As much as I want more inventory space, on or off character, I feel the need to reiterate that SE's reason for us not getting more inventory space was NOT server space. At one point, they might have said that, but the latest reason they gave is that they aggressively backup character data and a larger inventory means more network traffic. This reason is totally legit and reasonable. Sure, it may seem like they're backing up the data too often, but I'm not a network engineer. I don't know how often is required to prevent duping and prevent loss of progress due to sudden 90ks or whatnot. Do you want to lose an i170 crafter chestpiece you just made because you 90ked right after finishing the synth and your last backup was during the synth? Again, I don't know their network structure or how they've set up their data, but the backup thing sounds completely reasonable.

So, the reason they can give us more retainers while not being able to expand our armory chest or on-character inventory is reasonable/plausible. This is totally unrelated to their ability to provide more retainers. Retainer inventories aren't saved to server as often as our inventories, and only ones currently being accessed should be being saved since the others cannot change. Adding more retainers does nothing to the network traffic - you can still only access one at a time. So, the people who are saying SE is being hypocritical by giving us the ability to buy more retainers while claiming they can't afford to expand our inventories are incorrect. There's no hypocrisy there - you're comparing apples and popotos.

That said, the question "Why didn't we get a free retainer with 3.0?" is a totally legit question. Why didn't we? We've already established that their issue was with on-character inventory expanding, not off-character. Is it because off-character inventory needs to be saved and they don't have the server space for it? If so, then they couldn't have afforded to offer us more retainers, so that clearly can't be it. However, I feel that the people who are blaming Yoshida personally for it are being ridiculous. Yoshida isn't the god-emperor of Square Enix. Yoshida leads the development of Final Fantasy XIV, not the Square Enix Marketing Department. I find it very unlikely that it was Yoshida's deicsion whether or not to give the players something for free that they were already charging money for (cash-shop retainers predate 3.0, after all). Yes, being upset at Square Enix for a move that looks like nothing other than a money-grab? Totally valid. Being upset at Yoshida personally? Seems like a bit of scapegoating to me.


On the topic of a glamour guide, this is a feature I personally want desperately and I've posted suggested implementations of that idea in other threads. But, that would be a new feature. While yes, it would save space ultimately, it would also require development time. What I'd like to see more are implementations of ideas that take minimal development time. I feel like those are more likely to be done and more sensible to be done. Specifically, expansion of the Armoire. All the code's there, just let us store more items in it. It's off-character storage - it doesn't get saved every 5 seconds. I have never seen a sensible/comprehensible explanation for why they can't expand the Armoire to store 100x as many items. The data is compressed. The data isn't constantly being saved. The data would take up less space than other character-specific datasets that they've already implemented, like the Endless Journey feature, or the Calamity Salvager's sales list, or our achievement progress. They could add the on-character storage required for our Triple Triad card collection, decks, MGP count, tournament standings, race chocobo, cactpot ticket, mini-cactpot daily ticket count, and so on, but they can't add the off-character storage space required for an expanded armoire? Where's the difference?