DoL harvesting: Materia catalyst items and inventory space

[VisionHolder]

Although I'm excited to see the changes coming to DoL and DoH, I'm concerned that it's going to create a big problem with storage space. How many types of materia catalyst items will there be? Simplified recipes will help, but I have my doubts that it will help that much. (For me, I don't hold on to many "parts".) Many of us already have a hard time juggling the few open slots in our inventory, particularly after getting our swimsuits.

For me, playing DoL jobs in leves means 75% harvesting, 25% inventory juggling, and a little bit of traveling (variable). That's one of the reasons why I only play DoL through leves--I can level faster and effectively juggle my inventory less as a result. Outside of leves, I find that for less SP, I spend 25% of the time harvesting, 50% traveling, and 25% of the time handling my inventory.

With these materia catalyst items, I'm worried the inventory juggling is going to get worse. Then the DoL exp curve change based on the "amount of gathering performed" sounds like a way to shift exp efforts of DoL to non-leve gathering... which given these issues, I'm not terribly excited about. I'm hoping it means better exp (relative to the exp curve) outside of leves. I like the idea of roaming around (but not too much) for gathering locations, but to keep me playing DoL, the balance between inventory juggling, traveling time, and harvesting needs to be addressed.

(Discussions are already going on about how to handle inventory: 1) offering additional retainers for $1/mo--along with a better payment system, 2) inventory expansion quests, 3) untradeable item storage via NPC, etc... Some of these have gotten responses from the dev team, but nothing definite.)

All-in-all, I want to add that I'm very impressed with list of promised changes in patch 1.19. This, along with the claiming system, are my only concerns at this point.

[Picoman]

I bet you could NPC 50 things right now if you wanted to.
300 slots + crystal tab + currency tab + 30 bazaar spots, i feel this is pretty generous.
A major part of playing an MMO that isn't care bear, is Inventory Management.
In FFXI choices were made between levelling Jobs or taking part in quests because of inventory restrictions and for years it was blamed on PS2 limitations, now there are sacks, bags and safes everywhere lol.
IDK, i guess just hold tight until FFXIV goes P2P and we can buy more retainers. ^^

[VisionHolder]

I bet you could NPC 50 things right now if you wanted to.
300 slots + crystal tab + currency tab + 30 bazaar spots, i feel this is pretty generous.

I'm actually going through my retainers as we speak, and I admit that some stuff I held on for too long. I can't speak for everyone who's complained about inventory space, but for me, I level every job... and with that comes a lot of gear, including the unique/untradable items that are quite popular. I also do a lot of leves, which like to give crafting mats for recipes 10+ levels above your rank... so I hold on to them for when I reach that level, so that I can grind on them. Then there's all the +X items, a few of which I hold on to for later. (And no, I don't save the common ones.) And then there are event items, a few "parts" that are hard to find outside of Ul'dah (since I refuse to reside there), etc...

To me, I see this as culmination of several fundamental issues, some of which are being addressed in 1.19, and others are being discussed, but we have nothing official. These include issues like:

1) The need for unique/untradable NPC storage... and not just event items, given the proliferation of NM/instance drops that fall into this category. (Event item storage is being discussed.)
2) Simplifying of some, but not all, recipes... (coming in 1.19)
3) More appropriate leve rewards (in terms of crafting mats) based on level... and the same goes for harvesting. For example, I've been getting Gigantoad Skins from my TAN leves since the early- to mid-20s. I can't process them until the early-30s.
4) The need to buy more retainers if people need it.... which also ties into the horrible payment system.

If you've managed to control your own inventory, I commend you. For some of us, depending on how we play, it can be a great challenge.

[Chiz]

I bet you could NPC 50 things right now if you wanted to.
300 slots + crystal tab + currency tab + 30 bazaar spots, i feel this is pretty generous.
A major part of playing an MMO that isn't care bear, is Inventory Management.
In FFXI choices were made between levelling Jobs or taking part in quests because of inventory restrictions and for years it was blamed on PS2 limitations, now there are sacks, bags and safes everywhere lol.
IDK, i guess just hold tight until FFXIV goes P2P and we can buy more retainers. ^^

Its probably closer to 1/3 to 1/2 of that number of slots because of the +1/2/3 system that most other games don't use and FFXIV has clearly struggled with from Day 1. This situation may be alleviated somewhat in the future with the simplified crafting recipes, but as it is currently its not uncommon for high level crafters and gatherers to be holding +1-3 raw materials and NQ/1/2/3 crafted materials. I have 3 mules on my buddy pass and still struggle with inventory.

There's a lot of things SE could do to improve the situation, here's just a few I've thought of over the last few months that could help improve the situation:

1) Single line-item slots for items, with an allowance for different quality types for that line item. For example:

Item.........................NQ...+1...+2...+3
Oak Log......................5.....1.....1.....4
Scale Glue..................99...44....12....6

2) Increasing # of items to 999. Not a huge fan of this implementation but it would help crafters out a lot while grinding or amassing items.

3) Comparison filter for inventory and retainer items. Color code both retainers, say Red and Blue. Personal inventory Green. When looking at your retainer, if you have an item that is carried in your inventory, it would be highlighted Green. If on both retainers, highlighted in Red/Blue. Basically this would be a fast way to help manage inventory by telling you if there was already an instance of that item on your retainers, at a glance.

4) Auto "Sort-All" feature. This basically auto-checks items in your inventory and dumps them onto your retainers if there is the same item on either of them. This would be particularly useful when your retainers are in different wards. Think of one of those recycling sorter videos where a bunch of crap gets dumped into a big machine that auto-sorts everything where it belongs.

Just a few ideas, but back to the OP post, hopefully if there's a finite # of raw materia types they just add an additional tab similar to Crystals so that we don't have an additional burden of 8-32 types of "new" inventory concerns.

[Bigglesworth]

they can start be getting rid of the +1's and +2's all together. That is the way battle drops have gone, and there is no reason gathering can't align itself with battle in that regard.