Whats going on with SE ?

[kikix12]

If the server didn’t send your inventory data to the duty server along with you, you would show up naked, and everyone else would look naked since their inventory data wasn’t transferred either.

I already said that the characters looks are one of the things that need to be sent at the beginning. But inventory does not need to be sent for that at all. If you want to drink something that's in your fridge, you don't need to take out of it that cheese, the eggs, those pieces of meat waiting there for dinner and all the other things that are there. You'll just take out the bottle of whatever drink you want.

And opening your inventory for the first time would then involve a wait time while the duty server sends the data request back to your world server for the data.

Yes. I've been saying that all along. However, that would be the after all the other data was loaded. That's distributing the data load over time and it decreases the risk of overburdening the hardware/choking the net.

Did you ever use multiple high-demand programs at once on your computer?! Programs that on their own caused significant slowdown?! I have. If I turned one it could have spent, let's say, 5 minutes doing its work, while I could use lightweight programs to work. Sure, not as comfortable but possible. Then I could turn the other one and same thing. After ten minutes I could use computer without any issue.
Now, if I would turn both of them at once...I would be unable to use the PC for more than 10 minutes. They would get in each others way AND completely prohibit using the PC for anything else at all. Not only would it take more time, but I could not use anything in those ten minutes, unlike if I did them one after the other.

Computers spend some time when switching between two processes. Normally it is a miniscule amount that you won't notice even with quite a lot of programs turned on. However if they are utilized to their full, having a lot of things to do to the point they have large queues of processes to attend to...it starts being a pain. Especially if those processes use a lot of operative memory. At that point they will either shuffle which uses RAM, having to write the sama data over and over into it, or they will use the data drive, which if it is HDD (or lower quality SDD) is significantly slower.

When transferring data it is the same. Overburdening your connection will result in you getting any of that data later than if you downloaded it one after another. It's more convenient, I give you that. If I plan on leaving keyboard or don't care for getting the stuff fast, just want it for later, I'll add multiple things for download and don't worry about forgetting to add anything later. But if time is of the essence...I will download any file larger than a couple dozen MB one by one. Because that's the only way to get it as fast as possible. And that also minimizes the risks of something happening, like router overheating and dropping my connection or other random events. Those may be unlikely for homes...but sorry. Final Fantasy XIV have so many instances where playing is interrupted (due to congestion, DDoS attacks and such, but also routing issues some experience that are fault of neither but are still problems) that it actually starts getting pretty relevant how much time you spend on loading screens.

Even if you only wanted useable items like potions to load, the duty server has no way of knowing about that unless it receives your inventory data from your world server.

As I said, the only items that could be loaded are the ones on hotbars. And, again, it's just a precaution more than anything else.

I have no idea, I don't work on the game. The fact is, you don't know either.
(...)
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying you can't possibly be certain that you're right, yet you're acting like your word is gospel.

I'm explaining my point each and every time, leading to some pretty big walls of text. I almost never manage to fit into the post limit, not even when answering a simple query. In comparison, most people don't give any explanations. And not only they act like they couldn't possibly be wrong, but sometimes they outright talk down to another, out of the blue.

I'm afraid that I lost interest in spending that extra time making clear that whatever I write is my opinion and/or my analysis and/or my take on the matter. Especially when people already see in my posts things that never were there and don't see things that are there quite clearly. Just look at what I wrote above. I had to type once again the same thing I did in my previous post, simply because the poster one way or another skipped past me referring to what they intended to write already.

Then there's the fact that...this is not the only MMO game out there. It's not even a pioneer of any sort. There are tons of games done before it. Those other games have various problems of their own, yes, but I tried quite a few MMO's in my time and this is the first time the game developers use volume of transferred data as any sort of issue, and the first time that everything takes so long to load time and time again, at every step.
Clearly, whatever they did, they did it wrong. In the end I don't know what they did wrong...but they need to realize that they DID something wrong and realize that they NEED to fix it. They seem to be of the mind that they can keep ignoring the issue...but that's wrong. They more time it will take for them to try and solve it, even if not completely but step by step...the worse the issue will become and the harder it will be to solve later on.

I’m not saying the code doesn’t need fixing, but how exactly can the server send you data about what other players are wearing without sending that data to your client?

Items are stored in databases of some sort and surely are identified by a number. All you need is the ID of the items that are visible for the game to fetch the images, and images alone. If they are not stored on the clients computers in the first place (there should be a reason why the game have dozens of GB, right?!). You don't need to load anything else, their stats (since characters total stats are loaded anyway), their icons, their tooltips etc. Certainly not the entire inventory.

The reason YOU would also end up naked is because the cross-data-center duties are hosted on a separate server dedicated to dungeon instances. Meaning you are playing a temporary copy of your character the moment you set foot in a duty, any changes to your character are then sent back to your world server upon leaving the duty and overwrites the character data as it was when you started the dungeon.

The server doesn't care about how you look. Graphics are applied on clients side. Your character could hop from server to server and none of them should ever send you data on how your character looks, because it should be stored on your clients side and shown to you from your clients data.

Server needs your items ID (only the visible ones) to send to other players so that you wouldn't appear naked for them. Nothing else.

Also, if you didn’t carry any inventory into a dungeon with you, how would the game need to handle someone who doesn’t have enough inventory slots open to keep everything they decided to pick up in the dungeon when they leave?

I repeatedly said that it should be loaded as demand states. Clearly adding something to inventory is a demand, so the moment you would get loot, the game would check whether you have space for it (empty or a stack that it can be added to). It would be done in background and you wouldn't even know it's being loaded. Upon opening the inventory after that you would already have it loaded, so you wouldn't even have to wait for it to load.

[Tridus]

It's not a question of whether or not data gets sent; it's how much, and how often. FFXIV sends huge amounts of data very frequently. The net result of this is less third-party manipulation (in theory - there are plenty of exploits that FFXIV has had to deal with), but a lot of unnecessary constraints imposed by server limitations.

Yes, it's this. The root of the issue is that the game resyncs your entire inventory between client and server far, far too frequently. Effectively, it winds up sending your entire inventory because you looted something, instead of saying "you looted something" and letting the client handle that event. While that does nicely prevent the state from getting out of sync, it's horrifically resource intensive and that's why other MMOs don't do it.

It's also why they implemented things like Chocobo storage instead of simply adding more inventory. Chocobo storage is only synced when it's actually open, and it isn't available at all in many circumstances. It's a means of working around the root problem.

[Talraen]

I already said that the characters looks are one of the things that need to be sent at the beginning. But inventory does not need to be sent for that at all. If you want to drink something that's in your fridge, you don't need to take out of it that cheese, the eggs, those pieces of meat waiting there for dinner and all the other things that are there. You'll just take out the bottle of whatever drink you want.

How would that work? The server has to find the drink you want, which means searching the data for it. At that point you're loading the data.

Yes. I've been saying that all along. However, that would be the after all the other data was loaded. That's distributing the data load over time and it decreases the risk of overburdening the hardware/choking the net.

No, it does not. If this were a single player game, you'd be correct, but it's an MMO, and there's no reason to believe that distributing the same load per player over multiple loads will result in a more even overall distribution. If one person zones in every 10 seconds and then all of those people pop a potion at the same time (due to a big AOE, let's say), then the load distribution will be far worse under your model than Square Enix's. This point is just not correct.

Also, consider that when a whole bunch of players load into a zone at once, the server can stagger when they arrive in order to distribute the load. If the load occurs on need, the server must load everything immediately. Loading at the zone line allows the optimization of load distribution, in direct contrast to your claims.

Computers spend some time when switching between two processes. Normally it is a miniscule amount that you won't notice even with quite a lot of programs turned on. However if they are utilized to their full, having a lot of things to do to the point they have large queues of processes to attend to...it starts being a pain. Especially if those processes use a lot of operative memory. At that point they will either shuffle which uses RAM, having to write the sama data over and over into it, or they will use the data drive, which if it is HDD (or lower quality SDD) is significantly slower.

Server hardware is pretty robust, and I don't think switching processes is a big deal, but let's say your analysis is correct here. Wouldn't it be more efficient to do 100% of the job than doing 50% of it, switching processes, then doing the other 50% of it? The load is the same, but your model adds more switching processes, which you're laying out as a bad thing.

When transferring data it is the same. Overburdening your connection will result in you getting any of that data later than if you downloaded it one after another. It's more convenient, I give you that. If I plan on leaving keyboard or don't care for getting the stuff fast, just want it for later, I'll add multiple things for download and don't worry about forgetting to add anything later. But if time is of the essence...I will download any file larger than a couple dozen MB one by one. Because that's the only way to get it as fast as possible. And that also minimizes the risks of something happening, like router overheating and dropping my connection or other random events. Those may be unlikely for homes...but sorry. Final Fantasy XIV have so many instances where playing is interrupted (due to congestion, DDoS attacks and such, but also routing issues some experience that are fault of neither but are still problems) that it actually starts getting pretty relevant how much time you spend on loading screens.

First off, are you running a 386 with a 2400 baud modem? Downloading a few megs overheats your router? I mean what are we even talking about here.

Anyway what you're describing about downloading files is true... for HTTP/1.1. It's not even true for many web sites anymore due to the rising popularity of HTTP/2. And though I admit I don't know how FFXIV's architecture works, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess they aren't using a protocol designed specifically for stateless transmissions.

As I said, the only items that could be loaded are the ones on hotbars. And, again, it's just a precaution more than anything else.

It's not "just a precaution," it's the reason (as someone pointed out earlier) that we don't have problems with item duplication. And again, how is the server only loading stuff on hotbars? Ignoring for the moment the possibility that the server would also have to parse macros, hotbars are stored locally. The server doesn't have any way to know what's on them. So again, the only way to know any item in your inventory is to search your inventory, and thus already have loaded it.

I'm explaining my point each and every time, leading to some pretty big walls of text. I almost never manage to fit into the post limit, not even when answering a simple query. In comparison, most people don't give any explanations. And not only they act like they couldn't possibly be wrong, but sometimes they outright talk down to another, out of the blue.

I was trying to be polite. You're fundamentally wrong on several technical levels, and since you asked, I am pointing that out in this post.

I'm afraid that I lost interest in spending that extra time making clear that whatever I write is my opinion and/or my analysis and/or my take on the matter. Especially when people already see in my posts things that never were there and don't see things that are there quite clearly. Just look at what I wrote above. I had to type once again the same thing I did in my previous post, simply because the poster one way or another skipped past me referring to what they intended to write already.

I don't have a problem with your lack of explanations, I have a problem with the combination of your explanations being factually and logically incorrect and the certainty with which you state them.

Then there's the fact that...this is not the only MMO game out there. It's not even a pioneer of any sort. There are tons of games done before it. Those other games have various problems of their own, yes, but I tried quite a few MMO's in my time and this is the first time the game developers use volume of transferred data as any sort of issue, and the first time that everything takes so long to load time and time again, at every step.
Clearly, whatever they did, they did it wrong. In the end I don't know what they did wrong...but they need to realize that they DID something wrong and realize that they NEED to fix it. They seem to be of the mind that they can keep ignoring the issue...but that's wrong. They more time it will take for them to try and solve it, even if not completely but step by step...the worse the issue will become and the harder it will be to solve later on.

Actually, the fact that this is the only MMO with this issue (and I'll take your word on that) doesn't prove they did anything wrong. They made different choices and prioritized different things. It's certainly possible this was a bad decision, and I'm not denying that, but it's also possible that the upsides to this design are worth the cost. My point is that I don't know, and you don't know, but only you are insisting that they "NEED to fix it."

Items are stored in databases of some sort and surely are identified by a number. All you need is the ID of the items that are visible for the game to fetch the images, and images alone. If they are not stored on the clients computers in the first place (there should be a reason why the game have dozens of GB, right?!). You don't need to load anything else, their stats (since characters total stats are loaded anyway), their icons, their tooltips etc. Certainly not the entire inventory.

The server doesn't care about how you look. Graphics are applied on clients side. Your character could hop from server to server and none of them should ever send you data on how your character looks, because it should be stored on your clients side and shown to you from your clients data.

Server needs your items ID (only the visible ones) to send to other players so that you wouldn't appear naked for them. Nothing else.

Two pretty serious issues with this logic. First, if you send along the bare minimum for visual data at first, then send the full data later, you're sending more data in total than you would be otherwise (because the visual data is redundant). This would increase server load, not decrease it. But that doesn't even matter, because the fact is the game does need to load far more than the visual data on your gear the moment you zone in, because it needs to know your stats. It also needs the durability information the first time you take any action that affects it, and so on.

I repeatedly said that it should be loaded as demand states. Clearly adding something to inventory is a demand, so the moment you would get loot, the game would check whether you have space for it (empty or a stack that it can be added to). It would be done in background and you wouldn't even know it's being loaded. Upon opening the inventory after that you would already have it loaded, so you wouldn't even have to wait for it to load.

And here's the fundamental problem with your entire point. Loading on demand doesn't address the issue of the servers being unable to handle more inventory space. You're still loading more inventory space. You're arguing that by not loading on the initial zone-in, it will limit the data, but this is only true in the case where you leave the zone without once accessing your inventory at all, which would actually be pretty uncommon. If you get a single drop, open your inventory, buy anything, use any item, or anything along those lines, you've loaded just as much data. And let me reiterate: in a game with thousands of players, when you load is irrelevant. (To be clear, it's very relevant in any specific case, but there's no reason to believe it would lead to a more even distribution of load; see above.) All that matters is how much is loaded, and your idea makes very little difference. It wouldn't allow them to increase inventory size.

[Tridus]

I already said that the characters looks are one of the things that need to be sent at the beginning. But inventory does not need to be sent for that at all. If you want to drink something that's in your fridge, you don't need to take out of it that cheese, the eggs, those pieces of meat waiting there for dinner and all the other things that are there. You'll just take out the bottle of whatever drink you want.

It's possible you haven't seen my fridge. It's a Tetris puzzle, sometimes.

Yes. I've been saying that all along. However, that would be the after all the other data was loaded. That's distributing the data load over time and it decreases the risk of overburdening the hardware/choking the net.

Not really. For you, as one person, sure. For ten thousand simultaneous users, it's the same amount of data with the order changed slightly. The only time it would really have an impact would be when the servers first come up and lots of concurrent logins are happening, but it would have no real impact on load during normal operation as inventory is interacted with so frequently it's going to need to be loaded at some point. Doing this would also make interacting with inventory more far more impacted by latency and it just wouldn't feel good from a UX perspective.

Even if you don't open your inventory, as soon as you try and loot/craft/collect something the game will need your inventory both to modify it, and to know if it can even do the operation in question (because it might be full).

Did you ever use multiple high-demand programs at once on your computer?! Programs that on their own caused significant slowdown?! I have. If I turned one it could have spent, let's say, 5 minutes doing its work, while I could use lightweight programs to work. Sure, not as comfortable but possible. Then I could turn the other one and same thing. After ten minutes I could use computer without any issue.
Now, if I would turn both of them at once...I would be unable to use the PC for more than 10 minutes. They would get in each others way AND completely prohibit using the PC for anything else at all. Not only would it take more time, but I could not use anything in those ten minutes, unlike if I did them one after the other.

Hi, software developer here. Servers are not clients. They're designed to run large scale parallel operations with specialized programming practices and highly scaleable hardware. This example can hold true on a client PC with IO or CPU heavy processes that are consuming every available resource and causing blocking. It's not true of a server in the same way barring very intensive calculations (none of which XIV should be doing) or design issues.

The problem with XIV is the servers are constantly tied up doing things like client syncs and communication unnecessarily because of how 1.0 was designed, which isn't a lot for one player but makes scaling extremely difficult.

Computers spend some time when switching between two processes. Normally it is a miniscule amount that you won't notice even with quite a lot of programs turned on. However if they are utilized to their full, having a lot of things to do to the point they have large queues of processes to attend to...it starts being a pain. Especially if those processes use a lot of operative memory. At that point they will either shuffle which uses RAM, having to write the sama data over and over into it, or they will use the data drive, which if it is HDD (or lower quality SDD) is significantly slower.

Modern computers are all multicore and running multiple processes simultaneously, and servers have been that way since a very, very long time ago. Server processes are also designed to not need to swap to disk. If you have a server process swapping to disk, you are either doing something very specialized, or doing something very, very wrong. That absolutely murders performance. Any kind of disk IO is something you want to minimize in a high performance environment, so there's usually a cache tier or a disk array with lots of cache, letting you read data from there and have to go to disk less often. It wouldn't surprise me if logged in player inventory was actually kept in server RAM at all times because of how frequently it's going to be needed, but I don't know how they implemented that. (Another reason why logins tend to back up and take a while after a server restart: nothing's in memory or cache yet, so everything is being loaded from persistent storage).

When transferring data it is the same. Overburdening your connection will result in you getting any of that data later than if you downloaded it one after another.

... no it won't. On a high speed symmetrical link, the connection doesn't care what order you download the files in or if you download multiple ones at once. In fact, if your connection is fast enough and your computer can handle the IO, it's usually faster to download multiple files simultaneously as your download can only go as fast as the server sending it. If that's slower than your maximum throughput, you're wasting transfer time by doing files sequentially, and you could fill that time with another transfer by doing simultaneous parallel transfers.

A server dealing with thousands of players will constantly be transferring data to lots of them at once. It's impossible to do that sequentally: everyone would have to wait for the slowest one to finish and latency would skyrocket to unplayable levels. There's no context switching property on a fibre optic cable or router: the data all looks the same at that level of the stack.

It's more convenient, I give you that. If I plan on leaving keyboard or don't care for getting the stuff fast, just want it for later, I'll add multiple things for download and don't worry about forgetting to add anything later. But if time is of the essence...I will download any file larger than a couple dozen MB one by one. Because that's the only way to get it as fast as possible.

If you need the first file ASAP, then yes, it's faster. If you want all the files in the fastest time possible, then no, it's slower. See above.

And that also minimizes the risks of something happening, like router overheating and dropping my connection or other random events.

If your router is overheating, you have a hardware problem in the router or you have it in a spot where it can't get any air circulation. That in no way applies to servers, as the routers used in data centers are engineered to run under high load continuously reliably for years with minimal downtime.

As I said, the only items that could be loaded are the ones on hotbars. And, again, it's just a precaution more than anything else.

Hotbars are stored client side, not server side. In order for the server to know which items are on the hotbars to selectively load and send them, the client would first have to tell the server which ones to request. The extra round trip would make it no faster than just sending the entire inventory on initial load. After that, only update events should need to be sent, but as mentioned previously, the servers are syncing the full inventory too often.

Then there's the fact that...this is not the only MMO game out there. It's not even a pioneer of any sort. There are tons of games done before it. Those other games have various problems of their own, yes, but I tried quite a few MMO's in my time and this is the first time the game developers use volume of transferred data as any sort of issue, and the first time that everything takes so long to load time and time again, at every step.
Clearly, whatever they did, they did it wrong. In the end I don't know what they did wrong...but they need to realize that they DID something wrong and realize that they NEED to fix it. They seem to be of the mind that they can keep ignoring the issue...but that's wrong. They more time it will take for them to try and solve it, even if not completely but step by step...the worse the issue will become and the harder it will be to solve later on.

Agreed. It's a very hard thing to fix at this point in the game's lifecycle, but the technical debt incurred from 1.0 is causing so many problems now that it is worth looking at.

Items are stored in databases of some sort and surely are identified by a number. All you need is the ID of the items that are visible for the game to fetch the images, and images alone. If they are not stored on the clients computers in the first place (there should be a reason why the game have dozens of GB, right?!). You don't need to load anything else, their stats (since characters total stats are loaded anyway), their icons, their tooltips etc. Certainly not the entire inventory.

I don't know if they're sending stats or not as some items like the aetherial rings in ARR had a randomized stat (you can't see it if you link the item in chat, for example), so they might be. But yes, for your own stuff you need the item ID, the glamour item ID, the dye ID, spiritbond status, durability, and slotted materia. For another players stuff you don't need durability or spiritbond but it's otherwise similar. Art and text descriptions are all client side.

The server doesn't care about how you look. Graphics are applied on clients side. Your character could hop from server to server and none of them should ever send you data on how your character looks, because it should be stored on your clients side and shown to you from your clients data.

Server needs your items ID (only the visible ones) to send to other players so that you wouldn't appear naked for them. Nothing else.

It's a bit more than that as you can inspect people, but the right idea.

I repeatedly said that it should be loaded as demand states. Clearly adding something to inventory is a demand, so the moment you would get loot, the game would check whether you have space for it (empty or a stack that it can be added to). It would be done in background and you wouldn't even know it's being loaded. Upon opening the inventory after that you would already have it loaded, so you wouldn't even have to wait for it to load.

That would make looting slower because you have to load the inventory before you can check the loot status, and inventory is manipulated so often while playing that frequent on demand loads would create more work for the server rather than loading it once and keeping it in RAM.

The issue isn't with that. The root issue is that they sync it between client and server too often, instead of doing it once and then just sending events for updates. ie: When a loot a stick, send a message saying I looted a stick to the client instead of sending the entire inventory again.

[ManuelBravo]

Also MB... I am not going to go back over the whole post ive done but
I said Gig G I G???
Do you even know/understand what im talking about to begin with?
wth is that sentence even supposed to mean to begin with ?
Fishing & collectables:Sig is for SB and you have to be a certain level to get it. If it helps in past areas what is the issue??????
??? explaining things to you feels like a waste of my time thats for sure, im done

My apologies I miss spelled it do to typing at work in a middle of a call I was referring to the secondary hand tool Spearing Gig. Had hit max amount of post for the day.

[KaldeaSahaline]

Again, I don't think "storing" data is the issue. But your point is well taken, there are definitely issues that affect future design. That said, I don't see how the game will become stale simply because character inventory is permanently locked at 140 slots. They can add retainers, chocobo saddlebags, and who knows what else ad infinitum without worrying about the issues that prevent inventory from growing. They will have an issue if we get past 35 classes/jobs, since the armoury is also linked to this issue and will need to be expanded again. That does give them a few years to address the problem. Assuming the game remains popular long enough.

What specifically are you worried about becoming "stale" due to these issues?

In my job, I see a lot of people make decisions based on the problem in front of them, and not the root cause. In this case, you've mentioned the frequency at which data is sent being the prime issue. That is a problem for sure, but if the data were stored more efficiently, it suddenly becomes less/not a problem. It's possible there's even a deeper root cause than what I can see based on my limited understanding of their code base, but I'm VERY confident that the issue is definitely deeper than merely the transfer of said data (which is a problem).

Things like menu-based content, opportunity costs for implementing band-aids that could go to better fixes/new content, gearing/itemization depth, etc.

It's not a question of whether or not data gets sent; it's how much, and how often. FFXIV sends huge amounts of data very frequently. The net result of this is less third-party manipulation (in theory - there are plenty of exploits that FFXIV has had to deal with), but a lot of unnecessary constraints imposed by server limitations.

There isn't a perfect solution, to be sure, but I would argue that as soon as an implementation begins meaningfully infringing on a company's ability to grow the game, it's time to shift course. If SE doesn't want to rebuild the engine, they should invest in vastly improved server capabilities, so that the effects are invisible for the foreseeable future. Otherwise, they're letting their own architecture throttle their cash cow.

Bingo.

The server doesn't care about how you look. Graphics are applied on clients side. Your character could hop from server to server and none of them should ever send you data on how your character looks, because it should be stored on your clients side and shown to you from your clients data.

I don't know the specifics, but what I do know that is SE utilizes client-side operations the least out of any of the MMO's I've played over the course of nearly 20 years. In fact, IIRC nearly everything is handled server-side via checks. This has benefits (mostly security/anti-cheating measures), but it also has numerous consequences (performance, stability, etc.). The reason that so few companies employ this methodology is because it's NOT the most efficient design. Typically the drawbacks don't offset the gains, and IMO FF14 is a good example of this being true.

Yes, it's this. The root of the issue is that the game resyncs your entire inventory between client and server far, far too frequently. Effectively, it winds up sending your entire inventory because you looted something, instead of saying "you looted something" and letting the client handle that event. While that does nicely prevent the state from getting out of sync, it's horrifically resource intensive and that's why other MMOs don't do it.

It's also why they implemented things like Chocobo storage instead of simply adding more inventory. Chocobo storage is only synced when it's actually open, and it isn't available at all in many circumstances. It's a means of working around the root problem.

I vaguely recall reading one of the tech articles from SE going over how the server validates an operation. It was the most asinine thing I ever read. You push your hotkey, which sends the server your "intent" and the server sends an OK back (if OK), and then your system resends the press and the server validates that what you sent matches your intent.

As far as their band-aid solutions I just wish they would devote that dev resources to an actual solution. I understand why they don't (cost), but like I've echo'd before. It's likely going to be a problem eventually and the longer they wait to fix it, the harder it will be.

[Tridus]

In my job, I see a lot of people make decisions based on the problem in front of them, and not the root cause. In this case, you've mentioned the frequency at which data is sent being the prime issue. That is a problem for sure, but if the data were stored more efficiently, it suddenly becomes less/not a problem. It's possible there's even a deeper root cause than what I can see based on my limited understanding of their code base, but I'm VERY confident that the issue is definitely deeper than merely the transfer of said data (which is a problem).

You're not going to be able to make it smaller for the same kind of efficiency gain that you'd get from never sending it more than once. Over the span of 2 hours, sending all of it once and then only sending event driven deltas on update will result in a lot of data on login and a very small amount after that. Sending it literally thousands of times isn't close even if you try to tighten up what you send, due to sheer volume of how many times you're doing it.

I vaguely recall reading one of the tech articles from SE going over how the server validates an operation. It was the most asinine thing I ever read. You push your hotkey, which sends the server your "intent" and the server sends an OK back (if OK), and then your system resends the press and the server validates that what you sent matches your intent.

Wasn't aware of that, but I believe it, given how laggy actions can be compared to other games.

As far as their band-aid solutions I just wish they would devote that dev resources to an actual solution. I understand why they don't (cost), but like I've echo'd before. It's likely going to be a problem eventually and the longer they wait to fix it, the harder it will be.

It's already a problem, is the thing. Chocobo storage is a great example of the types of workarounds already required because of it. As they add more and more stuff to the game, it's not going to get better. It's going to be very hard to fix at this point, but it's worth investing in given how much of a difference it'd make.

[Lalarrific]

Actually that's the best and wisest decision. you are giving them the right message. I want to play your game but I don't want your overpriced cash shop items (which became more expensive over time step by step and character only lol).
If only everyone was thinking like that SE would have forced to retreat with their cash shop and premium app plans.

I ended up ditching the extra retainer, too.

[Talraen]

It's already a problem, is the thing. Chocobo storage is a great example of the types of workarounds already required because of it. As they add more and more stuff to the game, it's not going to get better. It's going to be very hard to fix at this point, but it's worth investing in given how much of a difference it'd make.

Why are chocobo saddlebags a problem, exactly? If we are stuck with 140 inventory slots for the rest of FFXIV's existence, why is that such a big deal?

[Seig345]

[...]

Items are stored in databases of some sort and surely are identified by a number. All you need is the ID of the items that are visible for the game to fetch the images, and images alone. If they are not stored on the clients computers in the first place (there should be a reason why the game have dozens of GB, right?!). You don't need to load anything else, their stats (since characters total stats are loaded anyway), their icons, their tooltips etc. Certainly not the entire inventory.

[...]

Of course the gear is represented by numbers, the server isn't sending you the entire graphical data for every piece of gear you have. The art assets are one of the things that are stored locally on your computer. But your gear is still a part of your inventory. You're capable of switching through all the gear that your current job can wear in your armoury chest AND inventory during a duty, in some cases even equip something that dropped.

Your character doesn't "hop" from server to server, this isn't ReBoot. When you leave your home server, your character is set aside and a copy is created on the destination server. There's no way for the destination server to tell your client what you're wearing or what you have in your inventory (and as others have said, hotbars are currently clientside only so the server can't look at what you have on those) without receiving a full copy of your character data.

But while the server can predictably work with loading inventory as each character loads in, it can't predict your inventory needs "on demand" every single time someone opens their inventory... If you're saying it would go ahead and keep everything loaded after that first opening of the inventory/armoury chest, I'm not sure where you're offsetting anything rather than just redistributing it in a less predictable/stable way.

Repeatedly stating how you're repeating yourself only serves to clutter up your posts, making them harder to read. Stating that you're cluttering up your posts into walls of text by repeating yourself doesn't exactly absolve that either.