I never have anymore space

[Pandastirfry]

Sure, if you're willing to spend twice as much time on inventory management as you spend actually playing the game, you could check all that and pare down your inventory to just the most useful items. But for people who don't want to devote the majority of their game to inventory, it has to be a much shorter set of questions, something like:
Is it a crafting ingredient? Yes. Do you do any crafting? Yes. --> Keep.
And that makes you run out of space fast.

you actually had the most important question in your first paragraph... really the only question worth answering " Am I going to want any of those items any time soon?" but just change "want" to "need". if the answer is NO get rid of it, nothing besides the starred gathering mats and philo mats could be considered "rare" and a must hold onto mat...everything else can be farmed up quickly and easily on a at need basis.

seriously if your Inventory looks like a Very Special Episode of "Hoarders" MMO Edition, it's your own dang fault for not just keeping the things you need, but holding on to all those bits and bobs, odds and ends because you might use them one day...maybe...

[Niwashi]

you actually had the most important question in your first paragraph... really the only question worth answering " Am I going to want any of those items any time soon?"

But that question can only be asked after you've spent a significant amount of time researching the previous two questions: "What recipes need it directly? What recipes need it indirectly for one of their intermediate ingredients?" Those are what tell you which items you're even talking about. Only after you figure out which items this thing in your inventory would be needed for can you ask whether you're going to want to make any of those items any time soon.

And in determining whether you're going to want to make them, you have to consider which classes of your own may soon want to use them (and whether they'd be an upgrade from what you currently have for each of those classes), plus whether they're used for leves or GC supply missions. And since a single ingredient may be involved in making a wide variety of final items, there's a lot of things to check before you can determine whether to keep or toss even one ingredient that saves just a single slot if you do toss it. Then repeat the whole time-consuming process for the next ingredient you picked up, or repeat it all 350 times if you want to clean out your retainers' inventory.

I'll agree with you that once you can finally manage to answer the question of whether you'll want any of the things this can make any time soon, you could eliminate most of the common junk you pick up along the way while playing. Indeed I said as much in my previous post. My point was about not wanting to have to do all that research every time I play.

[PArcher]

SNIP

Honestly, a serious crafter should know most of that already, or know where to find that info very quickly.

Or, at the very least, have a list of things they make a lot and their mats, and keep those things (or the pre-mats) in stock.

Rare (AKA expensive) ingredients should also be kept if you plan on using them, or sell them if not.

Also, I would keep NQ stuff, sell HQ stuff (except for 1* mats [Twinthread, Rose Gold Nuggets, etc]) since if you're able to HQ 2*s, you can HQ 1*s and lower with all NQ mats without issues.

[Niwashi]

Honestly, a serious crafter should know most of that already,

Not really, as the answers are constantly changing. What you need at one point in the game isn't what you need at another point in the game. After a productive gaming session, you're likely to have advanced at least one class or another in either level or gear, so what that class needs will be different than it was the day before.

or know where to find that info very quickly.

There is no place to find it quickly. There are places to look up each step of the process, but then you still have to put all the pieces together yourself, and that's the time-consuming part I was talking about. So you can look up ingredient A to find it's used in making ingredients B, C, and D as well as final items X, Y and Z, but then you need to look up what ingredients B, C, and D are used for, etc., until you finally put together a long list of final items that ingredient A goes into. At that point, you need to start considering whether you'll want any of those final items, so need to go to a different site to look up leves and GC supply missions, as well as checking in-game for which items you have or want for yourself. That's a lot of work just for determining "should I keep ingredient A or not?"

(Actually, there's a pretty good site for going the other way around. When you want to make something, you can in a single step find all the root elements as well as intermediates you'll need to make it. It doesn't, however, go the other way around, and tell you what all items a given ingredient is needed for. And even if it did, there would still be a separate step to check whether you'll want any of those items.)

[mero-ix]

My point was about not wanting to have to do all that research every time I play.

1) Attempt to place the item in your retainer for sale on the AH.
2) Check sale history.
3) Is it worth anything?
4) No? Sell it.

[Gextiv]

Working as intended.

Pay the monthly $4 fee or DROWN in your sorrows!

On the bright side, you get a "pay to win" advantage from having more retainers than the default two.

[SaitoHajime]

My bags are full, my retainers are full. If I do housecleaning to get more space I always end up with that free space being filled in less than a day

Please. Give me an option to increase inventory space using in-game Gil. And please, give us a way to check what's in our retainers bags without having to dig through each and every one of them.

Back on my day retainers didn't exist. Neither did all this inventory space

[Gextiv]

Back on my day retainers didn't exist. Neither did all this inventory space

Back in my day, you could acquire more inventory storage space with the in-game currency, especially when the game you played was SUBSCRIPTION BASED.

But them days be long goooooone.. nowadays you expect to get nickled and dimed for almost anything.

[SaitoHajime]

Back in my day, you could acquire more inventory storage space with the in-game currency, especially when the game you played was SUBSCRIPTION BASED.

But them days be long goooooone.. nowadays you expect to get nickled and dimed for almost anything.

Was kinda talking about xi

[IfritReborn]

Was kinda talking about xi

That may be xi, but every mmo I played for the past 6 years have offered ways to increase your inventory through in-game means.
This is the ONLY game where you can only pay real money to do so

And it's a shame. Because now XIV ARR will set the precedent that subscribers are willing to pay even more monthly (and not just a one time fee) for QoL conveniences for other future MMO's to follow
/slow clap