Servers in Danger of Crashing RIGHT NOW!

[Aeyis]

In addition to obvious arguments about how it's not about data storage, but transfer, you're also not accounting for the many tiny variations between one item and the next. Items that are stored retain quite a few flags such as whether it's HQ vs NQ on any non gear items

Come on now. Even someone with mere basic knowledge such as myself will tell you that a half decent IT engineer would simply make NQ and HQ different item ID's. Why needlessly complicate things with ''flags''?
The only flags I know of are:
-durability
-spiritbond ratio
-collectibility
-creator
-materia


Btw the top 3 of those are client side only (the data is shared between only you and the server) , which is evident by them not showing when you link the item. Glamours are not counted as its simply 2 different IDs being used.
Dyes are the same, different ID for each color.


Displaying all of these as flags is a really inefficient way of doing things. The only reason for doing it like that would be if your computing power far exceeded your storage capacity. Which is obviously not the case here.

Also, I don't know what games you've been playing, but compared to most MMORPGs and even most single player offline RPGs, we have quite a lot of inventory space, as pointed out in the post I'm quoting below.....

Most MMORPGs? Single player RPGs? oO
Okay how about WoW? Vastly more space then we have here. And on top of that even more space via the use of alts, your mailbox, and a guildbank.

Yet despite not having 7 billion reagents for crafting, or the need to have 10 different sets of equipment (''only'' 4 or 5 at most); they still increased storage by adding a reagent tab and increasing stack sizes to 200.

FFXIV has one of the worst inventories (compared to the total amount of items) I've seen anywhere. Offline or online.

If you're going to count alts as inventory space then try doing it for ffxiv:

8 chars x (450 inventory slots + 300 armory slots) = possible 6000 slots per account per server.

math is fun aint it.
(also before the obvious "It's not convenient to move items around between alts in this game", that dosn't mean that it can't be done)

Barely anyone has alts in this game. Whereas in a game like wow you can expect people to have several alts. (long time players even 8~ on a single server)

Please do not use alts as an argument for storage space, because alts arent really supported here. You cant even mail an alt.

For all intents and purposes, our characters have more than just the 100 slots offered by the bag. We have the Armory Chest, as well.
100 Inventory Slots + 12x25 = 300. So 400 inventory slots on our character, where games like WoW actually shares the inventory for armor/items

Yeah im sure the collection of 40 staves I had on my mage in WoW would fit real nice in our armoury system. And im sure the 25 slots for boots would be real great to fit in my pair of 2 boots and 23 items that arent boots.


Shared inventory also means no slot is a wasted slot.

Yes, because WoW puts ALL of their current focus into their raids, neglecting everything else. FF spreads out their content resources over many aspects of endgame, not just raids for shinies.

Like crafting and gathering, yeah?

Yeaaah shoot I forgot the armory space.

But even still, with caching and hashing they should be able to accommodate it without stretching to the limits of what their hardware is capable of handling.

Note though, that they make you open the armoury chest seperately - so then is that a separate call to load inventory from the server? It doesn't open simultaneously with your bag after all.

Armoury space being taken up is a design choice anyway. How many of these slots would become empty if their class/job requirements were abolished?
On top of that, I often have thrash in many of my armoury spaces because why not. Its not like I can place a stack of materials in the pants section of the armoury? xD

[Archulak]

Barely anyone has alts in this game. Whereas in a game like wow you can expect people to have several alts. (long time players even 8~ on a single server)

Please do not use alts as an argument for storage space, because alts arent really supported here. You cant even mail an alt.

I know quite a few people that have about 3 - 5 alts actually, and just because "People don't do it" isn't really an excuse to discount the fact that they could.

(Also I'm the one that said already its inconvenient to transfer items between alts so it's funny to me that you try and use it as a counter argument)

[Aeyis]

I know quite a few people that have about 3 - 5 alts actually, and just because "People don't do it" isn't really an excuse to discount the fact that they could.

I know absolutely noone that does. In fact many people I know were surprised to learn that I had an alt at all! Just one alt was a major surprise!

''People dont do it'', is not an excuse. Its a base for logic. Why base things on the assumption that people use alts, when in reality they dont?

(Also I'm the one that said already its inconvenient to transfer items between alts so it's funny to me that you try and use it as a counter argument)

Perhaps I misread then, because the way I read it you said something along the lines of (or well rather, exactly like)
:

(also before the obvious "It's not convenient to move items around between alts in this game", that dosn't mean that it can't be done)

Which means pretty much the opposite..

[DragonFlyy]

So compared to other MMOs, either our servers are crap (which is ridiculous when we have so many players paying monthly mind you) or our inventory is so horribly innefficient that even flavor of the month korean F2P games do it better than FFXIV.

Let me break out some mumbo jumbo to put into context the amount of data we're talking about in an ideal inventory:
Every item in your bag is just an item ID and a quantity, that's about all the server needs to know and tell your client. It knows what item it is by looking up the id. It knows how much you have by the quantity.
All the items info, graphics etc are stored client side. Using the item ID it looks up the graphics, descriptions, etc from the data on your computer.

We know that items are stored client side since sites like XIVDB regularly datamine it from the client.
So thats all an inventory stored in a database should be - the item id of each item in each slot, and a number signifying it's quantity.

Do you want to know how big an item ID and a number would be? They can both be numbers, and if we're going to be extravagant they're full on integers. 32bits each. So each slot would take up two integers.
How big is an integer? 32 bits.
How many slots do we have in our bag? 100. 175 per retainer.
2 numbers for each slot, that's 64 bits.
100 slots that's 6400 bits.
Each retainer by the way would be 11200.
Bear with me now: there's 8 bits in a byte. Our bag is 800 bytes. Our retainer is 1400 bytes.
Let me put that in terms of a quantity you may know: kilobytes. A KB is 1000 bytes, so our bag is .8KB, Each retainer is 1.4KB.
Our bags plus two retainers is 3.6 kilobytes.

To put that into perspective, a 1TB hard drive holds around 1,000,000,000 kilobytes. So that's what, 50 bucks to accommodate 277,777,777.778 players. I don't think we have 278 million players right now.

Want to know something else? I used waaaaaaaaaaay too much data for the quantity, since the most you can have is 99 of any item. We can just use a byte (8 bits) for the quantity. The item id being an integer by the way, gives us enough space to identify 4,294,967,296 unique items. We could make the item ID even smaller to accommodate say, 2 billionish instead.

Simply put, you could fit the inventory into an even smaller number of bits than what I gave above if you were to optimize it.

"Hey Phenidate, whats all this mean to me?"

Well it means that if the people who engineered the inventory system were trying to be good engineers and not waste space, the amount of data of everything you own could fit onto a grain of rice.

It's not about the storage space, it's about the transfer. I agree that it is something that can be addressed but it was already stated by a dev that it is a problem with how often the server is queried to save our inventory. It saves ALL of our active inventory somewhere like every 15 seconds. For every character on every server. Retainers are not included in that save because they are not active at all times. They are saved when an inventory change is requested.

[MikaKrystel]

It sounds like the database optimisation/efficiency is aimed at many players performing simultaneous searches, instead of how players search their own inventories.

If the developers had no choice but to pick between optimising for all players or optimising for individuals searching their retainers etc., then of course they're going to focus on the former.

What if adding extra slots increased the server load by multiples of the slots added? Maybe adding extra inventory slots is a big deal.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

Yes let's assume every single player is going to pay for more retainers to get more space.

[Phenidate]

That's apparently how they want us to cope - pay us more money for inventory space, we're not giving it to you for free because uh.. uhm... it'll crash the server!

[Merryl]

This game must be held together with duct tape then.

[papichulo123]

When they release the new eu data center will there be less stress on the U.S./ na data center server?

[Ferocious]

It's the same reason why they are refusing to fix the laggy servers, limited housing space, etc. Their servers are still as bad as launch even after they have made tons of profits by now. There are MMO's which have upgraded their servers to mega servers and some added cross-server functionalities like cross-parties, whispers, etc. But in the world of SE, expect none of this. Just keep giving them $20 monthly with extra retainers and expect no improvements in return. Neither to servers, nor endgame.