jpgames.de Gamescom 2015 interview with Naoki Yoshida

[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...