Proposal: Glamour, but for upgradeable skills

[Iselion]

The issue is how many different skills would need to be tracked. Which version of Glare are you using? Which version of Dia, Holy, all the other skills you have access to? The issue is not that there are lots of possibilities for each skill, but lots of skills with two or three options each, and every person who sees you cast a spell needs to be informed of what your spell looks like. Instead of being told "X cast Glare" and the recipient's computer displays the effect for Glare, it would either need a list of your preferences in advance or every command is now "X cast Glare with the appearance of Stone", increasing the amount of data that needs to be sent.

Equipment glamour is the opposite. The hundreds of options are irrelevant because people only need the short list of what you're wearing right now, and presumably don't need a new version relayed to them every 2.5 seconds.

I think you are vastly overestimating the amount of data that would actually take. You could very easily get all of this information in a byte per skill if you were using proper values, probably less than that if you're really efficient at coding. So, if we assume 23 other players with a very generous 100 possible skills each, that is still only 2.3 kilobytes, or 0.0023 megabytes in skill data received at the start of a 24 man. And yes, you would pull that data at the start of an instance, not on the fly.

Again, Blue Mage does this no problem. This could use that exact same framework.

Also, just because they can do equipment glamours now isn't proof that they can do skill glamours on top of it. The existing character data may be the limit of what they can transmit through their network.

Sorry but I'm really not a fan of the "Well it's hard" excuse. This is a top MMO with hundreds of thousands of active players. If they're straining to transmit less than 1/100 of a megabyte, they ought to address that immediately. Even if they keep saying network strain is an issue, there's no reason as to why they couldn't improve upon it if they wanted. The real reason they don't is because it's probably a pain in the neck to revise their networking environment and they really want to keep kicking that can down the road.