New glamour system please!

[Alberel]

The reason limitations is always the response, is because it really is server limitations. Unlike other MMOs, FFXIV does not store player data clientside, it is stored on the servers. They did this because SE believed players would edit the files like what happened back in FFXI with .dat file swapping. If player data was clientside, inventories would be bigger and glamours could be saved, similar to what WoW is doing with the transmog wardrobe.

Please find me an MMO that stores player data clientside. Seriously. Find me ANY MMO that does this. The .dat file swapping in FFXI was nothing to do with where the player data was stored, it just replaced the mesh and texture data for the equipment in the client so when the server said a player was wearing X item that player's client was redirected to load a different item. It was a purely cosmetic change and it only affected the player with the modified client. No MMO out there will ever store player inventory client side as to do so would kill the game before it launched due to the inevitable cheats and hacks that would result from it.

That is incredibly naive understanding of how databases work.

First off, an empty variable contains as much data as a full variable. This means that a brand new empty character contains as much data as a maxed out character with a full inventory. An empty inventory is just full of blank/neutral data. The same is true for retainer inventories.

The creation of a "Glamour Log" would add a massive amount of new data to every character. Every character's data would need to include a yes/no variable for every single piece of gear included in the Glamour Log, even if the character never even uses it. That is somewhere around 6500 new variables and their database addresses for each character currently as of 3.1 and that number will only grow as more and more patches come out. That is increasing each character's data by a massive amount.

This post is incredibly misleading and irrelevant to the discussion. The amount of data actually required to store items in a player's inventory might vary but the server has to have enough space allocated for every inventory to be at full capacity if needed so it makes no difference whether an inventory is full or not. The ACTUAL data usage is irrelevant; it's the potential maximum amount of data that may need to be stored that the devs have to account for.

The most expensive items to store are likely equipment with materia slots as these need to store data for the item ID, durability, spiritbond, materia and a glamour ID. We can assume that the item ID, glamour ID and materia references are the most expensive of those attributes as they likely are several bytes each in size to account for all the possible IDs that exist (or will exist in the future). Durability and spiritbond are likely a byte each to cover the 1-100 value.

The devs will have allocated server space to each player inventory and retainer on the assumption that they could potentially hold a full inventory of melded equipment as above. That's a very large amount of data.

Conversely a glamour log would merely hold a single bit boolean value for every different item skin in the game. That sounds like a lot but it's actually very small compared to the size of actual item data. In fact it's well over 100x smaller based on a conservative estimate for how much space a melded piece of equipment would take up. For every melded item in the game SE could store well over 100 entries in a glamour log.

There's also another thing to point out here and that's how SE stores player inventory versus retainers. Player inventory is stored on the character server as part of your character data as this data is loaded and updated as part of the regular server sync that runs every 15s. They have to do this as the player inventory can be opened anywhere. That is very intensive on the servers. Retainers, however, can only be accessed from fixed locations so their inventories are stored on a separate server. This is why retainers take a few seconds to load sometimes. This is much less intensive on the server and the memory used to store retainers is much less of an issue as the server isn't syncing the data every 15s.

A glamour log would not need to be accessible from everywhere. They could very easily make it a feature accessed from inn rooms or housing furniture like the unending journey or armoire (which coincidentally also use the exact same boolean flag system that I described above). Given that a glamour log could likely store every cosmetic item in the game using less memory than a player's inventory is allocated AND it could be stored on a separate server, meaning no real impact on the primary server or character server, I see no realistic reason why we cannot have a glamour log.

Do I even need to also point out the sheer number of games that already have this feature now? SE is making excuses for something that is quickly becoming a standard of the genre. They can do it, they just won't. Given the money they're making from selling extra retainers I have to agree that it is in their interest to pretend it's not possible.