Glamour Catalog - This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things...

[Moonleg]

Airget, do you even math?

141+40+423=964? What? It's 604, you dummy.

Thanks for counting all the gear items, though. Referencing back to my previous post of using one bit to switch between yes or no, those 4000 items rounded off comes out to a whopping ... 500 bytes. Half a kilobyte to store information about whether you have learned ALL THE GEAR in the game.

The interface beyond that simply needs to read from that, know the exact location in the file for the setting for each piece of gear (this is actually how save games used to work way back when on the early gaming consoles when every byte was precious), and voila. You have a glamour log. Make it look like a wardrobe, a spell book, I don't care. Just flip the switch for each piece of gear, and if you want limit it to sitting in a sanctuary when you're doing it - I doubt many people would throw a fit over not being allowed to glamour on the fly.

[Brian_]

Even from that angle, you still have no reason arguing against a limited glamour log where you can save a handful of pieces you really like and want to reuse. If slot count is your big hold-up, then limit it to 20-30 slots. It'll be smaller than any log you just mentioned and would still be a huge QoL improvement.

Everyone with a working brain knows it's just excuses and white knights that will leap to their defense.

[Colorful]

snip

Assuming you're correct in each player taking 500 bytes for owning everything, assuming we have 1 million players that can achieve that amount as an extreme... it's a whopping 0.5 GBs for a million players. Of course there's more going on between communications between the server and all that, but you wouldn't need to update the glamour log every 15 seconds, just whenever the player opens it up similar to retainers.

It boils down to not wanting to hire more staff to get the job done I'd think, similar to queuing with your chocobo out. They designed it in a manner where it can't be changed unless they changed that entire part of the system, and as such have to dedicate time into reworking it. With the new outfits going into the cash shop we'd have to assume they're going to hire some new developers, right? No? Okay.

[ElHeggunte]

Btw, didn't they say they would give us a new free retainer at some point? I swear I've heard them mention that.

It was briefly mentioned then they reneged on it.

And I don't hear the news about the free 3rd retainer as well. The cake is a lie fosho.

Square never promised anything. They said they were considering maybe giving us a third free retainer. Naturally people decided to twist the meaning of 'consideration' and then the rumor started to spread that Yoshi-P promised 100% that we were going to get a third free retainer just so he could relish in pulling it away from us like Lucy when Charlie Brown tries to kick the football.

[ruskie]

They could make the glamour catalog be a seperate instance thing as well. Something that wouldn't constantly sync.

[zosia]

141 minions, 40 mounts. 755 head pieces. Notice that? That's just head pieces. Let's ignore the "common" ones. 182 blue, 230 green, 412 in total, Let's just assume Head, Body, hand, legs, feet are the same 412, 412x5 2060. Again 141 minions, 40 mounts, 2060 slots for "glamor catalog" to support 2060 pieces of gear and I haven't even gotten to weapons yet.That's what people are missing, yes they have a system like the one people hope for in minions and mounts but the amount of minions and mount even together aren't even close to the amount of space that would be used with armor in the game.

Even the fishing guide is only 423 and I say only because that's been something which has increased since 2.0 and yet at 3.0 we are at 423 however if you wanted them to implement a catlog that would need to be 2060 + weapons + accessories which add up. 377 blue weapons, 530 green weapons, 29 blue shields, 44 green shield, 134 green rings and 97 blue rings. Just say all accessories are the same like armor so 231x4, 924.

That's 3964 slots for basically all the gear up til now give or take and I"m not even counting common loot, this is purely based on blue and green gear.

Now let's put this into perspective.

141 minions
40 mounts
423 Fish
964 Total.

Glamor Catalog=3964. Catalog would be 3000 more than what the above currently have so trying to compared a system that uses a fraction of what the catalog would end up using doesn't work because so much more data will be used to setup that catalog compared to the amount of data currently being used to support the minion/mount/fish combined. And I believe there are only 100 Triple Triad cards so that's just 1064 to the total amount of "space" being used in those system compared to what the catalog would use if it only took from blue/green.

Wow is doing it with legion with far far far more equipment, a base game and six expansions worth of gear. What is SE's excuse with a much smaller gear table?

Square never promised anything. They said they were considering maybe giving us a third free retainer. Naturally people decided to twist the meaning of 'consideration' and then the rumor started to spread that Yoshi-P promised 100% that we were going to get a third free retainer just so he could relish in pulling it away from us like Lucy when Charlie Brown tries to kick the football.

I said they mentioned it, I never said they promised it. With all the extra money they are making off people having 3,4, ..., or 8 retainers, they could have suffered the cost of giving people a 3rd retainer for free.

[Naunet]

141 minions, 40 mounts. 755 head pieces.

A lot of those head pieces are identical. There's a lot of repeat models in this game. Plus, there's no need to store many things associated with those models that are currently saved in inventory (things like stats, durability, convertability, etc).

That said, I would hazard a guess that Rift has just as much if not more armor models and yet they've managed a theoretically unlimited storage of appearances in their wardrobe system. If they can manage it, I feel comfortable expecting SE to invest to maybe use servers and database storage that isn't run on hamsters and "please look forward to it"s.

Even from that angle, you still have no reason arguing against a limited glamour log where you can save a handful of pieces you really like and want to reuse. If slot count is your big hold-up, then limit it to 20-30 slots. It'll be smaller than any log you just mentioned and would still be a huge QoL improvement.

No no no, let's not even suggest that. WS limited their holo-wardrobe to 250 slots and it was a nightmare. >_<

[Enthy]

A Glamour Catalog really would save older content like World of Darkness and Crystal Tower. It's almost impossible to get into older raids and dungeons. If we had a Glamour Catalog I would be playing old dungeons and raids like crazy to collect all gear sets in the game. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who would try to collect it all.

As the game is now, I rarely play a dungeon more than I have to. Once for story and a few more for exp and a few pieces on my main job (totaling about 10 runs max per dungeon if I'm lucky on drops)

[Gunspec]

So, did any of you guys watch the anniversary stream, and see Yoshida verbally jab the president of SE in person, on live camera, about needing more servers? And how the president balked and was clearly uncomfortable, because Yoshida was bringing up what was clearly a budget fight with his boss, right there in front of the subscriber base? The comment on the stream was specifically about servers for more housing ward data, but the fight over increasing the server capacity is an ongoing struggle.

We saw it at 2.0 launch, when the NA data server was severely inefficient at handling the player demand. They expanded that time and created more worlds, because supporting more players was directly correlative to more subscriptions.

Now when talking about inventory (either retainer or glamour) or housing servers, Yoshida's team isn't going to get a DIME for expanding unless they can prove that this is financially beneficial to the bosses who control the FFXIV budget. PAID retainers clearly lead to more revenue for SE, so that type of server expansion gets a rubber stamp.

Despite your complaining, whether it be housing or inventory, the big wigs at SE don't see any foreseeable loss in revenue if they fail to provide extra budget to Yoshida's team for these suggestions. Your opinions DO matter to the FFXIV staff, but unless you can convince the bosses that this is a good financial investment, you won't see a change occur.

Yoshida and the rest of the FFXIV team will continue dodging your comments and suggestions on the matter, because there is nothing they can do, financially. They don't want to promise something they are incapable of doing for budget reasons (see personal housing), and they don't want to openly blame their bosses in letters to the subscribers (a great way to end up cleaning toilets at a SE owned facility). Instead, they would rather focus the discourse on the things they CAN and ARE implementing into the game.

So keep throwing your fits, if the bosses think your threats aren't empty, then maybe they WILL open their purse strings. But stop thinking that Yoshida should take time to explain the intricacies of office politics with you, because it won't happen.

[Stormfur]

I'm glad you said that Gunspec. I didn't get to watch the stream but I can understand that from a business point of view, the producer needs to prove that something is worth investing in before their boss will give it the go ahead. Servers are expensive. I don't even want to think about what the cost and involvement would be for a game as large as FFXIV (to say nothing of other MMOs), so it does seem like YoshiP and crew are trying to make do with what they have. I'm guessing there must be a significant difference in how patch items are called from the gamer versus clothing and gear, since they seem to have no problem adding 800+ items but insist that a catalog of sorts cannot be done. The armoire was a sort-of compromise but a weak one.

But like I said I'm glad you mentioned that since it kind of gives the fans an idea of where things are.