Recent Q&A about glamour log...

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

There is EASILY a financial and practical reason to prioritize this issue but they keep treating it like some side thing.

The thing is, FF14 is still growing in sub numbers with the current inventory system. To shareholders, CEOs, and people who prioritize profit, you think they care about how a revamped database -could- help the game when the current method is working just fine? (Especially when the current method allows even greater profits by making people pay for extra retainers instead of getting space...y'know, for free?)

For the amount of work it'd re-take to redo a lot of the game's most core foundations, it's likely entire patch cycles of dev time would have to be gutted. Try explaining 'yeah, we have to cease all content production for 6-9months which is the stuff that keeps our playerbase subbed and staying in-game to change our code foundation to implement features that technically have zero tangible positive effects on increasing player counts and any benefits to sub counts can be only speculative' to the CEOs & shareholders of Square and see how quickly they look at you like you've gone insane. To the people actually giving Yoshi-P and his team the funding for FF14, it is a side issue, since it would interfere with the content cycle which is what actually makes FF14 its profits. Look at how people lost their minds over the long gaps between 5.2 <-> 5.3 & 5.5 <-> EW to see how well that'd fly over if you told the playerbase they're in for another ultra long break.

But that being said, I honestly don't think it's an issue related to their item databasing. I think it's an issue of server I/O load limitations.

Yoshi-P has constantly alluded across many Q&As to the fact that any planned increase in inventory has to be done with extreme planning due to the fact that with how they've designed their Server<->Client interactions, the inventory chest & armory chest are always loaded so that they can be backed up every few milliseconds. As a result, even a single additional item slot being added increases the server I/O load by the size of that slot * the number of currently online players on every read & write pass to the server. For an example, if we pretend that each item slot is 1kb in size (which its likely larger) and pretend there's a million players online, that 1kb of extra inventory space means the server is now backing up around an additional GB of data every few milliseconds, adding up to TBs over the course of an hour. And that's if its just a kb to start with.

Taking a look at the Eorzea Database, there is roughly 30k pieces of equipment when you filter out non-equipment items and leave only actual equipment. If each item only needs a single bit in the glamour log to determine if you've unlocked it or not, it'd need about ~4kb total. If we pretend FF14 has a million concurrently online users at the same time, that easily translates into well over 10TB of data passage every hour.

If the datacenter Square is hosting one of their DC's hardware has a special contract that says the FF14 hardware cannot exceed a certain amount of data per month, the reason behind their extreme hesitancy to increase inventory ever becomes much more clear. Especially if the contract cannot be changed for higher I/O throughput because of financial decisions by higher ups at Square. It's not an issue they can or not; even with their current code foundation, they can always find a way to create some hacky extra way to add in something. There's clearly some unseen reasoning, likely something beyond Yoshi-P's control that's blocking them.

[Nanchi]

What about the extra slots in the inventory for Key items?
I have no knowledge in this field at all but in all of the years I've been playing I don't think those have been ever used up. Could they make use of those slots?

[Theodric]

What about the extra slots in the inventory for Key items?
I have no knowledge in this field at all but in all of the years I've been playing I don't think those have been ever used up. Could they make use of those slots?

They're reserved for certain levequests. As in, when you collect an item from a levequest they're stored in the key item inventory for as long as the levequest exists in the quest log. In theory, you could pick up a whole bunch of levequests, grab the items and never hand them in.

Presumably it's why other MMO's just have a checkbox for whether you gathered something or not. Which would probably work better for FFXIV.

[SniperCT]

The Elder Scrolls Online has the equivalent of a glamour log as well as a dye system. Furthermore, the dyes can be used to dye specific parts of each piece of glamour. As if that wasn't enough, the character models themselves come in many different shapes and sizes due to a pretty broad range of sliders. You can make a character slim, heavily muscled and even give them a beer belly if you so wish.

So I'm not inclined to pay much heed to claims that it would be 'too hard' to do it in FFXIV. Both games arrived on the scene roughly around the same time, too, if I recall correctly.

lol pretty sure ff14 still has code left over from 1.0, which came out years before ESO, and could likely be 15 years old at this point. also ESO came out a year after 2.0 so that wasn't the same time.

additionally, you have to build a game from the ground up with these kinds of things in mind. It would be a massive amount of work to implement. so yes, yes it COULD be too hard to do in ff14, what are you even talking about, they're completely different games with compeletely different coding with completely different design philosphies

Could they do it? yes. But we wouldn't see 7.0 until 2025. you obviously have no idea (and no desire to accept or understand) how much work this would actually be.

Also sliders suck, you can see in ESO how often armor clips or even has gaps in it because they can't make it fit everything. in FF14 they just have to make sure armor works on a set number of body types.

But that being said, I honestly don't think it's an issue related to their item databasing. I think it's an issue of server I/O load limitations.

This...actually makes a huge amount of sense.

[GrizzlyTank]

The thing is, FF14 is still growing in sub numbers with the current inventory system. To shareholders, CEOs, and people who prioritize profit, you think they care about how a revamped database -could- help the game when the current method is working just fine? (Especially when the current method allows even greater profits by making people pay for extra retainers instead of getting space...y'know, for free?)

It's not working fine though. It's making it so that collectors and completionists are pushed into a situation where they have to constantly discard their rewards and goals. And even casual players that are playing all there roles quickly find themselves at a full inventory.

It's not a fun feeling having to think about what you have to discard whenever you log onto the game.

But that being said, I honestly don't think it's an issue related to their item databasing. I think it's an issue of server I/O load limitations.

Which they have been avoiding by putting the access to certain features such as wardrobe in instances that isn't accessed as much by the server.

And again, there is no reason for them to log every single item individually since most armors comes in clearly defined sets.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

It's not working fine though. It's making it so that collectors and completionists are pushed into a situation where they have to constantly discard their rewards and goals. And even casual players that are playing all there roles quickly find themselves at a full inventory.

It's not a fun feeling having to think about what you have to discard whenever you log onto the game.

And yet SHB has seen the highest sub counts ever in the game's history. To the people after the $$$, everything Yoshi-P is doing right now content wise is clearly working. Again; tell me how Yoshi-P can explain to the CEO's & shareholders they'd need to cease content production for well over a year to re-write their foundation and do extensive Q&A to be able to make sure they didn't break any system tied to items in order to be able to implement features where benefits of them can only be speculative, compared to the current code base and content cycle which is making FF14 buckoo amounts of money and clearly keeping the game ultra successful. Go ahead, I'll put on my publisher hat and critique your pitch from all the experiences I've had at the software company I've worked at during board meetings I attended from CEOs who don't know the first thing about coding so you can have an idea of what Yoshi-P likely has to go through :^)

it doesn't matter whether you think think the current system works or not. It clearly works to make Square money, and that's all that matters to them.

Which they have been avoiding by putting the access to certain features such as wardrobe in instances that isn't accessed as much by the server.

And again, there is no reason for them to log every single item individually since most armors comes in clearly defined sets.

And they do so by putting them in out of the way areas like the Inn to make sure the average amount of users having it open at any given time is low from intentional inconvenience. Clearly there's a server I/O issue going on in the backend so most systems they implement have to have artificial difficulty in access implemented. (Saddlebag cannot be used in instances since the instance server doesn't copy it over during the instance load process, Armoire & glamour dresser are intentionally put in ery out of the way places to make them much harder to use on purpose, etc.)

and depends. I have high doubts they're interested in giving players access to entire sets just for getting a single piece of it, since it would kill the ability of them to force players to re-run content in order to get certain things. I have no doubts if we ever see a glamour log, it'll be built very similar to the glamour dresser, where you'll have to sacrifice the item to the eldritch god living inside your dresser in order to permanently obtain the item, which would mean every item would have to be flagged individually.

Even if we assume they put the glamour log in an extremely out of the way area like the dresser, they would still have to take their time in implementing it and doing tons of testing with it to make sure the expected server I/O load of potentially a million players all having it open at once is within the bounds they want it to be. Because when something isn't within the bounds they Q&A for...you get Raubahn EX.

[GrizzlyTank]

I have high doubts they're interested in giving players access to entire sets just for getting a single piece of it, since it would kill the ability of them to force players to re-run content in order to get certain things. I have no doubts if we ever see a glamour log, it'll be built very similar to the glamour dresser, where you'll have to sacrifice the item to the eldritch god living inside your dresser in order to permanently obtain the item, which would mean every item would have to be flagged individually.

Even if we assume they put the glamour log in an extremely out of the way area like the dresser, they would still have to take their time in implementing it and doing tons of testing with it to make sure the expected server I/O load of potentially a million players all having it open at once is within the bounds they want it to be. Because when something isn't within the bounds they Q&A for...you get Raubahn EX.

Haven't mentioned anything about giving players full access to an entire set by just getting one piece. If data storage and server access is such a critical thing for them they could still easily utilize their own achievement system for a large portion of rng gated glamour.

Example: 1 alliance raid got 7 different sets. Once you get a full set you can present it to an appraiser that gives you a token related to that set as an item and once you got 7 tokens one for each set, those can be exchanged for an achievement which now makes it possible for you to re-acquire the set from someone. Here we would have 35 different items all of whom is logged to one bit. For all alliance raids this would be 12 soon 15 bit in total, for raids it would be double with 30 bit due to normal/savage and max level dungeons it's 24-30. These are again nothing compared to the data they need for just our inventory.

And this method wouldn't even need a major overhaul of their back-end.

[Caitlyn]

I think they just dont want to lose money generated by people who have additional retainers.

It may help if they rework their item system, since there are tons of items sharing the same 3D model.