Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XXXVII Discussion Thread

[Naunet]

If only you too posted on a character with more than one job at 50....

Better? :P Not that it matters, as my point remains.

I prefer how Caluun looks in the head shot than my main, though. xD

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Better? :P Not that it matters, as my point remains.

I prefer how Caluun looks in the head shot than my main, though. xD

All I'm sayin is if your gonna call people out on things, make sure you arent doing that yourself.

[Naunet]

<snip>

Cut down on the holier-than-thou patronizing, and maybe you'll have a hope of holding a reasonable conversation.

[Naunet]

So back to the thread...

I sure hope SE doesn't think a "glamour history" (presuming it means some kind of record of recent glamours) fulfills what we've been asking for!

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

So back to the thread...

I sure hope SE doesn't think a "glamour history" (presuming it means some kind of record of recent glamours) fulfills what we've been asking for!

I mean, depending on how they implement it, and whether or not its a translation thing, it might be exactly what you are looking for.

[Vhailor]

Continuing on the inventory tangent, I'd like to point out a couple of things people routinely seem to overlook, misunderstand, or have biased opinions about.

(1) There is absolutely no space problem. I level every DoH / DoL job concurrently while maintaining three combat classes (albeit only one at level 70) and a Glamour set for my main; I have oodles of inventory space and Retainer space. Does that mean nobody has inventory issues? Of course not - but it does mean that inventory issues generally arise from "pathological" use cases where people are utilizing far more space than is necessary / intended for general play. That's the metric by which SE is going to assess space, and it's the one we should keep in mind.

(2) There IS an inventory management problem, which is what I think SE should really focus on fixing. Consider a few of the glaring lacks below:

• No robust tools for sorting or finding specific items within one's inventory.
• Too many currency-style items (Gysahl greens, Dark Matter, Glamour Prisms, Beast Tribe currencies, Tokens from more or less any Raid / EX Primal, etc.) that do not get assigned to a currency tab of some sort.
• Unnecessary splitting of various items, such as Dark Matter being tiered or Glamour Prisms being broken out by DoH class.
• Clumsy item retrieval for quest turn-ins (Key Items, in particular, should be completely automatic).
• Lack of a Glamour log (and, yes, for a game that already had Log-style setups for Crafting / Gathering / pre-50 Hunts, this was absolutely inexcusable).
• A pathetically poor implementation of the Armoire, which encourages people to mix items they might actually use with items they just want to hang on to for fear of not being able to acquire them again.

There are surely other problems as well; these were just off the top of my head. All of these, viewed properly, are inventory management issues, not inventory space issues. Addressing them would certainly free up some inventory space, but primarily it would make FFXIV more playable and accessible - a result that is far more likely to draw attention from the development team. On the other hand, treating them as space issues and doubling or tripling our inventory space wouldn't improve XIV's playability at all; it would arguably make it worse. Simply keeping track of all the space we had, were we to use most of it, would be a nightmare.

Unfortunately, based on the LIVE Letter (to draw back to the original topic), it would seem that SE has no designs on really solving these issues. The general feel I got from the entire thing is that, aside from a few job tweaks, the dev team seems content with the state of the game. In my opinion, that is a troubling sign, one that is almost certainly going to cause me to cancel my subscription as soon as my girlfriend loses interest in the game. But, to each their own; I can't speak for anyone but myself here.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

/isearch helps with finding items. its pretty potent IMO.

As for handing over items for quests isntead of it just doing it for you. Devs commented on that, it was an immersion thing, done deliberately.

[Vhailor]

/isearch helps with finding items. its pretty potent IMO.

As for handing over items for quests isntead of it just doing it for you. Devs commented on that, it was an immersion thing, done deliberately.

The item search functionality, from what I recall, identifies what general inventory area something's in (Retainer, whatnot), but there's a lot of space within those (especially if people seeking more inventory space have their way with things). Searching through seven inventory grids in the Retainer, even with the larger viewstyle, takes time.

As for your other point, keep in mind when reading the following that I'm being critical of the XIV development team and its decisions, not you; I'm aware it comes off as somewhat harsh, and don't want you to feel attacked =)

Just because something was done deliberately doesn't mean it's a good idea. The atrocious clipping we see on virtually any longer hairstyle was an intentional decision, too, and it still sucks. To be sure, in general, it's not a major issue, but man does it get irritating when doing things like Ixal quest turn-ins. I think it makes sense for handling certain non-Key items (for instance, it wouldn't be good if you went to turn in a Grand Company item and had it yank a piece of gear you're using out of your Armoire, or use a NQ version when you wanted to use a high-quality version), but for single-purpose quest items like the Ixal stuff, or KIs? Yeah, no. FFXIV isn't terribly immersive as-is; creating inconvenient systems (without even an option to toggle the behaviour) to add some slight subjective boost to it is bad design.

[KisaiTenshi]

(2) There IS an inventory management problem, which is what I think SE should really focus on fixing. Consider a few of the glaring lacks below:

• No robust tools for sorting or finding specific items within one's inventory.
• Too many currency-style items (Gysahl greens, Dark Matter, Glamour Prisms, Beast Tribe currencies, Tokens from more or less any Raid / EX Primal, etc.) that do not get assigned to a currency tab of some sort.
• Unnecessary splitting of various items, such as Dark Matter being tiered or Glamour Prisms being broken out by DoH class.
• Clumsy item retrieval for quest turn-ins (Key Items, in particular, should be completely automatic).
• Lack of a Glamour log (and, yes, for a game that already had Log-style setups for Crafting / Gathering / pre-50 Hunts, this was absolutely inexcusable).
• A pathetically poor implementation of the Armoire, which encourages people to mix items they might actually use with items they just want to hang on to for fear of not being able to acquire them again.

This has been beaten to death in another thread.

a) Sorting and finding: We don't have it because it puts additional load on the servers. What is evident is that we can search our character and our retainers, so therefor the retainers must exist as active "players" in the market, and that's how we get real time notifications, but sometimes the market becomes unsearchable. What can alleviate part of this is by caching the contents of the retainer in the client without polling the retainers in real time. Anything that we can store stuff in, needs to be searchable at any time, but just because we are trying to find something, if it's not actually open (eg a housing chest, the armoire, the retainer's inventory) then there is no harm in caching this.

b) Too many currency-style items - Indeed, there is no need for this, and likewise there are a bunch of items that drop from FATE's that are used in beast quests as a type of currency, but only when that quest is available. If SE wants to fix one of the largest sources of inventory bloat, there are two quick and painless ways of doing it
- Create a "money belt" that you can click "clean up inventory" and it migrates all currency items to the belt, making them untradeable/unable to be sold on the market. I'm not sure how many people even care to sell these things but it seems the only purpose for taking up inventory space is to do that.
- Put a currency conversion market into the game. Go to this marketboard/NPC, list the currencies of all the beast tribe currencies (except the crafting Ixali/Moogles) and items used by those tribes, No gil, mgp, GC/Hunt seals, or tomes conversion. Also include a "rare/obsolete" list which will allow players to dump items from V1.0, expired events, expired quests, failed beast tribe crafting NQ, trash items from dungeons, old tomestones, and other seasonal things that players might have in their inventory as a result of stopping mid-quest and coming back months later after the quest is no longer available. Simply put, let players dump all their currencies they aren't using into this "market" at 1:1, and allow other players to buy them with other beast tribe currencies. "Selling 99 (tribe), wants 99 (other tribe)"

c) Unnecessary splitting - I get the idea behind it, but why both a "grade" and a "class" split for dark matter, prisms, and even materia/demimateria. Some of these splits result in excessive inventory bloat, instead of players using the items, they just sit around until there is something to use them on, sometimes never. Instead of having all this unnecessary stuff sitting around, simplify it. For materia/demimateria, just create "Battlecraft" and "Fieldcraft", and with materia when you use it, select which attribute you want to strenghten (and grey out attributes that this item can't benefit from.) That eliminates an entire level of PEBKAC.

d) Clumsy item retrieval - I'd really like to see a return to manually having to loot things, it's largely forgotten about to save having to draw art assets for "dropped on floor" animations. Because what you could do in these cases was drop things from your inventory if you really wanted these, and others could then pick up those loot drops. In FFXIV, and most WoW-like inventory systems where all the inventory icons for one kind of item look identical, you have no time to decide if that item is something you want, so you just 'greed' everything or 'pass' everything to avoid filling your inventory with items you don't want. Key-items, or items that are only usable with one NPC should be a separate inventory, and those items should disappear once the quest is completed or canceled. There should be a button to just "hand everything in" rather than having to right click on each space, or click and drag everything from key inventory to the spaces.

d) Glamour Log, lack thereof - It's obviously something everyone wants in some shape, but few have agreed on what exactly it should look like. In one form it simply destroys the item, making it irretrievable, which also means every time you want gear pieces for a different job, you need to go find those pieces. But that allows you to "log everything." Another form would be like an extended armoire which works like a collection book (think Wonderous Tails, except instead of dungeons, you have gear) that finding 5 left-hand items of from one set unlocks the lefthand set for all jobs/classes for glamour. Original gear deposited into the "book" can not be retrieved again. An even easier application of this is to just log every item you've ever received as a dungeon drop or item purchase as glamour-able. Some people want the gear to be retrievable after being turned into glamour, some do not. There's also the issue of where if an item can be pulled back out, then people might find an exploit to sell the items into the market or RMT.

e) The Armoire and the Calamaty Scavanger - Thus far are are poor implementations. The Armoire should allow all "blue" and "purple" gear to be dropped into it, as well as all level-1 costumes and event costumes.

[Zfz]

a) Sorting and finding: ...by caching the contents of the retainer in the client without polling the retainers in real time...

The lack of client side caching is one of the biggest disappointments of the FFXIV UI, and lack of an UI modding platform. Not only just searching, with modding it's even possible to do very advanced sorting or custom grouped sorting (like always putting gear of the same set together) and other kind of item grouping. An abstract layer of consolidated inventory management.

Even without modding, there's such a big opportunity for local caching that could have been done on the PC. But because PS3/4, it's a no-no god-forbidden sin.

I wish the devs would think hard about allowing QoL differences between PS4 and PC versions in terms of UI features.