Glamour dresser red flag

[kikix12]

Technical back-end stuff most likely. The armoire stores stuff "cheaply" by not storing spirit bond, dye, or glamoured appearance information- just the base item. Only a very limited selection of items are allowed in it so the amount of space it takes up is less than that of a traditional inventory. The Dresser stores the item, but since it's meant to store A LOT they need to keep the cost of hosting that data under control somehow. I'm 99% sure that's why we can't remove without destroying - otherwise, they'd have to push it off again or spend more than they're allowed to for this. It's not an excuse in the slightest since I think SE can do better than this half-assed system built on compromises and desperation but they don't have infinite time or money, so here we are. I'd be curious in hearing the exact reason why but they probably wanted to point to a simple item with as little information associated with it as possible, which may very well mean stripping out metadata that makes the item retrievable.

Except, if the dresser actually stores anything then it's already inefficient...

Armoire works most likely through "link". As in, there is a database from gear stored on the servers. That's what says what the gear in its base looks like, what stats it have, what drops it and all the other technical stuff. Now, the bad way of doing inventory is to copy all (most) of that data for every copy of that item that any player owns. This IS probably how normal inventories work, for whatever reason. Hence why there is a big-ass resource hog to the inventories. This is most likely NOT how armoire works, hence why it can technically have virtually unlimited space, because every item is just a few bytes or so for every character...which on an MMO's scale is nothing. When you take something out of the armoire, it merely references the item database for a specific item. For example, it would look something like "Put item no. 12611 in players inventory.". That's all.

Now, with the dresser, I bet they went the stupid way of doing it a separate inventory again. That means that the server copies the entire data (or at least large chunks of it) for every item you store on it, for every character separately. THAT is why they may not be retrievable (if it's not an error in the patch notes). There is zero reason why removing any metadata (other than items number in a database) would make an item non-retrievable, because all of that data MUST exist and be referenced every time you use that item in any way. Put the gear on?! The game needs to know what stat modification to give your characters, how your character will look, what icon to put in the character screen etc. Even someone just using an examination on you will bring up the tooltip which again will need all that data. Heck, you showing up on any characters screen when passing through makes requires the data to load, since it's tied to appearance.


In reality, data-management is a lot less problematic than some seem to think. It's supposed to work off of a database and cross-references. That means that every item should have exactly ONE copy of data on the entire data center (or a physical server at most), and every character and their mother would only reference that one copy of data. The drawback?! If they wouldn't do backups, any error in the database would affect everyone as well and could be unrepairable. The positives?! Everything else. Immense amounts of data storage being saved, among others, and that means removal of technical issues born from data mismanagement, which in turn would allow to make simple, efficient systems. And yes, adding a dyes metadata is just a little bit of data more, and still could be done extremely easily even with database reference. That's how inventory could very well work as well.