Actual Inventory Space Problem

[Takophiliac]

This may or may not be a good alternative depending on what your objective is for collecting the gear, but one good solution for this I've seen people suggest is to implement a glamour book system. People could add a piece of gear to the book (in some versions of the suggestion, this destroys the actual gear item in the process) but once added to the book, you could freely use the item as a glamour whenever. The book interface could include a checklist or completion percentage, allowing you to keep track of how complete your sets are.

The glamour book also doesn't provide the same benefits to square in the way of reducing user data.

Storing the gear in the storage NPC manner reduces in-circulation gil by providing another sink when you want to get it out. It also reduces the database storage requirements in 2 ways:
-By requiring the armor to be fully repaired and dropping its spiritbond level, storing the gear requires one smaller "key item" slot. This consolidation of data would reduce data storage to at least 1/3, or maybe less.
-By storing the set as a key item, only one key item slot (a serial number) is used for what used to be 5 full inventory slots. This consolidation reduces data to 1/5 (for most sets).

The glamour book would be something of an improvement, but still requires at least 5 key item sized inventory slots in your user data by the same measure. This represents a 2/3 (approximately) reduction in stored data size, vs the storage NPC idea which both creates a gil sink and reduces storage requirements by an estimated 14/15 (about 94%)

The glamour book also doesn't address the reason for collecting in the first place, at least not in my case. That may change if some other announcements about housing were to follow, but that's off topic in this thread.