ItemValues         10 15 0 0 0 0
#END

The vnum there is the item's ID in the system, which tells the server what item this is and what basic values to load for it (keywords, short description, long description, item type, etc) and then after the vnum we load anything about the item that's different. In this case the ItemValues field. What these individual values mean changes based on item type, so for a weapon the first number might be weapon type, or for armor the first number might be remaining durability.. you get the idea.

And we do that for every item in the player's possession. And we were doing this decades ago.

Nowadays we have super efficient database structures to handle this. So when SE tells me that their's can't handle something like this, I just plain don't believe them.