jpgames.de Gamescom 2015 interview with Naoki Yoshida

[Ortamus]

He's out of touch with what can be considered fun. He uses the right words but so far whenever they've taken content from previous Final Fantasy games they've ruined it. I don't even like what he says about Snow Boarding, they will turn it into a grind instead of a fun mini game if given the opportunity.

I think the interviewer asked the wrong question regarding our inventory spaces. Everyone knows where the issues is and the fix from SE that is required.

[mp-please]

The issue about whm identity wasn't the loss of proshell and granite skin, the issue is that the new traits that replaced those are absolute trash. Medica I will never be spammed enough for the enhanced medica to be noticeable and quick stoneskin is absolute trash, PoM+SS spam was enough to cover up the whole raid before phase transitions.

With the whole new dps skills added to whm and them wanting to make white mages "paladins" (note on JP the pld class is named knight), id at least expect a cleric stance trait that increases accuracy to some extent so whm can dps freely on accuracy cap content (like ast/sch can). But nope, we get enhanced medica and some crappy speedy stoneskin that has the same effect as the ones paladins cast.

[Bishop81]

Nothing on pet glamours.

...

/cry

[Yukiko]

NY: The whole development team are Final Fantasy XIV players and also want more inventory, so we understand the situation you are in. There are actually two reasons why we can not expand the inventory. It may look simple in game, but actually the size of data for only one item is really huge. If you look at the inventory and compare it to other MMOs, Final Fantasy XIV has the biggest inventory.

We have a few 100,000 players in all worlds at the same time, and every 15 seconds data will be going to the servers and stored, so a lot of data is transmitted. If we have more items in the inventory, there will be more data to handle; times a few 1,000 bytes per item per character. That’s going to be a high load on the servers. There then might be some risk that your data is not safed properly, and we want to avoid this risk. That is why we are so careful with expanding the inventory. It is not that we don’t do anything at all, we are working on this issue by optimizing the backend data so that the data will be read properly with less stress. If there is no high server load, we can probably work more on actually addressing this issue. This is the first point.

Another issue is that when you use the Duty Finder, you will go to the contents server. But when your character is going there, you bring all your items to the server. If you have more items, you have to wait a longer time to go to the server, you will feel a lot of stress. This optimization process takes a lot of time and we are working on it slowly, but that is the only way we can actually keep your game experience and the desire for more inventory space.

First: FFXIV does NOT have the most items in MMORPG history!
He does mean the biggest data size for inventory in MMOGs history and thats not an inventory problem but a huge programming error, they need to hire better programmers!

Then lets come to the core problem the big data:
how is it stored? and how does the game have access to it?
It seems even for short "jumps" (like map changes) your complete inventory needs to be send to the new server, that means it is somehow bound to your characters location. Thats a bit strange because you can program global parameters too, why it must be programmed local? Interesting too, that it seems to be a 2 way communication - for items it is not needed, you can handle it as simple as just having a storage data register. What about the 15 second timer? Shouldnt it just change when there is something "new" - event based programming and not timer based is much better for server stress! About the "risk" you do not need a 2 way communication either, that problem you normally fix with logfiles and checknumbers to keep server stress low (well its not that simple, but still...).

Hell, even mobile phones and browsergames can handle big data games where you can move freely... thats a bad excuse from square enix because they have the full power of computers and consoles!

The next thing is what is transmitted? Do they really send the full item names back and forth? There are limits of how long strings can be and the shorter the better! In 2 digits you can compress so much information its awesome, but it seems they do not do it that way... Well, they created a game where you can instant move, thats not possible if you have calculated everything on server, they need to power up their client - a client (special gameclient) is not meant to be only a portal to the gameserver just like a browsergame! Ok but it explains why it feels like a browsergame when it comes to inventory and delay times...

[Craiger]

Don't want to be rude, but for the people that talk about how bad their code is for inventory space... How much knowledge do you have in the matter? I don't know much about the matter, but it seems like a lot of you just think it's an easy fix, when it doesn't really seem to be.

Maybe the problem could just come down to PS3 again (sorry PS3 players), since the solutions I've heard here, sounds like something that would be done client-side, and not on the servers. I could be completely wrong though.

Only thing I don't really understand, is storage that you don't access all the time... Does the retainer space get checked every 15 seconds too? cause that shouldn't be needed, right? But then again, I'm just talking without any knowledge about it, and maybe some of you are doing the same.

[Colorful]

Only thing I don't really understand, is storage that you don't access all the time... Does the retainer space get checked every 15 seconds too? cause that shouldn't be needed, right? But then again, I'm just talking without any knowledge about it, and maybe some of you are doing the same.

I'll have to assume it functions the same as FC chests, and they said they weren't planning on adding any of those to Ishgard due to the stress it causes when people use them, if I'm remembering this correctly anyway. So it's likely that retainer space is only actively saved when they're summoned, but we won't know until they tell us.

[Duelle]

He stated we wanted healers to be equal

Equal in performance and healing throughput, not equal in mechanics. There's ways to implement healing in a way that's different from WHm and SCH.