Has there been any word about increased inventory space?

[MageBlack]

I think at the niconico event they mentioned they are aware of the lack of space and they were looking at ways to handle it without making data packets too big (or something like that). I'll find the quote.

Edit:

Found it!

They are aware that the capacity of the current Armoury Chest is too low. Right now, since there's no way to add to this without increasing the write time to the back end servers, it will take a bit more time to work this out. (Yoshida)

The number of items you can store in your Armoire will increase. (Yoshida)

Source

[KisaiTenshi]

I think at the niconico event they mentioned they are aware of the lack of space ...



Source

Because certain issues crop up with inventory management... and we have seen it show up...

1) Too many "inventory", as in on-person, spaces means that everytime you do something, it has to be written back to the disk on the server.
2) The retainer only has this limitation while the retainer is open, and the Retainer has 175 spaces plus 20 market spaces and the 13 gear spaces. So clearly it's possible to have more, just the conditions where the retainer is used is different from that of the player
3) Other games have tried to work-around this by having "bags" that open into more inventory spaces, with limitations on the bags that they can only store a certain kind of item, and it just works like a super-stack (eg instead of stacking to 99, it changes the stack to 999, 9999 or something) , this is generally useful when the game has a limited number of types of crafting materials, but FFXIV doesn't do this, so it can't and unlikely won't do this.
4) The entire reason there's limits has to do with latency between the player and the server. Because every time something changes in the inventory, everything in the inventory has to be updated (eg synced to disk) and that results in higher round-trip latency.

Without naming the game, I'll mention off hand what happens when you have too much inventory via "expansion bags"
- There is latency, usually a very very long latency that is incurred every time the bag is opened, this is because the server has to update the quantities in the bag, and it's a huge source of item loss or item duplication when the server crashes.
- When items are used that stack inside the bag and the main inventory, the game client can run out of sync and think you no longer have items to use because the remaining quantity is in the bag, because the item is just in a shortcut bar.
- The same game has pets/mounts that have their own storage space. I think this is more appropriate in the context of FFXIV, as it can work the same way as retainer space, but at the same time, it causes latency in summoning the mounts/companions for the same reason there is latency when the bags are opened.

So unfortunately the only real solutions to inventory space involve finding ways to compress the needed space down.

One way of solving this is by directly connecting the market to the crafting process. eg have your retainer automatically summoned when crafting items you don't have the needed materials in your inventory, and allow the retainer to operate like an extended part of your inventory while crafting. When finished crafting the retainer would then sell any unneeded materials back to the market if they were pulled from the retainer's store space.

Another minor solution would involve adding inventory to "minions" that "help" with DoH/DoL jobs. eg having a Goldsmith minion would let you store anything desynthed from the Goldsmith job, having a Miner minion would let you store materials gathered from mining, etc. They would all "share" a common minion inventory so only crafting materials are stored to a maximum of one stack.