Pay for your inventory.

[Altijacek]

Umm, isn't each retainer just one dollar? Everyone is saying that you have to pay $30 a month now? If you pay $15 a month plus 6 retainers that's $21 not $30. Still a lot, but ummm...just making sure, I thought they were one dollar, not two.

[R-Kine]

Yeah this is ridiculous. I'd rather they scrap retainers and just give us a real inventory. It's a stupid 1.0 gimmick for when the retainers manned stalls and you couldn't just use a market board. A way to make the world more alive or something, but it was awful.

The game will be better off without retainers. (For the players at least. SE won't like the idea of not charging us more money)

[Talia_Hailwind]

Have people not tried actually looking through their inventory and seeing what they can get rid of before they complain

Yes actually.

It went like this:

[Adire]

snip

Okay.

The Secret World: In game money to unlock storage in both the bank and the inventory, can also pay with the cash shop. Lots of expansion potential. Also has a "glamour log" (called the dressing room)

9dragons: Storage is simply large enough to accommodate the items, or was when I played.

Pirates of the Burning Sea: Storage is large enough to hold the items, many items are useful and can be sold if not used immediately, unlike a lot of the junk and character bound things in this game. Has a glamour log.

Jade Dynasty: Cosmetic outfits have a glamour log (iirc), storage is sufficient for other items. I played this for years either way and never had storage issues. (Edit: Also, cosmetic items were different from armors with stats. You could choose to either have the cosmetic items equipped visible with the armor's stats, or the armor itself visible. This allowed you to have a full outfit worn without taking up storage)

Those are a few examples. Can name more if they aren't enough.

[Ashgarth]

Umm, isn't each retainer just one dollar? Everyone is saying that you have to pay $30 a month now? If you pay $15 a month plus 6 retainers that's $21 not $30. Still a lot, but ummm...just making sure, I thought they were one dollar, not two.

2$ per month each retainer.

[raelgun]

Okay.

Those are a few examples. Can name more if they aren't enough.

So basically, you want to break the glamour market right?

Those games also don't have a lot of meat into the game, this one actually does, you have mentioned a lot of niche games if I'm honest with a small active playerbase that will make active use of the inventory space, free to play games do not have a large amount of active players that invest into it in the long term.

This game has a lot of active players concurrently using its storage servers.
Blizzard is a powerhouse amongst the industry and is literally made of money.

You can be damn sure if all those games you mentioned had a large active concurrent playerbase using all that inventory at the same time they will not handle it.

[XgungraveX]

oh look anther the sky is falling thread.

[raelgun]

Yes actually.

It went like this:

lol the Hobbit 3 was more to mind :P.

[Lewtskie]

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

Shit, Fashion Fantasy is the hardest part of the game. So well played, Balipu... well played indeed....

[Callinon]

Part of the inventory bloat in FFXIV in particular has to do with how the game works, and it's one of the primary factors that makes the game different from other MMOs on the market.

You can, and should, be every class on a single character.

Most games don't do this, and it creates problems for storage. Let's add to that though the fact that FFXIV contains no trash items (apart from allagan pieces that specifically tell you they're for vendoring). There no worthless items. Literally everything that drops can be used for something. So it will be most people's instinct to hang on to a useful item until they have a use for it. Guess what that means.

I try to clean out retainer inventories when I can, but I have two retainers (of my four) devoted entirely to crafting materials. Do I really need all that stuff? Probably not. Is it easy and convenient to figure out which things are, in fact, garbage and which are not? Nope. In fact it's a pain in the neck to figure out whether I have duplicate item stacks and am wasting space.

I realize that having an endless inventory like you have in most single player rpgs is not practical in an online game. But inventory management could be WORLDS better than it is right now. For instance, how about letting me craft using materials in my retainers' inventories? That'd solve the item stack issue right there if I could see at a glance exactly how much of everything I have without having to do an item search on Every. Single. Item. (btw you want to talk about wasting cpu time... hoo boy). How about letting me consolidate items between retainers without having to take a day to empty them out, restack everything, and put them back together again. I'm on the light side of the scale here too... there are pro crafters with all four of their retainers like this.. I only have two and I'm already struggling.

My OTHER two retainers are carrying gear. This is mostly for future glamour use. I would love to be able to just "learn" a glamour as soon as I own a piece of gear (like Diablo 3 does... man that game handles this really well). Then I wouldn't need to keep obsolete equipment around. That'd free up a ton of space. And the best part is, the tech for this is already in the game. The armoire system could easily be adapted to do this. I'd even be willing to destroy the gear I want to "learn" the glamour for. That'd be fine.