Recent Q&A about glamour log...

[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.

[Endariel]

I'll let my idea from a while ago, it would be easier and more cost-effective to store glamour log client-side with a server back up every once in a while.
Of course, that introduces the element of "cheating" aka inserting IDs in your local glamour log file (no code is unbreakable), but that should not be an issue because items cannot be stored (they are added automatically) nor can they be retrieved (only used for transmog).
Yes, i suppose wearing Alex ultimate weapons can be missleasing, but you can just check if the player had cleared that instance to have access to this transmog, and if not, ban. (Harder for crafted gear, but I'm sure there's a way)
It would be something at least

[ItMe]

yeah no, maybe players should totally avoid talking about technical things of the game...

I don't understand what you mean.
I assume this is directed at me?
Can you elaborate please?

[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.

[Enkidoh]

It's worse than that...
FF14 still has code left over from FF11.
Some of the code FF14 is running on was developed in 1999!

Citation please, because from what I knew about FFXI and XIV's development this statement is basically complete hyperbole (if not outright nonsense). FFXIV ARR had 1.0 player character data from FFXIV 1.0 transferred into ARR, but this is not 'old recycled code' but just a table of parameters that controlled character settings like what gear to start with in their inventory and what levels and EXP they would start at. Basically it's just a set of flags.

It's not 'recycled code' from 1.0, which is why ARR runs a lot more stable than 1.0 ever did. ARR uses an entirelly different game engine to 1.0 and even though certain gear, character models and enemy models may have returned from 1.0, they've been rerendered from scratch in the new engine and are not simply old 1.0 models (the proof of this is the Healer's Robe, in 1.0 this had a huge gap at the back when equipped to a miqo'te, for their tail to poke through, but in ARR, it's different, when worn on a miqo'te the gap is filled in and the miqo'te tail is instead attached directly to the model and looks a lot better, proving it is a new and entirelly different model to the 1.0 version).

And it should go without saying FFXIV 1.0 was an entirelly different engine to FFXI, a PS2 game (FFXIV 1.0 used the PS3-designed engine Crystal Tools), and used it's own independent coding that had nothing to do with FFXI (this is why 1.0 was such a mess software wise). The '1.0 spaghetti code' statement is just a stupid meme at this point with no basis in reality.

[DPZ2]

it would be easier and more cost-effective to store glamour log client-side with a server back up every once in a while.

This might work if the game was PC-specific. That's one of the reasons WoW can get by dumping so much of what they do on the PC of the player.

In this game a single Warrior of Light can be accessed, and can play the game with others, from both PC and console. This cross-platform play involves most of the 'server-side' solutions that are in place.

Other software producers find problems with cross-platform play to be insurmountable. For reference look no further than Call of Duty, Diablo 3 and similar games.

[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.

[Shougun]

I'm not tech person, so take this with a grain of salt when it comes to me comparing ff14 glamoir with wow. World of warcrafts armor data is prob very low due to it being simple in design and details and only armor is green armor and above. Common armor is not in the transmog system and wow has practically hardly any armor design for Transmog. It is not so simple to say if wow can do it then FF14 also can. Truth is 14 has more detail high resolution armor and more armor overall that is invested in their glamour system.

There are games with more complicated gears and still found a way to provide multi-thousand glamour system - which isn't to say therefore it should be easy to do or whatever (different programmers, setups (code, budget, goals), technical debt, etc). I think the main issue is how the core of FFXIV handles this, not the general concept either a technical debt from being rushed or an accidental foresight issue that has created a near unsurmountable issue. Something to add that I think might relate to the issue is unique to FFXIV that I don't believe other games do is in effect our glamour log is just a bank for equipment (rather than a library of images, it's really a bank for equipment specific items).

If they intend to carry FFXIV on for a long while then I think there is an imperativeness of figuring this sort of issue out (relates to housing too I'd assume, long ago I also recall Yoshida talking about how they programmed memory was a bit old school - made me think like imagine using a string vs an array of characters).

One of the things that WoW commented on was that they consistently worked to update their databases, so that might also be a difference - given that WoW didn't have a 1.0 rush out and then continued to smooth things obsessively (and over time had multiple other massive multiplayer games, and their teams, to learn and reference knowledge from). Meanwhile FFXIV had to untangle what I imagine is some technical debt due to being rushed for ARR (they did a crazy good job considering that time crunch, but one might imagine these issues easier to fix if they hadn't had to do that and were able to code with more time for foresight and growth into the unknown). Of course on that comment of growth Yoshida has commented quite a few times that it did better faster than expected (early housing for example was originally intended for only FC). Probably important to note at this point that they have said they're not using old code anymore, if I recall correctly at least. That doesn't mean, imo, that it didn't create technical debt in the sense that they went from problem code that they had to quickly fix, maybe not getting to have the time required to ensure everything they wanted and then quickly built upon that code making it in some ways sort of 'solidified'. Like when they add inventory type content to the game Yoshida always mentions how absolutely careful they are, because it could be a super massively enormously dire situation if done wrong (showing that vague sense of 'solidification', not truly but in that direction). Dire consequences, as one more note, is not really unique to any particular situation lol (always opportunities to fantastically break things, even in the most godly of code) - just that when perhaps what you started to build upon wasn't as optimal as you would have hoped that is a bit unfortunate.

Of course the above is why I think of them making a new mmo sometimes, besides just the purely selfish fact that it might be cool to see something new, personally hope for better memory management opportunities (glamour, housing), more accurate and snappy movement, more actual airships and boco lol, and feel like a child again, and some of the things / themes Yoshida has said he wants to make I'd like to play, so an off comment "If I live long enough to make another I'd like to", is like "yay, have good health!", there is the fact that some of these issues may be near as well to make a new mmo (not now, clearly let 6.0 breath, and see how that does as well, but being worked on in the background for proper oven time). For example having to redo the entire game for textures, given they said they don't have assets in the background that are higher quality (iirc), would be an incredible task requiring a lot of work. Maybe they can utilize some really fancy lightning and shaders to get around some of that, or some AI driven modifications. Besides that then is still talking about deep seeded code, which is probably more difficult to change than the already highly difficult situations one has to deal with because of the rush long ago (and the very consistent, and well appreciated, pace of content released there after- leaving little room to sit and preen and then upgrade everything). Of course he may have had set aside a team for that, it's dangerous to assume what goes on in the headquarters (and probably unwise), and or how much one is willing to spend.

Anyway, more has been done with more complicated systems - so in a void of just discussing systems and not specific situations of a game itself.. "it can be done". Then adding in all the specific scenarios around the game.. /shrug /throw hands in air. lol. Certainly a desirable system though. Item log would have been very cool, will be very cool if added, and definitely on the list of things that might make someone's head turn a specific direction.

[MiaShino]

Tis kinda nice to see so many discussing the more technical side of things, many times when these topics arise most defend with limited knowledge.

I was gonna go into some of the detail about likely cpus Square uses at their datacenters and number of available pcie lanes for the ssds they are probably using but have decided it would be waste of time.

When helping with the development of several emulators for another popular mmo I ran two servers locally while assisting with other popular servers. The first server was for the testing and ran on one single core amd 64bit cpu. The second server ran for some time without issue on one old spare HP dual core laptop that still used the ancient amd turion cpus. It sustained several hundred players with minimal issues and occasionally had to be run via sprint mobile broadband during outages. All this at time where instancing was not really a thing let alone something emulators could accomplish so was no way to distribute load across multiple servers yet.

It may surprise many at how little resources properly coded servers will actually use and this was not properly coded server. It was a cobbled together emulator some Russians and a random Lala were working on by inspecting packets between the client and server then approximating what their servers were probably doing. Jeeez am remembering we used Lua for mob scripting when this was developed, I believe the modern emulators still fricken do even now! Only ever experienced issues if too many players were engaging mobs in the over world simultaneously. Swapping items in and out of backpacks caused very minor disk usage over on the database (sql) server managing inventory once information moved from memory to disk. Ohhh right! The server was using ide mechanical drives.. you know, those old ribbon cables? That.

What ever is occurring within Square's databases must be addressed if the game grows and it is. Head on over to the 90002 disconnection thread, or watch Asmongold lagging out in the Vale. Executives can only burry the head in the sand so long. It should have been done properly from the start but I know better and is not how this works.