Recent Q&A about glamour log...

[Vahlnir]

I wouldn't be surprised if the limitation is more about dyes than anything else. It's easy to say "WoW does this" but WoW doesn't have the extensive dye system. XIV ends up with a lot more variation even within a single item.

This is a good point. In WoW...your armor is what it is. There's no dyeing it or changing the color, unless you pursue the transmoggable variants which sometimes have alternate color schemes or model alterations, which just about every content in the game has to some extent. Here it's a bit more complicated than that. We have a lot of pieces of gear, and I'm not gonna bother trying to count just how many dyes and tints of each color there are. It's a lot, and this very well could be a limitation in and of itself.

[Theodric]

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.

[Puremallace]

I wouldn't be surprised if the limitation is more about dyes than anything else. It's easy to say "WoW does this" but WoW doesn't have the extensive dye system. XIV ends up with a lot more variation even within a single item.

This has been said before by the dev team but that art team that everyone praises thinks they can do a better at designing then players is what that boils down to. They tried to explain it off that WoW armor is made up of like different shades and it would be hard but in other answers they have said they have a "design vision" for how they want gear to look.

[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.

[Theodric]

Clipping is inevitable. I've never played a MMO that lacked it in some form. I think sliders are cool, since unlike half-hearted pandering attempts they actually allow a broad range of players to be satisfied and design a character to their liking within the set specifications of a playable race.

As for it being a lot of work? Yeah, maybe - but if corners were cut then I'm disinclined to be overly sympathetic. The development team are quick to ask players to spend money on merchandise to support the game, be it through the Mog Station or the Square Enix store. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect more of that money to go towards the game itself.

I also think it doesn't matter if the games are different when they're in the same genre and are direct competitors. If two supermarkets compete for customers then they generally strive to check what the other is offering and match it with a version of their own. In this case, when it comes to a glamour log, FFXIV's system is the inferior option to me and I'd like it to be equal to or greater than ESO's version. 'Glamour is the real end game' is a meme the development team themselves are aware of, after all.

[SniperCT]

I also think it doesn't matter if the games are different when they're in the same genre and are direct competitors. If two supermarkets compete for customers then they generally strive to check what the other is offering and match it with a version of their own. In this case, when it comes to a glamour log, FFXIV's system is the inferior option to me and I'd like it to be equal to or greater than ESO's version. 'Glamour is the real end game' is a meme the development team themselves are aware of, after all.

Yeah but one supermarket has these huge supporting columns in it that disrupt the flow of the shelves and customers while the other supermarket is free to make the flow a lot easier. In order to match it the first supermarket has to demolish the columns without the building collapsing. It's not a matter of what the markets are offering in this case, it's a matter of the base structure of the markets being different.

eta: I want to say I WANT better glamour system more plates and a catalog. I just understand that it's not easy and saying it should easy because someone else did it is flat out not going to change that.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

My glamour dresser is full and has been for so long now. My retainers have some gear on them now. I don't like it at all. I feel I will lose things. I can't even buy mogstation outfits now because I don't have anywhere to put them.