Pay for your inventory.

[Fyce]

-Snip-

They update all character information every 15 seconds "juste in case of a crash", in order to avoid rollbacks.
That's the only reason, and quite a silly one.

I would understand why you would need a backup every 15 seconds when releasing progression content (Savage Alex), but during "normal" play, a 15 seconds snapshot of the entire server seems overkill, just to avoid a very tiny misfortune of someone losing something in a 1-2mn timespan.

So, to avoid that, no more inventory space for everyone. Hooray.

[StrejdaTom]

They update all character information every 15 seconds "juste in case of a crash", in order to avoid rollbacks.
That's the only reason, and quite a silly one.

I would understand why you would need a backup every 15 seconds when releasing progression content (Savage Alex), but during "normal" play, a 15 seconds snapshot of the entire server seems overkill, just to avoid a very tiny misfortune of someone losing something in a 1-2mn timespan.

So, to avoid that, no more inventory space for everyone. Hooray.

They shouldn't do it more often than once an hour.

[Catwho]

They shouldn't do it more often than once an hour.

Considering the frequency of 90002s, that's unacceptable.

"Hooray! I successfully HQ'd this 6 million gil item with a 5% chance! LUCKY ME!" *crashes one minute later* *stuff is back to raw materials*

Successful completion of the crafted item is determined by RNG on the server, but successful storage of that item on your character is handled by the synch process from your character to your server. 15 seconds is actually fairly slow for a database - most SQL applications measure it in miliseconds. But there are 4 million accounts, of which a million are logged in at any time, which is a million read/writes every 15 seconds.

[Fyce]

Considering the frequency of 90002s, that's unacceptable.

We are not talking about individual character crashes, the servers already handle that fine when the character disconnects (they save a character when it disconnects).
We are talking about complete server crashes which would rollback every player on the server.

Wait... every 15 seconds? I really want to know what the thinking was behind that design decision.

Pretty much what I said.
http://www.siliconera.com/2015/06/17...-item-storage/

They just want to avoid server rollbacks as much as possible.

[Fendred]

Considering the frequency of 90002s, that's unacceptable.

"Hooray! I successfully HQ'd this 6 million gil item with a 5% chance! LUCKY ME!" *crashes one minute later* *stuff is back to raw materials*

Successful completion of the crafted item is determined by RNG on the server, but successful storage of that item on your character is handled by the synch process from your character to your server. 15 seconds is actually fairly slow for a database - most SQL applications measure it in miliseconds. But there are 4 million accounts, of which a million are logged in at any time, which is a million read/writes every 15 seconds.

I completely agree from a QoS perspective that it is unacceptable not to be able to get your lost rare item back. However, the solution should be to copy the data only when it needs to be copied. The system they have right now ends up copying an incredible amount of redundant or just useless data. Copying the entire data for safe measure every hour, combined with some situational saves in response to player milestones like crafting rare items would be a more ideal system. It would take a lot more thought and time to implement than a 15 second timer, though.

[Fendred]

They update all character information every 15 seconds "juste in case of a crash", in order to avoid rollbacks.
That's the only reason, and quite a silly one.

I would understand why you would need a backup every 15 seconds when releasing progression content (Savage Alex), but during "normal" play, a 15 seconds snapshot of the entire server seems overkill, just to avoid a very tiny misfortune of someone losing something in a 1-2mn timespan.

So, to avoid that, no more inventory space for everyone. Hooray.

Yeah, I was just bringing up the data part of things because some people were saying that the extra costs for retainers were to "pay for server costs." If I built systems like that and got away with it, I would probably retire in my 40's from the ludicrous amount of money I just laundered from all my customers :P

Wait... every 15 seconds? I really want to know what the thinking was behind that design decision.

[Buff_Archer]

Now it finally makes sense to me why the Mogstation logo is a moogle bending over mooning us.

[Sol_Aureus]

Looks like Yoshida was asked about this again yesterday, but seems like it's the same answer that we always get outside of 1 detail which is him saying that they're "It’s something we’re working on now" and "Right now, with Heavensward coming out we know that a lot of players are going to access the servers and there is going to be a lot of stress on the servers. To do something like this at launch would create an unstable environment."

http://www.siliconera.com/2015/06/17...-item-storage/

[BreathlessTao]

http://www.siliconera.com/2015/06/17...-item-storage/

...I swear I've not heard any dev of an online game complain this much about network traffic. And yeah, complete backups of everyone's everything, every 15 second - that is plain insane. (Guess there is one major potential reason for all those disconnects.) If they fail to realise this, idek what to say - and they apparently do fail to realise this, considering how they rather outed the option to have more space for money instead of prioritising that optimisation Yoshi talks about there. On a sidenote, I really am curious just how big is that "probably biggest" save data size per character, and what on earth they do to make it so big.

[Fyce]

On a sidenote, I really am curious just how big is that "probably biggest" save data size per character, and what on earth they do to make it so big.

That point is irrelevant since they made the armory system which allows you to play every class/job on one character only.
If you keep that in mind, the amount of data regarding gear, stats, levels, etc. will obviously be bigger than any other MMORPG which doesn't have that kind of system in place (implying that people are using alts and mules).

What needs to be compared here is the amount of data per account between games, not per character. If we compare that, I'm pretty sure that a WoW account is close (ifnot bigger) than a FFXIV account.