New glamour system please!

[Niwashi]

It's limitations with there server and memory iirc.

Just look at past live letters yoshi says limitation like every other question

Features that take up active memory are severely restricted by their servers, but this feature only takes up a bit of database storage, and a rather trivial amount at that. Their crappy old servers don't account for not having it. They just haven't bothered to write the code for it yet.

Unlike other MMOs, FFXIV does not store player data clientside, it is stored on the servers.

All MMOs store their important data server side. In the case of glamour, the server says which items (or which glamour appearances) you have available and which you're currently wearing. Your client software says how to display those items on your screen. (Which items/glamours you're currently wearing, in fact, HAS to be server side in any online game. Otherwise the server wouldn't be able to tell other people's clients how to display your character when you're in their field of vision.)

That is incredibly naive understanding of how databases work.

First off, an empty variable contains as much data as a full variable. This means that a brand new empty character contains as much data as a maxed out character with a full inventory. An empty inventory is just full of blank/neutral data. The same is true for retainer inventories.

This would only be true if SE is really terrible at designing efficient databases. More typically, an empty slot would only hold a null pointer, whereas a slot that's used would hold a pointer to another record of whatever is there. If it's something like a crafting ingredient, that record would contain just an item ID and stack size. If it's a gear item, it would be a larger record, with fields for item id, durability, spiritbond, materia, color, and glamour.

The creation of a "Glamour Log" would add a massive amount of new data to every character. Every character's data would need to include a yes/no variable for every single piece of gear included in the Glamour Log, even if the character never even uses it. That is somewhere around 6500 new variables and their database addresses for each character currently as of 3.1 and that number will only grow as more and more patches come out. That is increasing each character's data by a massive amount.

Only if you regard 813 bytes per character as "a massive amount" since that's how much space it would take to store 6500 items in a glamour log. (They'd probably give it an entire kilobyte though to allow expansion room. A kilobyte would allow for 8192 items.) They could even set it so that it only allocates that killobyte or so of space when you unlock glamours at level 50, so new or trial characters wouldn't be taking up even that little amount of space, only characters at level 50 or above.

A yes/no would still be taking up 1 byte of storage.

If there were only 1 yes/no, then you're right that it takes up at least a byte (or possibly more). But 8 yes/no values can be stored in that same byte. (And they generally would be whenever you're dealing with a system of lots of yes/no answers like a glamour log or armoire. It's a simple bitmap.) When you actually select an item from your log to use, then the system would have to translate that bit into its corresponding item ID, but it wouldn't be storing the item IDs per character.