New glamour system please!

[WellFooled]

That is incredibly naive understanding of how databases work.

An empty inventory is just full of blank/neutral data.

As someone who is completely ignorant of how databases work, this is fascinating. Can you explain this blank/neutral data more? It seems so counterintuitive.

[Youkulm]

I don't see this being that difficult to make ( meaning a system where you don't have to KEEP the gear, only to have obtained it once, like a book of glamours or something of that sort. )

They likely will never do this only because of the revenue generated by retainers. With every new content update, we get more glamours which means you need more space if you don't want to throw anything out... which mean more retainers...

Frankly I find it ridiculous with the amount of content we got with 3.0 and we didn't receive an extra retainer with the unlocking of the expansion. If they wont do that... they most certainly won't do this :C

[Archaell]

...

If I paid attention to all the inventory topics, the main issue comes from the data updates.

For the glamour purposes "easily fixed" by having a glamour NPC to store the data and - because SE loves that - nice hefty monthly fee for the "Additional optional glamour services". For some of us it would be still cheaper option than keeping several glamour retainers.

[Keramory]

I think a fair compromise would be glamor be set as a consumable action and then you set it to gear without actually needing the piece anymore. It's a Gil sink and encourages more crafting. This and it frees up inventory and is the best alternative for the servers.

Say I want to glamor some 40lvl body armor to my raid gear. I consume the 40lvl body armor and now I can glamor it to whatever I want (within the normal limitations). The 40 armor goes poof and I get to recast it as much as I want without needing the space.

Granted it'll still use up data space but let's face it, most characters won't have an obscene wardrobe option.

[Aivi_lo]

I don't want to pay any more money for retainers to store something I have earned through my sub and time spent playing the game.

[Lambdafish]

That is somewhere around 6500 new variables and their database addresses for each character currently as of 3.1

I'm not the most adept at programming theory, but surely binary variables (I.e. Booleans) would take up far less than an entire piece of gear with stats. 6500 yes/no values actually doesn't sound like too much of a strain, all things considered.

I also don't understand why it can't be done the same way as actually obtaining gear. Surely the game doesn't have a check list for 6500+ pieces of gear to see if you own it, it only adds the function after you obtain the gear, why not have a clause at that point to add that gears ID to the glamour log, and have that saved as an (array?).

My thinking is that it is more for a design standpoint, that displaying 6500 types of glamour is horrible for UI.

[Evangela]

Cannot increase inventory space due to server limitation is (kinda) understandable.

but they have no excuse for glamour log. It's just a list of equipments you used to own so the data would be just 0 or 1 multiply with the amount of equipment in the game. so it'll be like 2 kilobytes or something like that. why can't they do it? I have no clue.

[ruskie]

I'm not the most adept at programming theory, but surely binary variables (I.e. Booleans) would take up far less than an entire piece of gear with stats. 6500 yes/no values actually doesn't sound like too much of a strain, all things considered.

I also don't understand why it can't be done the same way as actually obtaining gear. Surely the game doesn't have a check list for 6500+ pieces of gear to see if you own it, it only adds the function after you obtain the gear, why not have a clause at that point to add that gears ID to the glamour log, and have that saved as an (array?).

My thinking is that it is more for a design standpoint, that displaying 6500 types of glamour is horrible for UI.

Note numbers are without overhead that would be taking by other metadata...

6500 identifiers - let's assume it's an unsigned int(and tbh I'd likely see a long here because I assume everything in the game has an identifier) - 0 to 65535 that's 2 bytes per identifier. A yes/no would still be taking up 1 byte of storage. That's 3 bytes per single item. For a single character.

So true for a single character having 6500 items would be ~20 kilobytes. Not a lot right? Doesn't take into account overhead data of course.

Now you have 5 million accounts... with each having at least 1 character. You can see where this is going. It's a lot of data to deal with. You need to initialize or at least reserve this space for each character.

It gives computing overhead, network overhead, storage overhead.

Would it be nice to have? Yes. Can they do the UI side of things? Yes. Wouldn't be too hard. They could just limit it to per job tabs, along with other tab and then only show items you actually got.

But you need to be able to handle so and so many people accessing this data at the same time, being able to offer adequate response times and such. Could probably do some variosu tricks and optimisations as well but that would likely increase the data storage requirements.

Cannot increase inventory space due to server limitation is (kinda) understandable.

but they have no excuse for glamour log. It's just a list of equipments you used to own so the data would be just 0 or 1 multiply with the amount of equipment in the game. so it'll be like 2 kilobytes or something like that. why can't they do it? I have no clue.

Did some blind maths... 0 or 1 will still take 1 byte in memory/storage/etc... without any overhead metadata. A single file on disk no matter how small will usually take 4kilobytes because that's the smallest block assigned to store it. So even a file with a 1 in it will still take 4 kilobytes.

[Kerrigen]

Even WoW is adding this feature with Legion. I think it's eventually going to be implemented in this game especially with how it's being pushed by the community all the time. The question is when. The answer is "not anytime soon".
If I was leading the dev team, I would try to milk the current system + selling retainers for as long as I can (even though as a player I find it pretty revolting) because this is a pretty big and expensive feature to implement. Definitely expansion material.

[Warlyx]

the system is kinda already there with pets/TT cards, or even better OLD gear u used to have from quests and events , u can reclaim that gear using the NPC Calamity salvage...the game keeps the track of this , and u can buy gear from that NPC over and over.

if a game can keep track of what pets , mounts , and gear, the glamour log is almost already implemented.

Maybe u can select the gear and glamour from it , HOWEVER i think a solution ...select the item u want and a copy of that piece of gear could be created in your inventory and then use it as glamour...then u can drop it (u can reclaim it over and over ) all that gear of course will be 0 gil value and untradeable.

thats 1 option , it would be easy to implement a wardrobe and let ppl change glamour on the fly , but yeah is more easy to create 1000 different prism because reasons.....and if the system isnt convoluted and confusing as hell...then it must be scrapped and reworked , this a FF online game after all ¬¬