Idea: Merge PLD Sword and Shield into a Single Item

[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.

[Sjol]

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.

In ARR the sword and shield relics seem to be able to have different light levels. You have to turn them in separately. Clunky doesn't mean unusable, just that there's friction. I mentioned several areas where they've had to make adjustments because they're two items. The designers really seem to want to treat them as a unit rather than as separate items, but it seems like the legacy code/design has left them stuck with work arounds.

A shield is an offhand, but for some reason not in the "off arm" section of the market. The shield is the only main/off arm that's not with the rest. That's clunky. It's also the only job with two arms post-ARR meaning you still have to pay for an extra item -- the PLD tax.

Stats are also split between the sword and shield, needlessly. You could get the exact same effect by putting all the stats on the sword and making the shield literally cosmetic, which is where this idea spawned.

Also, shields are listed under the Weapons tab of the Armor dialog [e.g., Allagan Tomestones of Comedy (Dow) => Weapons tab]. Also, clunky.

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.

I have played on multiple devices and I'm aware that the final view of your items is stored locally, but the items are coming back contiguously on a fresh installation (based on my memory), so either the game is randomly assigning them a position (why?) or they do have a slot number for the purposes of the server and initially experience. And if my memory is wrong and they're just a random contiguous block of items, then there's definitely no such thing as slot on the server and slots aren't reserved. Either way my point was that inventory slots aren't reserved.