Suggestion: Improved Glamour System

[KhevanFarstryder]

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. [...] 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 byte 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 realize that there are more items for which you would need to store information, but isn't there less data per item that would need to be stored? Since these are not items that could be restored, for example, you wouldn't need to keep track of quality (NQ/HQ), dyeable/undyeable (just replace the undyeable with the dyeable if you get it), maker's mark, etc. It would just be a boolean array for each character of 1 byte per item (2 bytes for items that have a dyeable/undyeable option - 1 byte for the true/false of having unlocked the item and 1 byte for the true/false of it being the dyeable version). Wouldn't need to keep track of pre-dye either, since I mentioned that a con to the original proposal would be that you couldn't pre-dye items (it would only be tracked on the glamour plates).

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.

Now if you took that and split it up per server (not all 24 million players are on one server and I mentioned in the original post that the database would be account wide so wouldn't need 1 database per character, unlike the current item dresser, just 1 per player), how much room would it take per server then? And if you limited access to it (couldn't access any of it, other than the glamour plates, if you do a cross server/datacenter visit or are outside an inn) would the server load be more feasible?