Suggestion: Improved Glamour System

[Rongway]

isnt that the same kind of check thats performed every time a house/retainer/saddlebag is used?

The retainer database tables can only be accessed while you're at a bell. The saddlebag database tables can only be accessed when you're not in an instance. The internal housing database tables only when you're inside the house. They limit the places we can query the databases so that the servers aren't inundated with constant access requests, because access requests take server resources to look up the data and bandwidth to transmit the data. The server resources and the bandwidth are also things that the devs have an interest in minimizing, besides the storage space for the data.

[Lihtleita]

The retainer database tables can only be accessed while you're at a bell. The saddlebag database tables can only be accessed when you're not in an instance. The internal housing database tables only when you're inside the house. They limit the places we can query the databases so that the servers aren't inundated with constant access requests, because access requests take server resources to look up the data and bandwidth to transmit the data. The server resources and the bandwidth are also things that the devs have an interest in minimizing, besides the storage space for the data.

in this case wouldnt limiting acessing the glamour log to the glamour dresser be that smart move? thats already halfway what they did.

[Rongway]

in this case wouldnt limiting acessing the glamour log to the glamour dresser be that smart move? thats already halfway what they did.

I don't know exactly how the current glamour data is stored, but here are my best guesses as someone with a graduate degree in computer science.

There are almost 20,000 equipable items in the game. If you ignore belts, this number will go down; but let's assume the number of items will stay about the same or go up once we account for the items that are coming in Endwalker. That means we need log_2(20,000) --between 15 and 16-- bits to differentiate between all the different equipable items in the game, and another bit for HQ/NQ. So the glamour dresser needs 2 bytes per item to remember what the item is. The glamour dresser also remembers an item's dye. We have something like 120 dyes, and another byte can handle that. There is other information for items in general, but the dresser doesn't need to care about those things, and you're even warned that some data will be lost, such as condition and signature, when you put things in the dresser. So ignoring that information, we need 3 bytes per item in the dresser. A 400 item dresser then should require 1,200 bytes.

If instead we stored 1 bit for each equipable item we've ever obtained, the catalog would require 20,000/8 bytes. That comes out to 2,500 bytes, which is over twice the minimum data required to support a 400 item dresser. So if they're worried about storage space now, it could be much worse with a glamour catalog. There are of course data structure optimizations and compression algorithms that you could apply to reduce the storage required in either case, at the cost of increased processing requirements, but then we get back to how much processing would need to be done on many glamour catalog access requests over a period of time.

I know, 2.5 kB is not a lot. But with 24 million registered players, the total data required to store just glamour data would be about 60 GB.

And that's all before we start talking about how an increase in glamour data size would affect the data transfer volume (and cost), even with it restricted to dressers in inns.