Account wide item limitations are no longer an issue?

[KisaiTenshi]

I guess it's possible, but it would make a lot more sense for the system to just check that once the first time a character logs in.

Simple check: Does this character need to be given an account-wide item?
Yes? Add it to their mail and trigger the mail notification -> Flag it as received
No? Just do nothing

If there is seriously some kind of bizarre 8th grade VB MyVar1 programmer limit to the amount of items an account can have, I just give up. There's no reason for there to be a limit to these things. Although SE has shown remarkable incompetence when it comes to system design with FFXIV. It may not be ALL their fault since they had to build on the 1.0 system, but come on... this one had to be obvious from the start.

Moogle Mail has a limit of 130 messages, and you can send 5 items per message.

I leave this message in my mailbox to denote when the game started up.



Note how when you "Reward Delivery Request" on the upper-right button of the inbox you get the message displayed. This right away tells us that the reward system is something not processed by the game server, but rather some out-of-band process that has to be queued.

So it probably has to read through your entire subscription history, on every character and every service attached to the service account. If there is a limitation involved, it likely has to do with the number of characters on the account (eg 40, 8 per server max.)

In MMO development, or any client-server development, you have to take into account the bandwidth that is wasted by doing needless things, so if sending something to a character at time of purchase costs X bytes, but checking if the player has every possible account-wide cash shop item takes X^n bytes, then you're going to want to have as few account-wide items as possible.

I'm not going to defend this practice by SE, but from a software development point of view, you want to push as little data between servers as possible, and it's likely the account server is global, or at least where the database is. So anything that puts unnecessary load on that database you want to avoid. It's also entirely possible that the database is shared by more than just FFXIV, thus requiring other games co-operations. I do remember at some point seeing FFXI in there somewhere.... ah yes, if you click "List Subscriptions" it goes back to your Square-Enix account. So it indeedy looks like the service account is tied directly to your Square-Enix account, thus they likely have some corporate BS to deal with to put things at the account level.

[Callinon]

Moogle Mail has a limit of 130 messages, and you can send 5 items per message.

I leave this message in my mailbox to denote when the game started up.

Note how when you "Reward Delivery Request" on the upper-right button of the inbox you get the message displayed. This right away tells us that the reward system is something not processed by the game server, but rather some out-of-band process that has to be queued.

So it probably has to read through your entire subscription history, on every character and every service attached to the service account. If there is a limitation involved, it likely has to do with the number of characters on the account (eg 40, 8 per server max.)

In MMO development, or any client-server development, you have to take into account the bandwidth that is wasted by doing needless things, so if sending something to a character at time of purchase costs X bytes, but checking if the player has every possible account-wide cash shop item takes X^n bytes, then you're going to want to have as few account-wide items as possible.

I'm not going to defend this practice by SE, but from a software development point of view, you want to push as little data between servers as possible, and it's likely the account server is global, or at least where the database is. So anything that puts unnecessary load on that database you want to avoid. It's also entirely possible that the database is shared by more than just FFXIV, thus requiring other games co-operations. I do remember at some point seeing FFXI in there somewhere.... ah yes, if you click "List Subscriptions" it goes back to your Square-Enix account. So it indeedy looks like the service account is tied directly to your Square-Enix account, thus they likely have some corporate BS to deal with to put things at the account level.

Interesting, I wasn't aware of that button. Given its existence I agree with your interpretation of the way their system probably works.

Ok, so if we assume the existence of a global accounts server that's managing all of these accounts and would therefore be responsible for distributing account-wide items, then we simply go back a step in where the item distribution has to happen.

So our flow now looks something like this:
Login -> Account server checks for content -> Got some? Send it to the FFXIV server to add to the account file and flag it as received -> FFXIV server takes over and sends it to the various characters.

In this scenario the FFXIV server itself does have to keep a permanent record of account-wide items so they can be distributed to any new characters created, but this shouldn't be any more significant than keeping a record of any other items a player has accumulated.

As for the mog mail space limits, that's an easy one. You queue them to distribute the max number of mails at a time and then just send the next batch the next time the queue is checked. WoW's been doing that forever.

[worldofneil]

Hey guys, thanks for the feedback on the thread, but I don't think I explained very well what I meant.

I wasn't so much concerned with the technical reasons behind account wide item limitations, but simply are there still limitations or not?

SE told us that does to account wide item limitations that had switched the minions with Eorzean Symphony and the Artbook to single character only. However since then they've bought out 4 mounts that are account wide, suggesting these previously mentioned limitations are no longer in effect.

Will future in-game item codes therefore be going back to account wide? (and will those two items also be changed to account wide?)

[polyphonica]

SE told us that does to account wide item limitations that had switched the minions with Eorzean Symphony and the Artbook to single character only. However since then they've bought out 4 mounts that are account wide, suggesting these previously mentioned limitations are no longer in effect.

It almost certainly just means that they decided to allocate the remaining account space to mounts they were going to sell on the MogStation (and of those included in really expensive merchandise like figures), rather than to pack-in extras they were going to include with other merchandise like books and CDs. I doubt very much that they addressed the limitation, sadly. They way they phrased it, it wasn't that they were at a hard stop, but that they were "rationing" the remaining space.

FWIW, I definitely think that codes included with all merchandise (including books/CDs/etc.) should be account-bound.