Really tired of the inventory excuses.

[Risvertasashi]

Also, in regards to on-character storage, why are we limited to 99 items and not 250 (or 255)?

I agree with your post. To this specific point... SE has gone through a great deal of effort to make FFXIV feel like a traditional JRPG. Traditionally they were limited to 99 of one item (perhaps due to space for digits? Or someone thought 99 was reasonable and it just caught on)... I would guess that the stack of 99 thing is just one small part of that.

That said, 99 is enough for most purposes that this particular point doesn't bother me. It would be annoying if crystals/shards had this restriction but they actually covered us there.

[Bovinity]

Opportunity Cost isn't a difficult concept to comprehend. TL;DR If you can make more money doing something else, do something else. Which is what I do, I don't make money through crafting, I do it through other avenues. I simply enjoy crafting and when it's a hobby and not a primary source of income you want the lowest bottom line that you can. That being said gathering is so easy, it's almost always cheaper to gather your own mats than to buy them off of the MB.

P.S. When I said you were being philosophical, what I meant was that this was going to turn in to a debate about how economics work instead of addressing the original point of how it's harder to compete when you have a higher bottom-line than the other guy.

Well fine, then lets go have a drink!

[Nyalia]

To this specific point...

Fair points, but while true that it wouldn't change much, there are several items I wind up with more than 99 of, especially when desynthing, binge-fishing, or participating in Company Crafting (or storing items for it). And really, this was just pointing out that there are simple ways they could alleviate the situation at least to a tiny degree without making a substantial change to the game or the code, but they have not done it and instead give reasons for why they won't do it that don't even apply to such changes.

And, on the [S]NES and [Super] Famicon, I can see screen real-estate being really important, so limiting items to a practical 99 is totally sensible. But, we're not playing games on the NES anymore (well, the PS3 users might as well be, but still <_<) and we don't have super-tight screen real-estate.

[Nutz]

The amount of space we have is mostly fine, though I think the armoury chest might need expansion as certain slots are easily filled through normal play. Most of what needs to happen is restructuring of certain items on their end.

Glamour prisms, even if they opt to keep all the ridiculous redundant variants (instead of removing the 5 tiers and making it just 7 varieties) should be stored like crystals or currency.

There should be a glamour logbook so we don't have to hang on to tons of old armor that we like the look of and really don't want to reobtain (even with soloing low level dungeons and the like, imagine even now the time commitment to collect a full set of armor from Labyrinth of the Ancients, for example). For many people this would free up an entire retainer or more. Make it only accessible in private chambers/ inn rooms if server stress would be a problem.

Turn dye into a similar unlock system (maybe add a single dying kit item that's consumable if you're dead set on consumables) and you've freed up more space. There is the potential problem of their paid for dyes, but I don't think there's anybody who doesn't think it's ridiculous that there are certain dyes that you can purchase for real money that are consumed, especially in a game where you change your gear so often.

A tackle box absolutely should happen. Make it only accessible while you currently have a fishing pole equipped and the server stress should be negligible. There's no reason to check it, save it, etc. at any other time.

Only the suggested crafting materials tab should be a problem because of the staggering number of materials that exist and the fact that the proposed solution is really just an additional, extremely large, reserved inventory system. Still, given the inventory bloat everyone is feeling and their reluctance/ inability to make changes, you'd think they could refrain from creating hundreds of new materials that are only used in a very small number of recipes instead of being more conservative.

[Stormrider]

The item bloat is bad. Why did they not streamline all the recipes and sets pre 3.0. I am sure we could all remove 50% of the recipes and gear from pre 3.0. One dungeon set, one crafted set, one grand company set, and one glamour set. Then reduce the items needed for all recipes to the simplest method no multi craft or multi gather. Have mobs drop 1 type of crafting item per family not per mob. Certain catalysts that have multi grades just had a pre 50(low) and a post 50 (high). All the extra worthless fish pre 50.

Would not deleting all this bloat from pre 50 help everyone servers, players on ps3s, and crafters. I am no designer so I have no idea if removing and renaming data is hard or easy. But they do seem to rename stuff fast in quick fixes. This would personally not solve my current inventory issue (main weapon for pvp sets) but it would show a huge sign of progression. Most people don't expect miracles but they also don't expect to be treated like trash when voicing an issue.

[CrystalRainbow]

Give me a key items so I can summon my retainers anywhere and I have no issues.

[Raist]

FFXI inventory / storage:
Gobbiebag - 30, upgradable to 80
Mog sack - scales with gobbiebag
Mog satchel - scales with gobbiebag
Mog safe - 30, upgradable to 80
Mog house storage - upwards to 80
Mog case - 80
Mog wardrobe - 80
Mog locker - 30, upgradable to 80
_____________________________________
640 total slots

Cost of additional characters for storage (mules) - $1.00 each / month (Another 640 slots of inventory).

If you're going to compare apples to apples, make sure you are providing all the information. The larger complaint that I have with the inventory issues, is that this isn't SE's first MMO and it certainly isn't their first to feature a one character, all jobs system. The fact that they have had to continually add new storage methods throughout XI's lifespan should have made it pretty clear from the beginning that inventory would be a major issue in this game. Also, stop and consider that we've had 4 new jobs added since initial launch and with the expansion they have started moving away from shared gear, back to job-specific gear.

You are forgetting that that is global inventory. EVERYTHING you had went into those locations--including your gear. So, you would also have to take into account all the armory slots in XIV for a proper comparison.

Also, only one of those bags was immediately accessible last time I played. All the tools you needed on demand had to be in your main backpack (80 items): foods/meds if on a macro, any situational gear you might want to flip to via a macro--all had to be in that first 80 slot bag. Otherwise you had to stop and move items in and out or otherwise call up the separate bag and use it from there manually.

If you didn't keep gears in that first gobbie bag, when you job changed you had to hunt them down across the different storage locations.A full BLM and SMN gear/item set could basically consume an entire storage location alone. Then you had issues with other jobs as well that relied on a wide variety of weapons and situational gear that could make things tricky as well. And don't EVEN get started on weapons selections for triggering staggers. Some jobs had to carry a veritable arsenal on them for swapping out different weaponskills--some even had to keep differnt damage types on hand for certain content (like mobs that would only take piercing damage). Depending on how complex you gear sets were and how much you got into crafting/gathering, organizing inventory was quite a job.

It was far and away a much more screwed up system than XIV by comparison.

[Raist]

I agree with your post. To this specific point... SE has gone through a great deal of effort to make FFXIV feel like a traditional JRPG. Traditionally they were limited to 99 of one item (perhaps due to space for digits? Or someone thought 99 was reasonable and it just caught on)... I would guess that the stack of 99 thing is just one small part of that.

That said, 99 is enough for most purposes that this particular point doesn't bother me. It would be annoying if crystals/shards had this restriction but they actually covered us there.

On this topic, technically speaking 99 is actually only 7 bits...the 8th bit comes into play above 127 on the programming side, so it actually takes less space. I know.. splitting hairs, but it can be important from a programming standpoint. That 8th bit could be used as part of a mask or something if more bits are reserved.

Also, graphically representing 3 digits versus 2 digits can be problematic in small interfaces. So this could be coming into play as well. Putting a 100 in the box may not seem like much of a shift from 99, but if you move to a larger number it starts to have more of an impact:
200
100
99

Keep in mind the text here is much more uniform. In the GUI, that 100 might actually be slightly more narrow than the 200. It can pose some issues with layouts and such in an already tight interface.

Keep in mind also the consoles---they sort of stream some data on a sort of loop. Some don't quite behave like a PC, so increasing the bit count used for certain things can have a negative impact on how things flow on a console.

[Nektulos-Tuor]

I think the inventory should be cut in half and a bank should be made. A bank only needs updated when players use it. This cutting the "Inventory" lag on the server by more then half.

[Mikhaill]

I'm actually more peeved they didn't give us all a free retainer.
Instead of saying oh here, a free retainer because we dropped 50 million mats and new items and gear!
Nope, sorry, we extra bucks or two and shove them back in mog station.
That's really a low blow.