What Would You Sacrifice for a Glamour Catalogue?

[Naunet]

Here's a small thing I came up with. It's not fleshed out, but a decent starting point.

While this solves certain inventory issues, I think we can do a lot better than coming up with horribly convoluted and seriously inconvenient systems for SE. They do that all on their own. We should be pushing them to do better.

[New_Game_Plus]

F. I don't really think we need one.

[Talraen]

Seriously, in this day this "server memory limitation" nonsense shouldn't be a thing unless you are either stuck in the late 90s/early 2000s(Ultima online and EQ era) or bad at making use of your resources. Other modern MMOs don't have this crap(that isn't there by design for cash shop)

I don't know how the FFXIV servers are setup and I'm not necessarily defending them, but you don't have enough information to make this claim. There could be some fundamental differences in FFXIV's server design than other games that do this which cause it to be impractical. It could be a tradeoff for some other feature we take for granted. They may have been given a hard bandwidth cap by their corporate overlords and designed accordingly. We don't know. But as a programmer I have an allergic reaction any time anyone tells me something they have no visibility into should be "easy."

[SaitoHikari]

-snip-

Pretty much all of this.

I was once a moderator that had contact with developers/producers for a different MMO, and you'd be surprised how many things would break out of nowhere. For that particular MMO, the issue was that there were so many different versions of the game all around the world progressing at their own speed that it was virtually impossible for the developers to program for every contingency.

A minor example was that there was an event that was supposed to deliver items that could be placed on a weapon to convert all non-elemental damage inflicted to that particular element. Thing is, the gifting algorithm used was programmed in a rather odd way - first the staff had to find the item ID, and then for some reason, they had to input the stats themselves (most items within the same 'family' of items had randomized stats, which is probably why this step had to be taken). The items given out did not actually work as intended - even though the item tooltip said that it'd convert non-elemental damage to a specific element, that actually did not happen, for it turns out that the developers did not program a working 'elemental conversion' stat into the item gifting algorithm (even though the text was there).

So the staff pretty much had to take back the worthless items and award currency instead that would allow players to purchase the working items from the special currency shop.

[Vhailor]

Title asks the question. One of the big reasons we haven't received a Glamour Catalogue/Log is due to the high amounts of data that need to be stored for each individual playable character. The topic came up with some friends over Discord and I thought I'd bring it here to see what people think.

So, what would you Sacrifice to get a Glamour Catalogue?

a) The Hunting Log
b) The Sightseeing Log
c) The Fishing Guide
d) All of the Above
e) Something Else
f) None (Don't want a Glamour Catalogue)

Option (f), because there shouldn't need to be a sacrifice made. SE did a thoroughly atrocious job implementing Glamours; it is the most obtuse and inventory-hungry solution I've seen in a video game. Needing special Prisms? Needing to have both the Glamour item and the actual item in the Armoury at the same time? No way of recalling an old look without hanging onto the gear in question? Fucking ridiculous.

Also, that argument about 'high amounts of data' is utter nonsense, and nobody should be particularly accepting of it. It could literally be done with a bit string (one million bits would take up a single megabit of space, or 1/8 of a megabyte). It's not like they'd literally have to store the information for every potential Glamour item on a character to create a log; they just need a bit string that references a central Glamour database.

No, the REAL reason that there isn't a Glamour log is some combination of incompetence, disinterest, and penny-pinching. It's impossible to say with any certainty how blame should be allocated across these three categories, but there isn't some magical technical barrier. They somehow managed the Crafting Log, after all, which, while not precisely the same size as a Glamour log, is of an equivalent order of magnitude. Let's stop letting SE off the hook for an inept Glamour implementation by accepting their ridiculous excuses for why it just can't be done.

I don't know how the FFXIV servers are setup and I'm not necessarily defending them, but you don't have enough information to make this claim. There could be some fundamental differences in FFXIV's server design than other games that do this which cause it to be impractical. It could be a tradeoff for some other feature we take for granted. They may have been given a hard bandwidth cap by their corporate overlords and designed accordingly. We don't know. But as a programmer I have an allergic reaction any time anyone tells me something they have no visibility into should be "easy."

There's absolutely nothing about FFXIV's construction that I haven't seen in other games in some form or another. If SE made trade-offs, they were bad trade-offs. If their server design allowed for extensive Crafting Logs but not Glamour Logs, they really cut it close to the margins.

It's true that there might be factors beyond the control of the development team, but that's all the more reason not to accept their excuse. Corporate overlords will be much more inclined to ease up on any restrictions if they see complaints from the community. Accepting the dev team's hard-to-believe explanation just gives corporate more of an excuse to tightly ration resources, if that's indeed what they're doing in this case.

[Duelle]

While this solves certain inventory issues, I think we can do a lot better than coming up with horribly convoluted and seriously inconvenient systems for SE. They do that all on their own. We should be pushing them to do better.

I agree with this, but my post, like with every one of my suggestions, keeps in mind the way the devs implement things and the reasons they give for not doing things.

I could easily tell the devs to copy something from another game completely because it works, but Yoshida's already addressed copying WoW's transmog log and how that would cause problems for them when it comes to data per character. My suggestion, while convoluted, nips the data issue in the bud because the glamour log would only involve interacting with a summonable NPC, and would be limited to inn rooms/housing. Which means the checks between server and client for something like a glamour log wouldn't take place all the time, but under specific conditions.

[Naunet]

No, they need to fix whatever is causing these ridiculous "character data" problems, because they are clearly dragging the game down. There's really no excuse for SE to struggle so much with features that really have become basic game systems across MMOs.

[Twinsoul]

SE is a high-tech software company running one of the most lucrative MMOs in the market. They shouldn't be citing character data storage issues as a reason that they can't deliver something that much smaller, much worse games can do easily. We shouldn't have to sacrifice anything in order to get a simple glamour catalogue system. If we believe in SE's ability to deliver a solid and enjoyable game (which we obviously do), then we need to believe in SE's ability to deliver something as basic as a standard feature.

[Duelle]

No, they need to fix whatever is causing these ridiculous "character data" problems, because they are clearly dragging the game down. There's really no excuse for SE to struggle so much with features that really have become basic game systems across MMOs.

I agree, but when someone gives you a bullshit excuse for not doing something, you have the choice of calling them out on it to their face (something no interviewer will do) or suggest things with said bullshit excuse in mind (which gives them no outs on why they can't/won't do something).

[kattzkitti]

If added, the glamour log should be account-wide, not per-character. This alone would save a vast amount of resources post-implementation.