The equipment system for the purpose s of appearance customization and individual expression of yourself in is cumbersome and archaic.
Every patch adds numerous equipment pieces (unique weapons for 13 jobs, pvp gear, tank/DPS/healer gear, event gear, promotional gear, subscription event gear and so on) and storing even only the most essential and appealing pieces in your inventory and on retainers is an awkward task. When you want to use a piece for glamour, you need to remember it's name and how it looked like. You need to remember where you've put it (character armoury? character's inventory (4 tabs, 175 item slots), which retainer (8 max, each holding up to 175 items)?). Or maybe the item is stored in the Inn's Armoire? Or maybe you've converted it for materia? Traded in for points? Disposed due to lack of space? In that case, you need to go and run a dungeon (first figure out which dungeon was it exactly) over and over to get it back again - hopefully your queue times aren't murderous and you won't get outlotted. Or figure out how to craft it again - gather materials or camp the auction house and spend a fortune - again...
Many other MMOS, even the ones not branding themselves as 'theme park' game have moved to smarter and more user friendly inventory glamour systems.
In the most basic terms, it works by showing you a list of gear you've (account wide, so all of your alts together) ever obtained, let's you Try-On and apply it's glamour to your current gear with one mouse click. You can sort the list by level, job, gender, colour, slot, theme... Apply dyes on the fly...
The most important features tho are:
1) you only need to obtain the item once, and then put it away or throw away, but it will remain awailable on the glamour list forever
2) you can categorize (ie, see only bodies) and Try-On all the items you've ever worn and find very fast exactly the look you want, without rammaging through 1575+ (9*175 inventory on retainers, armoire etc) or having to reobtain the gear again (not fun)
I think time spent on developing a modern Wardrobe system would be a better investment in games future than resources spent on Triple Triad, Lord of Verminion, Chocobo Racing and Diadem all together (not that they're terrible).
This feature is being requested by players for years now, i.e.:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...system_mockup/
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...e-Guild-Wars-2
In the upcoming patch players will be expected to accomodate the following new items and equipment, for example: