Pay for your inventory.

[Lewtskie]

Someone please explain to me what exactly you are 'winning' at when people scream "P2W!!!!"

Is there some kind of secret buff for having a shit load of items? Do you do more damage? Are you tankier? Is there a special move that lets you throw junk at enemies and nerf them?

So if I buy another retainer, I just apparently 'win' the game.... damnit SE, this is the worst secret ending yet!

[Draxxion]

This. Even giving us crafting mat bags would be good.

You know what I would like to see is actually the way WOW handled it. Increase the stack of the crafting mats. Instead of 99 make it 999 as an example. Then add as you said a special storage just for mats.

[Catwho]

"Master crafters" produce small amounts of high end items.

People who actually know how to get the real money out of the MB produce lots of lower-to-middle end, high demand items.

What makes you think I don't do that? But I also have a 0 competition policy and only produce a limited number of HQ goods for sale. I don't like to flood my own markets. Keeping my 80 slots stocked on a daily basis is enough of a challenge, trust me.

[Nyalia]

A few things I would like to point out -

• As a programmer, I'm going to say right now that increasing stack size from 99 to 125 does not cost additional server space (unless they are doing something extremely weird). "99" is not a multiple of 2. They are storing a number from 1 to 99 in a slot that can hold a number that is at least from 1 to 128. The space is already allocated. They just want to use the "round" number 99 instead of the more generous number 125. Also, chances are very high that increasing stack size to 250 would not cost additional server space. It's very rare for a programming language to use 7-bit data structures. There's no such thing as negative numbers of items, so there's no reason for item quantities to be "signed" numbers (numbers with one bit allocated to +/-). This means that they are almost definitely storing a number from 1-99 in a slot that can hold a number from 1 to 256 (8 bits, aka 1 byte). Increasing stack size is one of those simple things they can do to alleviate the inventory space issues if they wanted to, but they have not done. This seems, to me, to imply that they don't want to.
• Not to defend SE's decision, but transferring items between characters would cause a greater strain on their servers. I highly doubt that SE has the server capacity to support every player on a server suddenly having 8 characters, each with 2 retainers. I'd bet they're banking on people buying the additional character slots and not using them, or not leveling their alts past 15. That said, $2 extra a month gets you either 208 extra inventory spaces (175 retainer inventory, 12 retainer equipment, 20 retainer for sale), or 926 items (416 retainer, 100 inventory, 13 equipment, 275 armory, 27 soulgem, 75 key item, and 20 received but unopened mail attached items) plus a couple hundred armoire spots, an equally large number of Calamity Salvager unlock spots (those take space), Mount/Minion guide spots, crafting/gathering/fishing/siteseeing log spots, aetheryte/aethernet unlocks, aetheryte favorites, hunting logs, currency, experience and levels for 24 classes, desynth skill levels, Triple Triad cards, chocobo data, chocobo racing data, and so on and so on per character for up to 7 additional characters. All of the data for a character consumes a ton of space. But, they price one single retainer with its 208 extra item spots (plus character customization and experience/level info for one class) at the same price as all of those extras. If someone who has access to 8 characters per server were to make a single alt and never use it, it would eat up more space than an additional retainer. If they were to use it, it would eat up at least five times as much server space as a retainer (more like ~10 times). Their pricing scheme does not match their stated reasons for their decisions. If we're actually paying to support additional server space, why doesn't an additional retainer slot cost the same as a new 1-character subscription?
• To add on to the previous point, I'm paying $13 a month for ~1,300 items worth of server space (at least). New retainers cost $2 a month and grant ~200 items of server space. We are literally paying the same $/data rate for the new retainers as our initial subscription. Before someone points out that not all item data is created equal and some items take up less data than others (inventory space being the most expensive, armoire/calamity items being the least), that point doesn't actually matter. I care about how many items I can store, how many mounts I can collect, how much stuff I can have. They've said they can't increase armoire sizes for space reasons, even though that should compress a large portion of our data significantly and reduce the amount of data stored... until we get more items increasing it. But they could alleviate space issues by giving us a means to trade our inventory spaces for significantly more armoire-like spaces. They are not doing that. Therefore, the point is still valid.

To break out of the list format for a second, I just realized something. Consider what they could do to provide us more efficient inventory space, but have us pay for it with a higher sub fee (since that's what the pay per retainer service is all about, this makes total sense). They could add the option of us spending $2 a month for the same amount of server space a single retainer takes up, but instead used of being in the rather inefficient (for glamour purposes) retainer inventory format, we get an armoire-like space that could store any piece of equipment. Since the space is highly compressed compared to retainer inventory (the only detail the database would have to store is an item number, no stacksize/dye/glamour/condition/materia1-5/makersmark/spiritbond/inventoryposition, so it would take ~1/5th to 1/10th the space), that new space could have a maximum capacity of ~1,000-2,000 gear items for the same price. One retainer costs the same, server-space-wise, as an entire, workable glamour storage system.

I can't even imagine this taking much coding time on their end. They already have the Armoire. This would just be an extension of an existing system. If expanding server space to handle the data for an extra retainer only costs $2/mo, then server space isn't an issue with implementing this system. If they don't want to charge money for a unique system that is not available in the main game (which is a reasonable and good position to have), they aren't - this is just an expansion of the Armoire, like additional retainers are an expansion of the Retainer system. Heck, an extra retainer gives it to all your characters if you have multiple. Tie this new system to a single character if you have to - it would then take LESS server space than an extra retainer. I'll make a new thread asking about this. Brb. (EDIT: Done)

[Balipu]

Someone please explain to me what exactly you are 'winning' at when people scream "P2W!!!!"

Is there some kind of secret buff for having a shit load of items? Do you do more damage? Are you tankier? Is there a special move that lets you throw junk at enemies and nerf them?

So if I buy another retainer, I just apparently 'win' the game.... damnit SE, this is the worst secret ending yet!

You can sell more stuff at a time and so dominate the market and get a lot of money with which you can buy well...errr, well you can't buy all the stuff you buy with pvp commendations, grand company seals, allagant tomestones, gold saucer points and hunting seals, but you can use it to repair gear and teleport so it's very usefull.

And besides you can't keep five glamours for every class in your current inventory.


EDIT: I don't know who will notice this as I can't make new posts but I logged in the mog station to check this retainer stuff and it said no additional fee for 1 and 2 additional retainers. The way I understand it: we can have up to 8 additional retianers now, with the first two being free.

[Talia_Hailwind]

I'm in complete disgust about the fact that you have to buy the new retainers.

[2.0] Players can now hire up to eight retainers.
* Players are normally limited to two retainers per character. To hire additional retainers, please use the optional retainer service

At first I was like we're getting 8 retainers!?! Awesome!

Then I read the second line.

Thats a complete asspull in my honest opinion.
Between glamors, craft mats, housing items, fishing lures, food and pots the inventory at this point is already pushed to breaking point.

They should of given 2 new retainers FOR FREE PRIOR for everyone! And they jump on this like a vulture ready to feed off everyones money.
YOUR MEANT TO FIX PROBLEMS NOT TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THEM SQAURE!!!

Honestly this is something an F2P game would do!

[Catwho]

I also wanted to mention, for those who didn't play FFXI, that your storage and extra AH slots were additional characters in that game (known as mules) and each one cost $1 extra on top of your sub fee. Retainers became a thing because SE realized that's what we were doing, so even in 1.0 they just went ahead and gave you one to start. (And you had to physically place them in the game so people could examine them, until they fixed that with the market ward search engine. 1.0 was broken as heck...)

Thus, SE charging for additional storage space and additional slots on the AH is nothing new to the XI veterans.

[KayoZ]

A few things I would like to point out -

Great post. All this talk about "space" being a problem... what? Depending on their naming convention, items can only possibly be a few bytes of space per stack. Item number, stack size, and inventory location. You might think that can add up with all players but give me a break... at a time when there is a seemingly limitless space for videos, pics, and documents, for free... you expect anyone to believe there is really a space problem? Are they saving our characters in floppy disks? I doubt our entire current inventory takes up even a single MB of space.

[Callinon]

Thus, SE charging for additional storage space and additional slots on the AH is nothing new to the XI veterans.

True but it was bs 13 years ago too. We just didn't know any better because there wasn't a baseline to compare it to. We just rolled with it because it sounded reasonable. Hard drive space at the time was also a legitimate concern, so it wasn't totally unreasonable.

Great post. All this talk about "space" being a problem... what? Depending on their naming convention, items can only possibly be a few bytes of space per stack. Item number, stack size, and inventory location. You might think that can add up with all players but give me a break... at a time when there is a seemingly limitless space for videos, pics, and documents, for free... you expect anyone to believe there is really a space problem? Are they saving our characters in floppy disks? I doubt our entire current inventory takes up even a single MB of space.

Sounds right. There's a little more to an item in your inventory than that, but you've got the basics.

At most you're looking at an object that contains:
itemId, quantity, dye, aetherialStats[5], aetherialValues[5], materiaId[5], signature, spiritbond, condition

So that's an: unsigned int, unsigned short, unsigned int, 5 unsigned ints, 5 unsigned ints, 5 unsigned ints, string, unsigned short, unsigned short. About 106 bytes per item. Be generous and round us up to 128 bytes per item to give us room to expand later.

That not huge. Each character can have a few hundred of those in regular inventory (including retainers). And then of course the armoire and calamity salvager have a much simpler structure consisting entirely of: itemId.

Yeah the disk space claim doesn't pass the smell test. Previously they've complained about the number of read/writes they're having to do (apparently the game writes your entire character every 15 seconds, which is frankly a ridiculous thing to do), but then that's what you attack. There's no reason we need to be writing character data that often. We could double that interval, toss in zone changes as forced writes, and still cut the CPU time used for this and the bandwidth required roughly in half.

Or we could double people's sub fees so they can have enough inventory space. Yeah let's do that one!

[lololink]

At most you're looking at an object that contains:
itemId, quantity, dye, aetherialStats[5], aetherialValues[5], materiaId[5], signature, spiritbond, condition

That's where SE is really making a mistake, if they add a skin book or something like that you would be able to store much more items since you would only retain the ItemID number and remove all the other datas, creating much much more space for vanity.