Recent Q&A about glamour log...

[Colt47]

Okay so there are probably two things here that are going on that impacted the system design knowing how the culture is native in japan for software developers. First off, Software Developers were not considered a high end job in Japan as much as hardware development positions, at least from what I remember talking to devs back in 2013-2014, which led to the country falling behind on the technological ladder in a lot of places. This probably led to recycled code from older games getting used for the database, or the design was done in such a way that it was based on an older and less up to date idea.

Second, Database design is something that has to be laid out pretty early in development since once it goes online it can take a lot of time to migrate data. Could they actually fix their database to be more efficient in isolation? Absolutely! A database of credit card transactions could be easily transformed into a more efficient and normalized system with far fewer bugs and issues.

What is really the problem in this case is all the code that accesses the said database. Most likely, they are in a situation where the work needed to fix legacy code to function on a new database system would entail complete rewrites to the way they handle inventory and gear in game, to the point that it might take an entire expansions development time to accomplish. And then they might have to take the servers down for a week for an upgrade depending on how long it takes to migrate all the data to the new system.

I'm all for it and would keep paying my sub through the venture, but telling the company management "it's a good idea to fix our database and redo our code base" without a strong financial reason is an uphill battle. As customers we can communicate we want a better inventory system, but at the same time we tend to also want to eat the cake at the same time it is being baked. I think Yoshi P. put in a strong argument to get that system up and running because I know his team can do it, he knows his team can do it, and the players want it. Just it's one of those things where getting the task done would be a crazy amount of work.