It's time (Option to Hide other players Glamour)

[Awha]

I mean what is next? I want all races to be hume? Come on.

Slippery slopes are kind of meh. Though if you want everyone else on your screen to be "hume" cool. I would have no idea you would have it enabled so it would not impact me in the slightist

I mean that is what it all boils down to right? I don't want to give people an inch when it comes to options on how they see my char. People like that are never happy that someone dressing up in a silly outfit is enough to ruin the almighty immersion. We can't take you serious.

From my perspective it just seems people are against the idea out of principle more so then anything else. Maybe I am just an odd one out, or it is because I have a background with mods. I just have a hard time understanding why such a feature would change anything in the game. I just do not see people switching to well everyone will be using the feature so what I look like does not matter.

Personally the reasoning behind the request matters very little to me, I am one of those frog and pig suit players. I am pro option though if SE could provide an option that made others game a tad more enjoyable without causing any noticeable consequence I am all for it. Sure not the best standard to live by, but that is the stance I take and part of the reason I got into mods back in the day. I wished to enhance my experience with something I already enjoyed.

I get that the idea of someone changing how a character looks is hurtful on a personal level, but on the other hand I do not think it is healthy to go around getting worked up over a change that outside of three possible situations one would normally not even know was taking place. Though I am one of those out of sight out of mind types, so my view does lead to some reductios that most would not be on board with, but that is another issue altogether.

For me all this boils down to curiosity, since SE probably will never add such a feature, but I do find the reasoning behind others opinions interesting.

Sorry hit my post limit.

[Krotoan]

I mean what is next? I want all races to be hume? Come on.

We call this a slippery slope argument.

"I want to be able to not see ridiculous/ugly/jarring outfits" does not equal "I want racial purity ingame".

[Packetdancer]

Yes, because wanting a single competent programmer to spend 6 hours to implement such a small feature is completely unreasonable.

Okay, time for Words™. (I must be good at Words, because I have Many of Them.)

So... I used to work in the games industry, and while I work on embedded systems these days—because there's less crunch time, more support for rigorous testing, and fewer people making online death-threats than game development involved—I was formerly an engine programmer for an engine used on two MMOs (one unreleased, one released). And I still have worked periodically on gaming hardware for my current job, so have had to deal with game companies on a day-to-day basis as well.

So while I'm not familiar with the innards FFXIV's code specifically, I can speak in general terms.

One thing to keep in mind is that game development often works on an older model than folks are used to; where most folks who do development these days are used to the distributed model of development where everyone has their own image of a source repository and can work on things simultaneously (i.e., git or Mercurial), many game companies still adhere to the older single-central-repository method (i.e., things like Perforce). As such, if any one person is working on a file, it is usually checked out and locked, meaning no one else can work on that file.

This can sometimes be important when you're dealing with large binary files (precomputed/compiled maps, models, textures, etc.) but not so great for people working on source code in parallel. So keep in mind that you don't just have the impact of a single developer working on the feature, but if SquareEnix uses that development method, you are also potentially making it impossible for anyone else to work on anything that touches that particular part of the game code while the feature is being made.

Beyond that, there's been about a dozen different implementations discussed on how to handle this feature; some of them might take only six hours to implement (assuming no contention over files and without including testing), while others would likely take considerably longer.

A single client-side switch to disable glamour globally (and just show the actual gear) would probably take very little time. I'd need to sniff the protocol to see whether the client already receives the actual gear information (for showing when you use 'Examine' on someone) or whether it queries it on-the-fly when you Examine—or, I guess, go look at the XIV packet capture library used by things like Teamcraft and ACT to see what the packets look like. (And to be honest, I do not care enough to do either of those things for purposes of this post.)

If the former, it would be trivial. If the latter, you could still implement it in a pinch without server-side changes by executing the same query at the beginning of a dungeon to pull down the real gear and display it instead. (The downside would be that if you have to query it manually, it would be additional network traffic for folks who might already be bandwidth constrained. However, if I remember what I saw about how the models are referenced, I think it would be about 4-6 bytes per slot, for ten slots, so at most 60 bytes of extra traffic plus whatever overhead the network protocol entails for message headers.)

A single client-side switch to disable glamour globally and put people in an artifact gear set appropriate to the job would take slightly longer. You'd need to define a gearset per-job, but that could still be done entirely within the client. We do already receive their class/job data for people in our party (for purposes of displaying the icon in the party list), so no additional information would be needed from the server in that case; it's possible the job data is also sent with people in the open world, but if not, demonstrably the capability already exists to query it (since you can examine players). The downside would be that doing effectively a simultaneous examine on 20 or 30 players at once might have a performance impact on entering a zone.

A purely client-side glamour blacklist per-user would also not require server changes, but there might be some performance implications. The game engine already seems to be going a bit gray at the temples, and in some cases it already takes a while to deal with loading things in and out; I'm not sure you want to introduce an additional lookup operation every time a player is instanced, especially as the impact could get nastier as the glamour blacklist got longer. It probably wouldn't matter in dungeons, but it might have a significant impact on things like loading into Limsa.

Also, as a purely client-side thing, it would be stored locally and potentially lost if you reinstalled or moved from machine to machine. And introducing more moving parts definitely means you need to do more comprehensive QA on the feature, as well as adding more UI (to manage such a blacklist, in case you want to see who all you've blacklisted and remove someone who you added accidentally).

Adding a server-side blacklist—where it would be processed on the client, but stored on the server like the real blacklist—would definitely take longer. You've got all the conditions of the implementation I just described one paragraph ago, but now you're also needing to modify the server. And any time you modify the servers you're dealing with a lot more QA, as well as potentially needing to bring the game down entirely for maintenance to roll out the change.

Adding a fully server-side blacklist—where the server acts on your blacklist to determine what glamour to even send—would be the least-ideal option, in my opinion. zYou're now asking the server to parse each player's blacklist for every other player it instances into their view of the world and send the real-gear model IDs instead of the glamoured ones. While the performance hit would probably be negligable, it's still a lot more work for little real gain.

Even if the change is fairly minor, you want to test it thoroughly; it could be anywhere from a day or two of work (and testing/validation) to a couple of weeks.

Of course, the thing is that the folks who want the feature are estimating the time required at the lowest end of things ("It would only take a couple of hours!") while the folks who don't want the feature are estimating the time required at the highest end of things ("It would prevent an entire other feature being done for the patch where they rolled this out!").

Because, of course, those estimates make the preferred choice seem the 'reasonable' path. (And no one is actually defining what implementation they're using as their yardstick for how long the feature would take.)

And in reality, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

(As, likely, is the rest of this thread.)

[Jadedsins]

Slippery slopes are kind of meh. Though if you want everyone else on your screen to be "hume" cool. I would have no idea you would have it enabled so it would not impact me in the slightist.

I mean that is what it all boils down to right? I don't want to give people an inch when it comes to options on how they see my char. People like that are never happy that someone dressing up in a silly outfit is enough to ruin the almighty immersion. We can't take you serious.

[Krotoan]

I mean that is what it all boils down to right? I don't want to give people an inch when it comes to options on how they see my char. People like that are never happy that someone dressing up in a silly outfit is enough to ruin the almighty immersion. We can't take you serious.

Inversely it seems silly to the other side that peoples "almighty expression" is ruined by simply the idea that someone might not see it.

While you are welcome to your perspective, it's eye opening to consider that others may consider your reasoning ridiculous as well.

[Lubu_Mykono]

I'll leave my Bridesmaid dress clad Male Roe in Colibri Pink and Tsukuyomi wig afk in the middle of Limsa and there ain't anything you can do it about it.

[Krotoan]

I'll leave my Bridesmaid dress clad Male Roe in Colibri Pink and Tsukuyomi wig afk in the middle of Limsa and there ain't anything you can do it about it.

All this does is make arguments that people use glamours as harassment with no repercussions. Wearing what you like is one thing, purposefully dressing to antagonize and placing yourself in common hubs is another.

[Nariel]

All this does is make arguments that people use glamours as harassment with no repercussions. Wearing what you like is one thing, purposefully dressing to antagonize and placing yourself in common hubs is another.

I've never, ever in years of game and AFKing in hubs and I mean it, I never once in my gaming lifetime on any MMO witnessed an argument by people offended by a silly attire. I never read a single line of anybody being mad at someone doing silly gear or being offended by a Colibri Pink bridemaid dress on the world chat E V E R. People having fun together being silly with no other reason to have fun ? Yup, definitely took part of it too many time to count, how about you stop being special snowflakes and have fun rather than being offended by what make MMO so special ?

[SturmChurro]

I've never, ever in years of game and AFKing in hubs and I mean it, I never once in my gaming lifetime on any MMO witnessed an argument by people offended by a silly attire. I never read a single line of anybody being mad at someone doing silly gear or being offended by a Colibri Pink bridemaid dress on the world chat E V E R. People having fun together being silly with no other reason to have fun ? Yup, definitely took part of it too many time too count, how about you stop being special snowflakes and have fun rather than being offended by what make MMO so special ?

Well, now you have. This is the great community of FFXIV that everyone always talks about! It is what makes this place one of a kind.

[Nariel]

Well, now you have. This is the great community of FFXIV that everyone always talks about! It is what makes this place one of a kind.

I mean in game, forums have always been a weird place with people ranting about just anything to show the world how special they are.