jpgames.de Gamescom 2015 interview with Naoki Yoshida

[Krokov]

No one can say dark side Hurts their eyes or anything anymore, You can just make it out if you are in a brightly lit area or even a bright background Environment.

[BreathlessTao]

Comparing the inventory to other MMOs - FFXIV might have the biggest inventory, yes. I can't help but wonder though, how does the amount of items we can have compare to other MMOs? I doubt it's in the low, so yeah, well, thank you, but it's quite obvious that we should have the biggest inventory - in fact, that was the case at launch, let's just count how many times more items there are since then...? While the inventory remained the same.
That 15 seconds flush to disk is absolutely insanely ridiculous, no wonder their networks/servers are so stressed. 1 minute or even greater would make much more sense while significantly decreasing the load on both the network and the hardware, there is just literally no reason for it, especially with "oh so many" players and "oh so much" data on each item. It would mean no high server load, so they could work more on addressing this issue.
Idk what to say about the content server, tbh. A lot of items (COUGHAlextokensCOUGHventuresCOUGH) that don't even make sense to be actual items should just have placeholders in the inventory, so the free slots don't change, but that apparently overwhelmingly huge data doesn't carry over into instances. Crafting materials don't have to be carried into dungeons either.
And yeah...sure...make it more convenient to use retainers. Because there is the option to pay extra for more of those, and many people do pay extra for those. I mean to hell with all of us plebs who have only been paying our monthly sub... Because let's be real, this won't really be for the benefit of those who only have the default two, managing two is not that big of a headache, might even say no headache at all.

As for housing... eh. They completely fail to see, or refuse to care about the core issue with housing. Which is the fact that the ward system is simply not viable on the scale it should be viable; code can only be tightened so much, and the servers/zones still have to be on 24/7. It's just not something that can be done when there are "few 100,000 players in all worlds at the same time" - yeah, ok, a great chunk of those are RMT bots and AFKers (re: flushing entire inventories to disk every 15 seconds, one more reason why the auto-kick should be a permanent feature), but the other great chunk of those are legit active players. More wards/servers can be added, sure, but it'll only create even greater/more issues than it is creating now - more hardware for maintenances, more space to store that hardware, more bills to pay... And as big as it currently is, it's only 1440 plots per server. Vs the hundred thousands that are on at any given time, probably not a bad indication of the total number of players on each server - literally less than 1% of the population has access to it - would have access to it, were it not for the fact that it's shared between individuals and FCs. And the dead, decaying plots/houses, and the several-plots-owned-by-one-person phenomenon of course, because why on earth should such a limited feature have any kind of restriction on it, that'd be completely illogical, right...? Yeah, no, this system for individuals should just completely be scrapped, those who spent on it refunded with their items shoved onto the Salvager to be reclaimed. Free the wards up for FCs (see several new ones being created every day), and instance it for individuals, end of story.