[Feedback] More Glamour Plates or More Areas to Apply Glamour Plates?

[Hasrat]

No, I don't, really. I'm just offering ideas to counter the "It's so obviously simple, why haven't they done it already" arguments.

[Canadane]

More plates. The system is barely functional with so few plates considering we have to use some for weapons and Fashion report.

You don't need to use a plate for the Fashion Report.
You can just waltz on up wearing the gear directly.

[SummonerSenah]

Having finally gotten around to doing the glamour dresser, I have two thoughts.

1) I can deal with 10 glamour plates since you can save over previous ones. But given the choice to have more plates vs. more places where you can change them, I'll take more plates.

2) More importantly, I think the dresser needs to hold more than 200 items! I’m already nearly at max and that’s not considering all the gear that I’ll be getting in the future. It really makes me have to reconsider whether I’m actually going to ever use some things for glamour. I mean that’s not necessarily a bad thing but I still wouldn’t mind more room.

[TaranTatsuuchi]

Wait...
wait, wait, wait!

Why is this an OR question??
The system needs both more plates and the ability to apply them anywhere!


Serious question.
What is the Dev team's intended use for this sytem...?



I can't personally see this as functional until we have enough plates to cover all the classes and have some left over for misc outfits.
So, 26 classes and some extra, 30~40 is probably a good starting ground.

The restrictions on where to use them just makes it difficult if you're out and about doing stuff and want to swap glamours around, perhaps you've wandered into a snowey area, can't put on your coat because you can't use the plates outside a main city...



This OR thing has me severly dissapointed.

[Reinha]

You don't need to use a plate for the Fashion Report.
You can just waltz on up wearing the gear directly.

You do need to use a plate if at least one of the items is already in the dresser.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

If they could only say, double the amount of plates we have. A simple compromise thereafter would be to implement plates as a secondary equipment-esque system, thus it wouldn't save over your existing glamours. So for example sake, you create two plates for Scholar and Astro while White Mage uses the old system. The former two's plates sit on top of your White Mage but do not overight it. Many of us assumed that was the intent. Instead we got this mess.

[Dualgunner]

No, I don't, really. I'm just offering ideas to counter the "It's so obviously simple, why haven't they done it already" arguments.

Like I said, I'm not saying it's simple. I'm saying that they did it stupid in the first place, this rebirth is also convoluted and dumb. Altena also brought up several good examples of logs they added post-launch, and I'm sad I didn't think of them.

The issue of the glamour log wouldn't be as tough for them if they did it right in the first place--then it would have been a simple matter of them building on it like they have with the sightseeing log, card list, challenge log, and orchestrion list. Since they insisted on playing monkey's paw though, it's now some big muddled mess that would take a lot of effort to fix. That's my point.

[Hasrat]

I mean, that's kinda my point as well. It just doesn't really do any good for the discussion to say "Well they should've done it differently from the start." They didn't, here we are, that suggestion doesn't really move anything forward, unless it's genuinely a call to shut everything down to dismantle the mess and put it back together properly, which, doubtful the game could afford.

That leaves us right where we're at, with all the inherent problems, necessitating current systems to get as much of the effect as we can.

Regarding "other log systems," each one was implemented with the data allocation in mind. They didn't just add piles of Triad cards, and years later finally provide a log of them, did they? They didn't just sprinkle Sightseeing locations without a log already attached to them.

Suggesting they "just add a glamour log" as if it's the same situation just strikes me as obtuse. The glamour system wasn't designed with a log in mind, unlike all the other log systems, so trying to shove one in is going to be difficult, to say the least.

Should they do it? Sure, maybe, would probably solve some problems, and meet demand. Can they? Hard to say. I'm of the belief that if they could, they would, and what we're seeing now is just their attempts at approximating it within the confines of the system they've trapped themselves in.

In short, the idea of a glamour log is great. But I don't know enough about the back end to be certain it's even possible to implement here, without significant overhauls.

[Dualgunner]

As Altena said, if they had to shut the whole game down to backtrack on their glamour coding, then something much more major needs fixing anyway. I think "The current system is a mess; adding onto it is a bad idea, we should backtrack now before this gets muddled up even more" is a very valid opinion to hold in a conversation like this. You and I agree on the point that this would have been easier to implement correctly in the first place, when the gearsets were far more manageable; this means implicitly, we also agree the chances of ever getting a superior system like that only shrinks over time. Especially when they add on things like the glamour dresser.

But for the sake of argument, I'll say I like the dresser. The ability to drop items in is a nice one, and I don't mind its restricted to a room (although hopefully it will be a housing item soon.) I dislike:

1. Items you put in cannot be retrieved
2. Plates overwrite glamours instead of being layered over them
3. Items from the dresser cannot be used on squadrons
4. 200 item limit (I feel 200 per slot, maybe even 100 per slot would have been far superior to this)

I do like:

1. Plates apply entire outfits at once
2. As far as the dresser UI itself goes, it's very well organized and visually appealing
3. The clutter of glamour prisms is basically gone
4. It's given me a reason to put all of my veteran reward stuff in the armoire finally

[kikix12]

Ideally, they would fix their programming, so that there would be no choice.

"This will increase the amount of data passed through the network, so we’re discussing where we can increase and make this possible." shows that it's done poorly. What's the difference between using Plate #1 from plate #9999999?! From perspective of data sent, there's hardly any. As in, you saying "Hi everyone!" in chat sends more data than either of these two. Vastly.

For whatever reason, they send a lot of unnecessary data, probably calling onto the entire glamour system whenever you interact with it, instead of just what you are doing. How it should be:

You use a glamour plate. The game calls the server to access your glamour plate #X. The server finds the glamour plate #X then uses further references to find the items connected to it within its item database, then apply modifications (dyes) that are also in that same database. Then that information is sent to you.

As you can see, the number of plates available here makes no difference at all. The only part where it matters, the call to the server, is a non-issue as it already occurs anyway.


How it probably is for whoever knows what reason.
You use a glamour plate. The game makes a call to the server that you used glamour function and all the plates, all items stored in the glamour chest, are called back then sent to you. The game then chooses which ones to correlate to the plate you used and discards the rest.
With this, increasing the amount of plates or item slots in the chest massively increases the data sent, because there is a LOT of data that never was needed.

Think of it like this. If you liked a single image in a web gallery, you save that image and end up with ~500kb-5mb file. But for some stupid reason, the game, instead of saving that one image, exports the entire gallery with all of their images, add banners, text, scripts and everything else instead, all for the purpose of accessing that one image offline. As a result, the game would need to save ~11mb-110mb or more.

Their problem is that the amount of gear a player can equip in a multi-class game such as this is just enormous. And to pull off the traditional glamour log system would mean listing a rediculous amount of gear. This equates to a stupidly high amount of work this late down the line, from development time to testing.

Except, this issue have a very simple solution. Make the log work only with items added to it. You get a piece of gear, you register it, the log updates itself with its information.

Later down the line, the developers could just copy the so-created database from a player that collected the most items and fill in the gaps they missed...or just leave it as it is, really. Though leaving it as is would make the amount of data (storage, not network) taken increase for individual copies of the logs. I have no faith they could do it the smarter way of cross-referencing, if they couldn't do it like this for all this time with all the inventory issues.