Yoshi-P: Flippant dismissal of player criticism is a poor look for a lead developer.

[Dikatis]

By the way, every single player will have a private customizable island and a entire new seperate inventory system for free....

I'm not in IT, so I won't presume to know how these things work, but more priority is probably going to be put on new content to keep players enticed over something that will become more or less taken for granted the minute it comes out. In all likelihood, he would have it done if he had the time and resources to do it while ALSO putting out new content on schedule given how often this question comes up.

It just feels odd to say that, "No, they SHOULD be working on this" when they're under pressure from their fanbase to keep pushing out new stuff. Then they get bombarded with complaints when they do push out something new because it's not exactly what they had in mind. Heck, the new Sil'dih Subterrane dungeons are in development precisely because people wanted some WoW-style dungeons and they've said as much.

In the end, it's responses like these that just prove Yoshi-P's complaint right that people will complain after getting this glamour dresser space upgrade. Is it a bad look for a dev to be making a sort of mocking joke/complaint? Sure. But is it warranted? Well, just look at this thread...

In the end, the devs are people too. I wouldn't really make a big deal out of one stray remark.

[Deveryn]

By the way, every single player will have a private customizable island and a entire new seperate inventory system for free....

It's basically like using Google or Facebook to login to (idle game). It will pull a little bit of info from your character and use that with all this other stuff that's totally separate from the game.

[Tigerlilley]

It's basically like using Google or Facebook to login to (idle game). It will pull a little bit of info from your character and use that with all this other stuff that's totally separate from the game.

So why couldn't we have a glamour wardrobe like that?

I'm just saying - I'm sure there is a solution for this. They've pulled off many "impossible" things before.

Insisting we couldn't have our actions reset on a wipe was one of them. They pushed back on that for years.

[SomeRandomHuman]

So why couldn't we have a glamour wardrobe like that?

I'm just saying - I'm sure there is a solution for this. They've pulled off many "impossible" things before.

Insisting we couldn't have our actions reset on a wipe was one of them. They pushed back on that for years.

They still haven't figured out how to put an FC chest in Ishgard without crashing the servers...

[Sebazy]

It's not that "they're ignoring what players want" it's, "We quite literally can't given the pressure we're under and our server capacity."

Honestly, I don't believe him on that one. Granted I was a world builder, not a coder so take my very very rough theory with a pinch of salt. If I've got the wrong end of the stick then by all means I'd appreciate being corrected++

Working on the assumption that SE's back end is running 32bit still, lets say the game has 8000 equippable pieces of gear as a rough figure. We want a glamour log, so to cover all of that we're going to use 32bit integer arrays to flag if our character has gotten those items or not. It'll take 250 of them if I'm not mistaken. With those figures that's 1kb of additional data per character. The last total account figure I saw for FFXIV was ~40 million accounts. Let's assume that once we factor in alts, we're going to see 100 million unique characters, that's 100GB of additional data from this.

Obviously my numbers aren't going to be accurate or even close to reality, but even if I'm half or a quarter of the final figure, it's still a drop in the data centre ocean.

So what's actually going on here? Two factors IMO.

A) Having a bunch of job capped coupled with a glamour addiction results in a huge amount of inventory pressure, 800 slots is a drop in the ocean if you're hoarding gear for multiple roles. A glamour log that allows players to simply ditch 'useless' gear without fear of needing to go farm it again if it becomes useful for a glamour is going to impact demand for those extra DLC retainers.

B) Lets also not forget, SE have historically kept the purse strings exceptionally tight when it comes to running costs for online games. My 22 year old Everquest Shaman is still just a billing page away all these years later, I don't even need to do that for my WoW Shaman. Meanwhile in FFXI, unsubbing for long enough (officially 3 months) ran the risk of your entire character getting archived off the live servers, something that wasn't reversible until a good way through the game's lifespan. I've got no reason to believe that SE changed their tune with FFXIV either, the slow tick rate and slack net code are both measures used to minimise server costs.

[Vahlnir]

Honestly, I don't believe him on that one. Granted I was a world builder, not a coder so take my very very rough theory with a pinch of salt. If I've got the wrong end of the stick then by all means I'd appreciate being corrected++

Working on the assumption that SE's back end is running 32bit still, lets say the game has 8000 equippable pieces of gear as a rough figure. We want a glamour log, so to cover all of that we're going to use 32bit integer arrays to flag if our character has gotten those items or not. It'll take 250 of them if I'm not mistaken. With those figures that's 1kb of additional data per character. The last total account figure I saw for FFXIV was ~40 million accounts. Let's assume that once we factor in alts, we're going to see 100 million unique characters, that's 100GB of additional data from this.

Obviously my numbers aren't going to be accurate or even close to reality, but even if I'm half or a quarter of the final figure, it's still a drop in the data centre ocean.

So what's actually going on here? Two factors IMO.

A) Having a bunch of job capped coupled with a glamour addiction results in a huge amount of inventory pressure, 800 slots is a drop in the ocean if you're hoarding gear for multiple roles. A glamour log that allows players to simply ditch 'useless' gear without fear of needing to go farm it again if it becomes useful for a glamour is going to impact demand for those extra DLC retainers.

B) Lets also not forget, SE have historically kept the purse strings exceptionally tight when it comes to running costs for online games. My 22 year old Everquest Shaman is still just a billing page away all these years later, I don't even need to do that for my WoW Shaman. Meanwhile in FFXI, unsubbing for long enough (officially 3 months) ran the risk of your entire character getting archived off the live servers, something that wasn't reversible until a good way through the game's lifespan. I've got no reason to believe that SE changed their tune with FFXIV either, the slow tick rate and slack net code are both measures used to minimise server costs.

Yep. Most of the time it's not that they can't do certain things. It's that they won't. SE itself is largely to blame for this, since they insist on keeping the FF XIV team extremely small and, as you said, keeping their purse strings tight. But that doesn't excuse some of the decisions I've seen the team make over the years. Some of the problems are on them too.

[Deveryn]

Honestly, I don't believe him on that one. Granted I was a world builder, not a coder so take my very very rough theory with a pinch of salt. If I've got the wrong end of the stick then by all means I'd appreciate being corrected++

Working on the assumption that SE's back end is running 32bit still, lets say the game has 8000 equippable pieces of gear as a rough figure. We want a glamour log, so to cover all of that we're going to use 32bit integer arrays to flag if our character has gotten those items or not. It'll take 250 of them if I'm not mistaken. With those figures that's 1kb of additional data per character. The last total account figure I saw for FFXIV was ~40 million accounts. Let's assume that once we factor in alts, we're going to see 100 million unique characters, that's 100GB of additional data from this.

Obviously my numbers aren't going to be accurate or even close to reality, but even if I'm half or a quarter of the final figure, it's still a drop in the data centre ocean.

So what's actually going on here? Two factors IMO.

A) Having a bunch of job capped coupled with a glamour addiction results in a huge amount of inventory pressure, 800 slots is a drop in the ocean if you're hoarding gear for multiple roles. A glamour log that allows players to simply ditch 'useless' gear without fear of needing to go farm it again if it becomes useful for a glamour is going to impact demand for those extra DLC retainers.

B) Lets also not forget, SE have historically kept the purse strings exceptionally tight when it comes to running costs for online games. My 22 year old Everquest Shaman is still just a billing page away all these years later, I don't even need to do that for my WoW Shaman. Meanwhile in FFXI, unsubbing for long enough (officially 3 months) ran the risk of your entire character getting archived off the live servers, something that wasn't reversible until a good way through the game's lifespan. I've got no reason to believe that SE changed their tune with FFXIV either, the slow tick rate and slack net code are both measures used to minimise server costs.

It's not surprising, considering this an ongoing project for who knows how many years to come. It's not cheap to maintain all that and no good company wants to resort to having ads in their MMO. I remember a huge uproar about this during EQ or EQ2 with some company named Massive or something. People need to learn to understand and accept that there's only so much you can squeeze out of these games.

[Raven2014]

Honestly, I don't believe him on that one. Granted I was a world builder, not a coder so take my very very rough theory with a pinch of salt. If I've got the wrong end of the stick then by all means I'd appreciate being corrected++

Well, I won't claim I know how it works, but I can give you my 2cents as someone with coding experience: you can not look at an issue in a vacuum, not with a program this big. The question may not about "can we change this or not?". But "what will be the risk for doing it?". And I say risk, not cost for a reason. I had wrote a few training manual for programming bootcamp, and it's always something under-appreciate by people who do not work in programming. My favorite exercise is to have the trainee painstakingly build a small program, test and optimize it to work to perfection. Then ask them to change/add what seemingly a very simple and innocent function. Most trainees would thought "this is easy, I'll get it done in one evening". And I always have the privilege of enjoy watching them antagonizing over the fact not only that small change does not work the way they think it should, it often completely bone their program at seeming unrelated places as well. It's my way to teach the trainees the important of respecting content lockdown in a development circle.

Then there is the question of whether the change can be made via an extension, or requires modification to the backend of the engine. These day we tend to forget this game was resurrected from one of the worst MMO melted down in history, I sincerely doubt the core engine were created with much foresight. It may sound weird, but with the way the spaghetti nature of the the FF14 engine that I have seen so far, it's probably easier for them to give us a brand new feature rather than say ... adding an additional dye channel to our gears. I had said in my previous post there are a lot of overlap in the way gears are acquired/store/tag in this game, it's like when these system were added, they weren't really left open-ended. These things definitely have to be sorted and streamlined before something like a glamour log can be created.

And if that is something that requires modification to the back-end ... yeah, forget about asking and begging, we probably won't be able to even fundraise enough money to bribe Yoshi to do that. I'm surely Yoshi know simply improving the capacity is just a bandaid solution, and his joke can also be seen as a self-depreciating toward the inevitable futility of it. But that's still his only option because the alternative probably will have to wait until the next engine overhaul.

[Sebazy]

It's not surprising, considering this an ongoing project for who knows how many years to come. It's not cheap to maintain all that and no good company wants to resort to having ads in their MMO. I remember a huge uproar about this during EQ or EQ2 with some company named Massive or something. People need to learn to understand and accept that there's only so much you can squeeze out of these games.

Keep in mind that in 2020, Everquest 1 took $11.5mil in revenue, EQ2 took $6.8mil. Meanwhile FFXIV & DQX combined pulled in roughly $140million.

I think that covers 100gb of extra enterprise storage no?

The question may not about "can we change this or not?". But "what will be the risk for doing it?".

That's a solid point and probably the answer that Yoshida should have gone with.

[Deveryn]

Keep in mind that in 2020, Everquest 1 took $11.5mil in revenue, EQ2 took $6.8mil. Meanwhile FFXIV & DQX combined pulled in roughly $140million.

I think that covers 100gb of extra enterprise storage no?



That's a solid point and probably the answer that Yoshida should have gone with.

It's never as simple as just adding storage though. There's maintenance and actual real estate. I'm sure the 140 and continued revenue helped with getting these new datacenters rolled out, but even with all that money, it just couldn't happen sooner. I think we also got some more staff.

Yoshida could make that point over and over and it still wouldn't register with a lot of people. I think he actually has made some points along these lines and people are still cyncial about it, like they're holding out on us.