jpgames.de Gamescom 2015 interview with Naoki Yoshida

[Daralii]

WoW has way more Slots aviable in WoD:

128 Inventory Slots
223 bank slots
98 Gathering Bank slots (Only for Materials)
80 Transmog Bank slots (only for Weapons and Armor)

Thats a total of 529 spaces. And that for every Character you play to 100.

To be fair, the code they use for the backpack in WoW is a tangled mess that's at least as old as WC3. They have to have a ton of slots to compensate for a technical limitation; from what Yoshida's said in the past, 14's is a server limitation. That can, presumably, be overcome with sufficiently improved infrastructure.

[Moonleg]

WoW has way more Slots aviable in WoD:

128 Inventory Slots
223 bank slots
98 Gathering Bank slots (Only for Materials)
80 Transmog Bank slots (only for Weapons and Armor)

Thats a total of 529 spaces. And that for every Character you play to 100.

Yes, true - but you only have two professions to deal with on a given character; in FF14 we have eleven. Wait, Fishing is a free profession in WoW, isn't it? Okay, three against eleven.

That, and you only deal with two specs on a given character; in this game we deal with up to 24 specs on one character. It's not a straight comparison to make.

[Reynhart]

I never quite saw WHM as just being about the big numbers. The point, and problem, is that specific things that set the WHM apart were removed.

Ok, I'm only lvl 50 WHM and SCH on my alt, but I don't think "Shell" and "Granite skin" are really part of the WHM's identity...
Because, when you play, you still just cast Protect of Stoneskin wether you have the trait or not.

What makes a job unique is how it plays, and for that, WHM still retains all its identity...and I suppose even more at lvl 60.

But, while they're removing traits for WHM, what about this stupid in-battle Raise trait, then other healers don't need ?

WoW has way more Slots aviable in WoD:

128 Inventory Slots
223 bank slots
98 Gathering Bank slots (Only for Materials)
80 Transmog Bank slots (only for Weapons and Armor)

Thats a total of 529 spaces. And that for every Character you play to 100.

Armory : 25*12 slots = 300 (Not counting job crystals)
Character : 100 slot
Free Retainer #1 : 175 slot
Free Retainer #2 : 175 slot

That's 750 slots, without counting the unlimited space of armoire, even though only a few items can go there.

On a single character that you can level 23 times to 60

[Yukiko]

NY: The whole development team are Final Fantasy XIV players and also want more inventory, so we understand the situation you are in. There are actually two reasons why we can not expand the inventory. It may look simple in game, but actually the size of data for only one item is really huge. If you look at the inventory and compare it to other MMOs, Final Fantasy XIV has the biggest inventory.

We have a few 100,000 players in all worlds at the same time, and every 15 seconds data will be going to the servers and stored, so a lot of data is transmitted. If we have more items in the inventory, there will be more data to handle; times a few 1,000 bytes per item per character. That’s going to be a high load on the servers. There then might be some risk that your data is not safed properly, and we want to avoid this risk. That is why we are so careful with expanding the inventory. It is not that we don’t do anything at all, we are working on this issue by optimizing the backend data so that the data will be read properly with less stress. If there is no high server load, we can probably work more on actually addressing this issue. This is the first point.

Another issue is that when you use the Duty Finder, you will go to the contents server. But when your character is going there, you bring all your items to the server. If you have more items, you have to wait a longer time to go to the server, you will feel a lot of stress. This optimization process takes a lot of time and we are working on it slowly, but that is the only way we can actually keep your game experience and the desire for more inventory space.

First: FFXIV does NOT have the most items in MMORPG history!
He does mean the biggest data size for inventory in MMOGs history and thats not an inventory problem but a huge programming error, they need to hire better programmers!

Then lets come to the core problem the big data:
how is it stored? and how does the game have access to it?
It seems even for short "jumps" (like map changes) your complete inventory needs to be send to the new server, that means it is somehow bound to your characters location. Thats a bit strange because you can program global parameters too, why it must be programmed local? Interesting too, that it seems to be a 2 way communication - for items it is not needed, you can handle it as simple as just having a storage data register. What about the 15 second timer? Shouldnt it just change when there is something "new" - event based programming and not timer based is much better for server stress! About the "risk" you do not need a 2 way communication either, that problem you normally fix with logfiles and checknumbers to keep server stress low (well its not that simple, but still...).

Hell, even mobile phones and browsergames can handle big data games where you can move freely... thats a bad excuse from square enix because they have the full power of computers and consoles!

The next thing is what is transmitted? Do they really send the full item names back and forth? There are limits of how long strings can be and the shorter the better! In 2 digits you can compress so much information its awesome, but it seems they do not do it that way... Well, they created a game where you can instant move, thats not possible if you have calculated everything on server, they need to power up their client - a client (special gameclient) is not meant to be only a portal to the gameserver just like a browsergame! Ok but it explains why it feels like a browsergame when it comes to inventory and delay times...

[Assirra]

Armory : 25*12 slots = 300 (Not counting job crystals)
Character : 100 slot
Free Retainer #1 : 175 slot
Free Retainer #2 : 175 slot


That's 750 slots, without counting the unlimited space of armoire, even though only a few items can go there.

On a single character that you can level 23 times to 60

Armory really shouldn't count as total since they are very specific of what you can place there.

[Craiger]

Don't want to be rude, but for the people that talk about how bad their code is for inventory space... How much knowledge do you have in the matter? I don't know much about the matter, but it seems like a lot of you just think it's an easy fix, when it doesn't really seem to be.

Maybe the problem could just come down to PS3 again (sorry PS3 players), since the solutions I've heard here, sounds like something that would be done client-side, and not on the servers. I could be completely wrong though.

Only thing I don't really understand, is storage that you don't access all the time... Does the retainer space get checked every 15 seconds too? cause that shouldn't be needed, right? But then again, I'm just talking without any knowledge about it, and maybe some of you are doing the same.

[Reynhart]

Armory really shouldn't count as total since they are very specific of what you can place there.

Yet it still count as memory space and data that need to be transfered.

[Colorful]

Only thing I don't really understand, is storage that you don't access all the time... Does the retainer space get checked every 15 seconds too? cause that shouldn't be needed, right? But then again, I'm just talking without any knowledge about it, and maybe some of you are doing the same.

I'll have to assume it functions the same as FC chests, and they said they weren't planning on adding any of those to Ishgard due to the stress it causes when people use them, if I'm remembering this correctly anyway. So it's likely that retainer space is only actively saved when they're summoned, but we won't know until they tell us.

[Kosmos992k]

Protect is a problem if your plan is to have damage taken continue to scale.

Considering that the damage being taken by players scales up also, a flat % mitigation caused by Protect, or a % of HP mitigation such as with StoneSkin hardly seems OP - even with Pro-shell and Granite Skin traits. Removing those traits substantially decreases the potency of those moves for WHM. Given that we are supposed to see WHM as a raw power healer (apparently), it would make more sense to me for he WHM ability with SS and Protect to be more powerful than when SCH or AST cross skill it. Instead though, WHM loses those exclusive traits.

[Ashkendor]

Considering that the damage being taken by players scales up also, a flat % mitigation caused by Protect, or a % of HP mitigation such as with StoneSkin hardly seems OP - even with Pro-shell and Granite Skin traits. Removing those traits substantially decreases the potency of those moves for WHM. Given that we are supposed to see WHM as a raw power healer (apparently), it would make more sense to me for he WHM ability with SS and Protect to be more powerful than when SCH or AST cross skill it. Instead though, WHM loses those exclusive traits.

Think about it - if the damage is scaled down so that you don't need the 18% mitigation from Graniteskin, then it ends up being overpowered as compared to the content. If the damage is scaled up to take into account the extra 8% mitigation provided by Graniteskin, suddenly WHM is absolutely indispensible. The same thing goes for the magic defense on Protect. With how much magic damage is being slung around in A1S (that's as far as I've gotten so far, can't personally attest to later floors), WHM would be absolutely necessary. They don't want it to end up that the meta is WHM + AST/SCH. The whole point of adding more classes was so that people have choices and the world has more variety. Right now AST needs some help so the meta is WHM + SCH but hopefully with some adjustments to AST that relaxes somewhat and people are more willing to experiment. They have to be careful though, so that the meta doesn't end up being AST + AST with the other two healers left out in the cold.

I don't envy them the task, honestly.