Quote Originally Posted by mbncd View Post
Heck even ye olde Runescape has their inventory system under control. Stacks can be unlimited (as in not 99 items in each stack for multiple stacks of the same item but rather thousands of items in a single slot), they have a dressing room which functions as a glamour log and they have buyable bank space but they also give subscribers free bank boosters every now and again as well (including in the last week or two). They also have storage items like tackleboxes (that also hold fishing clothes, bait, exp boosting items and fish themselves) and tool belts you can attach regularly used tools (like pick axes and salt shakers) to so they never take up space again.

It's an old game, it's not pretty and it gets a lot of flack for a lot of things, but some things it does right: quest rewards (not just money and gear but long term reusable items that never stop being useful) and inventory management.
The developers said the inventory limit was a speed/safety issue. If they increase the inventory then they can only sync it to disk half as much, which means if a server crashes, you "roll back" and get a lot more customer service complaints.

In older games, "stacks" were simply represented as a quantity variable. Hence "dupe'ing" bugs, especially gold dupe bugs were prevalent in pretty much every MMO at some point. Newer games actually account for all the gold and items on the servers, at the cost of intended inventory space being reduced, and the glamour systems require the game to keep track of two items, not just one.

More to the point though, almost nobody has ever played a game where the inventory space was nearly unlimited and lived to tell about it. Everyone finds a way to work around the space limitations, even if it involves making it an extreme pain in the ass.

Because:
1) Every item requires being sent across the wire. FFXIV is so responsive because there are so few items being sent. Even not-so-old (freemium) games that let you buy expansion slots, were never this fast.
2) Searching inventory and market boards are fast (market boards occasionally time out), and searches check your Retainers.

This one time, in this one other MMORPG game, I lost my dress that I had worked so hard to get and dye the right colors... and lost it to a server crash because I had just changed gear. I will never forget that.