Idea: Merge PLD Sword and Shield into a Single Item

[AmiableApkallu]

I would love to see the PLD sword and shield sets moved into a single item AND THEN:

Allow left and right weapons/shields to be individually glamoured. This could easily apply to NIN and maybe RDM, AST, and any other job that has two pieces to their kit that can be non-symmetrical. I could see this apply to paint brush and palette even.

I don't see why one has to be done before the other.

SE could develop whatever tech/code/data is necessary to glamour the two parts of a NIN, RDM, AST, MCH, etc. weapon as it's own feature, without having to deal with, say, ARR swords and shields (remember that some shields can be used by CNJ/THM/WHM/BLM).

In that scenario, PLD would still be able to glamour their sword and shield separately, just like they can do today.

[Sjol]

I don't see why one has to be done before the other.

SE could develop whatever tech/code/data is necessary to glamour the two parts of a NIN, RDM, AST, MCH, etc. weapon as it's own feature, without having to deal with, say, ARR swords and shields (remember that some shields can be used by CNJ/THM/WHM/BLM).

In that scenario, PLD would still be able to glamour their sword and shield separately, just like they can do today.

I guess I also have this vision where SE cleans up a lot of the little one-offs and dead systems that ARR and HW had to make them consistent with the rest of the game. While I would have probably rather had a different systems per expansion that's not what they did, and I choose to accept that on their terms.

And it's not like it was bad that they tried stuff out and moved stuff over from 1.0. Trying stuff out is good, but we're also at the point where we're 10 years in and some clean-up may be warranted and helpful towards expanding what's capable. Removing code and systems is important for making space for new stuff (and I'm talking as a software engineer here). You can't grow complexity infinitely.

[AmiableApkallu]

Trying stuff out is good, but we're also at the point where we're 10 years in and some clean-up may be warranted and helpful towards expanding what's capable. Removing code and systems is important for making space for new stuff (and I'm talking as a software engineer here). You can't grow complexity infinitely.

As a software engineer, then, you should be very aware of the perils and sheer arrogance in trying to backseat drive someone else's codebase without any inside knowledge.

As a software engineer, I don't need my users and customers to tell me how to manage my own, well-aged codebase. I'm already well aware of all its imperfections and things that could be better. But my time and resources are not infinite, or else I would have already fixed and tidied up everything.

What I do need my users and customers to tell me is what they'd like to be able to do.

[Sjol]

As a software engineer, then, you should be very aware of the perils and sheer arrogance in trying to backseat drive someone else's codebase without any inside knowledge.

As a software engineer, I don't need my users and customers to tell me how to manage my own, well-aged codebase. I'm already well aware of all its imperfections and things that could be better. But my time and resources are not infinite, or else I would have already fixed and tidied up everything.

What I do need my users and customers to tell me is what they'd like to be able to do.

I want to not have to deal with the additional mental model/hassle of separate sword and shield. I don't want all the weird exceptions to how items work in the game in this one place. I ask this both as a customer and as someone who understands the costs of such things.

While I don't have any inside knowledge, it's also not strictly required to form a hypothesis on how things work. It's also my experience that developers want to clean things up but aren't given the opportunity because customers don't ask for things to be cleaned up and product management then doesn't prioritize it.

If I were a developer on FFXIV, I would love to be told that cleaning up older systems was a priority because customers asked for it.

[AmiableApkallu]

While I don't have any inside knowledge, it's also not strictly required to form a hypothesis on how things work. It's also my experience that developers want to clean things up but aren't given the opportunity because customers don't ask for things to be cleaned up and product management then doesn't prioritize it.

Yes. And that's as it should be. It's not the job of customer to ask a developer to clean their code up. It's the developer's job to deal with their code in whatever fashion they deem most efficient in delivering a product now and in the future.

So, pray tell, how do you propose to deal with low(er)-level casters that want a rod/stick in one hand a shield in the other?

[Sjol]

Yes. And that's as it should be. It's not the job of customer to ask a developer to clean their code up. It's the developer's job to deal with their code in whatever fashion they deem most efficient in delivering a product now and in the future.

So, pray tell, how do you propose to deal with low(er)-level casters that want a rod/stick in one hand a shield in the other?

Admittedly, what I'm talking about is as much design debt as code debt and I'm mostly focused on the design debt. What I would say to lower-level casters that want a one-hander and shield is, "It's not something we support anymore." It would be different if the designers decided to support the idea for the jobs forever, but they didn't. They decided that all jobs would get a single droppable item even if it represents two separate physical objects (e.g., two daggers for NIN). The one exception remaining is the GLD/PLD which they probably didn't have the time or inclination to address that particular thing at the time. That one exception makes for a clunky experience whenever it comes up and they're having to add a bunch more exceptions to make it less weird.

[AmiableApkallu]

That one exception makes for a clunky experience whenever it comes up

It literally doesn't. GLD/PLD is no different from the other classes and jobs. Keeping it geared is the exact same rigamarole as all of the other jobs. Buy your weapons. Buy your armor. And if you somehow think a shield is a "weapon" and not a piece of armor, that's a fundamental misunderstanding on your part of what a shield is.

If anything is "clunky," it's all of the other jobs that think "main hand item" should encompass multiple separate pieces to be held in two (or more) hands. There should simply be "left hand item" and "right hand item." Voila. Maximum flexibility.

I've modeled stuff like this before. What you get is records (e.g., rows in the database) that are something like this:

[INVENTORY_ID][SLOT_ID][ITEM_ID][COUNT]

where:

INVENTORY_ID is the inventory being affected (the ID for you, your saddlebags, or a retainer)
SLOT_ID is where it's being stored in that inventory
ITEM_ID is the ID of the item being stored
COUNT is the size of the stack

Databases aren't implicitly ordered and so you need to store the ordering or location information explicitly and if you're doing that, you might as well not waste space on empty data. You can infer an empty slot from no record of data being there.

My friend, there is no meaningful notion of "SLOT_ID" on the server. Anyone who's played this game on multiple devices knows this. The way your inventory is sorted isn't shared between devices.