What ever happened to the increase in inventory slots

[Krotoan]

Again, I am talking about a workaround at least (aka. what they did through saddlebags and retainers for example) which would leave the faulty code there, but unused. This would be both faster and cheaper. And we're talking about a game that got a complete rework of itself, sans the engine apparently. While the developer STILL supported somewhat the old game before it was closed.
I really do fail to understand how people keep on thinking that making a new game from scratch (I'm not talking bout ARR right now) is easier than changing just one aspect of an existing game (I'll bring the "one aspect" up later in the post).

Because it's easier to make a cake from scratch than it is to yank ingredients out or compensate for disproportional ingredients. It may not be faster but it requires a hell of a lot less troubleshooting things that may or may not get fixed.

Eh...no. It wouldn't be a halt. Why would it? The team responsible for one type of updates would be responsible for it while the other teams would continue their work. Again, this is not a company where six or seven people in total work at the project. It's a company where there are probably dozens of them divided into several teams, each with their own purpose. And that it would cost company?! And why should I care about that?! Players pay them every single month. Some pay on top of that. They get money technically "for free", just having to move part of it to cover costs of operating servers. If we're expected to pay a LARGE amount of money every single month, and then pay on top of that for something worth no more than a couple dozen cents when you consider it being digital and miniscule to the scope of the game...why shouldn't we expect them to funnel part of that money to fixing the worthless code this game is built up on? Subscribers give them more money every month that most games earn at their peak. Yet those "most games" still provide their developers with money for future projects. Entire games. On top of paying their bills, vacations and so on. And those games take ~two years to develop, while we pay that EVERY MONTH. Yes, an MMO (and Final Fantasy XIV is no exception) is a bigger project than most single player games (note the "most"). However, its updates are not. This game was made and we are only getting updates on it. The updates over the course of a single expansion, along with the expansion that comes after it, can very well be compared to the amount of content a single new game covers (if not less against certain games).

So yes, I base my "estimations" on players money spent to content amount to new games development basis.

Because if they're going to rework the inventory it'd be silly not to rework the things related to it. The only people who wouldn't be involved would be the design crew, but none of it would be testable, or implementable without the code crew. You can make all the content in the world but it's not gonna get coded and tested unless that crew can get to it. You need the whole crew going to keep the updates coming. We pay a fee that's relatively small compared to other "service for a fee" options. Netflix is slightly less but they are primarily a content aggregator, not a producer. While their name IS on several exclusives it's easy enough for them to throw money at a crew and ask to slap their name on it, SE tried that and we got 1.0. 12 dollars is not a large amount, AND optional content IS completely optional, nobody is forcing your hand there, you get to say whether that's worth it or not to you. Likely our sub money goes to the costs to keep the game and the updates coming , not improvements. SE decides how much money they want to put back into the game and while we should expect them to put SOME back into it, refunding a ground up rework AGAIN is highly unlikely. I say unlikely because at the point they'd decide to do such, AGAIN it's far more likely they'd just make FFXIV .. 2. Solving a whole host of problems at the same time: Inventory, MSQ lockdowns, update restrictions, data center upgrades yadda yadda. I can see the decision for that going through far easier than "hey.. we need to rework the game.. again". From their point of view they'll keep this going as long as people will pay for it and when it becomes more trouble than it's worth it'll shut down and the successor will be announced. You see far more profit in reworking now and reaping longer subscriptions later which is a fair assessment but investors see consistent money coming in and no reason to stem that flow until it starts to be constricted. Neither of those paths are right or wrong in my opinion, I'm trying here to provide perspective and I lean towards a non rework because I believe it's unlikely knowing what I know about business decisions and development investment.

And what does that mean? Consider this. If you ever used Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc or any other such program you surely know how it works. The cells can reference each other, over multiple separate tabs even. Inventory would be one tab. The storage of data, the functions of items, the possible interactions, all of that would be in that one tab. This is actually a bit wasteful way of doing it, since some of those things should be in a separate tab (like interactions and actual item data, in fact) but Square complains about their jumbled system so let's assume it like this. Character data, and that includes the equipped items, would be another tab and it's involved with the inventory. Then there are retainers, chocobo saddlebags, shops.

Now, how does that work. If you want to do something related to the inventory, for example buy or sell a new item, the shop references your inventory. That means that it "targets" a cell within the Inventory tab related to what you click on. If that cell is empty or have incomplete/corrupted data, the game crashes (or at least the function doesn't work), so that's a bug. Making a new inventory system would need to provide a way for it to work. Now, what you suggest is changing all those tabs (retainers, chocobo saddlebags, shops and more) so that they reference the respective cell in new Inventory tab. What I say they should do is change the old Inventory tab to just reference the relevant cell in the new one. In other words, the old inventory tab would be reduced to a redirection table towards the new inventory tab. Every inventory tab needs the same cells respective for the inventory slots and needs to have access to the same data directly (in additional slots) or indirectly (redirected to a database). That means that even if they made a completely new inventory tab, based on databases and cross-reference instead of endlessly copying everything unnecessarily (which is how I assume it works and why there are such issues in the first place), nothing other than the old inventory tab would need to be touched and the problem would be solved.

An MMORPG is not a spreadsheet unless we're looking for an analogy. There are levels of interaction a spreadsheet just cannot reproduce and interactions in the codes of the items themselves that make swapping out just one page or cell a nightmare of new bugs and now flapping references. I understand your comparison but it doesn't hold up in the context of a game.

I know. That's why large companies work on multiple games at the same time, relocating workers between teams that are at various parts of the development. But that still means that there are "slow days" for some workers. Not because it's impossible to avoid, but because I know full well "humans". I have not seen a single company without management flaws and I've seen multiple large companies that work nation or world-wide from inside. Not development ones, but production, transport and service related...so yeah. I've got some experience there.

Idle time does not equal available development time. Fred the item database coder farting around on facebook for 3 hours a day isn't going to translate into 3 hours of productive rework time if someone is standing over his shoulder holding the (figurative) whip. People do goof off but not in scheduled chunks or organizable timeframes. Yes they COULD make everyone work on the rework on their "spare" time but that's more of a timeline for YEARS instead of months and even IF they do that, the amount of changes to the game while they do so might make their work never ending or in the end moot. Once again here we hit "no updates till it's done" territory. Getting it done before changing any other parts of the game would be paramount.

[Ruf]

We pay a fee that's relatively small

I disagree to this,because of dollar conversion, not to mention that physical copies of the game are rarer than they used to be as you actually get to download nowaday.Just my opinion, I dont think we pay a relatively small fee

[Krotoan]

I disagree to this,because of dollar conversion, not to mention that physical copies of the game are rarer than they used to be as you actually get to download nowaday.Just my opinion, I dont think we pay a relatively small fee

what does having a physical copy of the game matter? It's one less thing to lose and contributed literal cents to the cost of the game in the past. It's relatively small as in relative to OTHER services you pay monthly fees for. Netflix, amazon music or video, twitch prime or subs, Crunchyroll.. the list grows. If we're talking about how much 12 dollars is to you or me, that's incredibly subjective. 12 dollars is less than lunch to me, for some people it's a months allowance and I understand if that seems like a lot. I'm not going to argue your personal finances, but in the scheme of the average gamer aged north americans (23-35) income it's not a whole lot either.