Inventory space

[Zojha]

It's kind of hilarious, listening to folks whine about how they MUST have this or that glamour, and how unfair it is that SE makes them pay real money for it.

You know what's even more hilarious? Double standards.

Consider expansions. What are expansions? Basically cash shop bundles with several exclusive features. Heavensward owners have a HUGE advantage over non Heavensward owners in all just about every regard - they gain more gil, more power, more overall content. But somehow, everyone is okay with that. If you were to put every expansion feature into the cash shop as singular items instead of a bundle however, say, putting the level cap raise and job skills up for 1 dollar, then each new zone at a few cents and the MSQ for another dollar, a primal battle at a few cent (imagine it all summing up to the same end price), it would be pay to win and evil. Why? Double standard.

[Zafrei]

You know what's even more hilarious? Double standards.

Consider expansions. What are expansions? Basically cash shop bundles with several exclusive features. Heavensward owners have a HUGE advantage over non Heavensward owners in all just about every regard - they gain more gil, more power, more overall content. But somehow, everyone is okay with that. If you were to put every expansion feature into the cash shop as singular items instead of a bundle however, say, putting the level cap raise and job skills up for 1 dollar, then each new zone at a few cents and the MSQ for another dollar, a primal battle at a few cent (imagine it all summing up to the same end price), it would be pay to win and evil. Why? Double standard.

One is considered a game, the other is considered nickle and diming xD

Having said that, I'm okay with the principle of a cash shop - I've bought from mog station - but when it becomes the primary source of income (*cough*eso*cough*) then developer resources focus on it as a priority and stuff that would otherwise be packaged in a game, gets shut behind the store. Then of course come the lockboxes. FFXIV has the right balance though exactly as it is now from a consumer point of view, in my opinion.

[LineageRazor]

You know what's even more hilarious? Double standards.

Consider expansions.

Apples and oranges. No sensible person believes we should get all the stuff we get in an expansion for free ("free" in this case meaning for no more than our subscription fees). All that work requires a LOT of extra development effort, far beyond what our subscription pays for, and the one-time purchasing fee for the expansion does a lot to defray that cost. By the same token, I'd guess the percentage of players who would prefer not to ever see new expansions is very, very low. The vast majority of players want to see the new content that an expansion provides, whereas only a very niche market exists for mogstation glamour items.

Arguing that cash shop vs expansions is a double standard is akin to arguing that cash shop vs subscription fees are a double standard. After all, a player who pays subscription fees has a HUGE gameplay advantage over a player who does not. That's pay-to-win, right?

It is true, however, that this game handles expansions (at least the first one) badly. What you say is true: A player that doesn't buy the expansion might as well not play. They can't level beyond 60, and there are NO current endgame activities that they can participate in. FFXI handled that much better: even when they added expansions to raise the level cap, they added methods for players without those expansions to keep leveling, and even deliberately placed some endgame activities in older zones (Voidwatch, for example) - endgame activities with meaningful rewards. In FFXI, buying an expansion was a choice (albeit a choice that the vast majority of players chose); in this game, it is all but a requirement to continue enjoying the game.

[Kosmos992k]

What you say is true: A player that doesn't buy the expansion might as well not play. They can't level beyond 60, and there are NO current endgame activities that they can participate in.

No one can level beyond 60. The things that are locked behind HW are primarily the HW zones, MSQ and anything that takes place in those new zones. Saying that there are no current endgame activities would have more sting if the completion rates for Alexander and the 3.X MSQ were higher. But they are not. There is in fact plenty to do in the ARR elements of the game, especially for players with restricted play time, or a play style that advances progress at a far lower speed than the end-game community.

I don't actually think that buying the expansion for HW was required to continue enjoying the game, though it is certainly required to play any of the new jobs, obtain job actions beyond lvl 50, enjoy the HW MSQ, participate in current end-game, fly and of course access the latest beast tribe dailies. All of those things are attractive options, but are by no means a requirement to enjoy the rest of the game.

It wouldn't really even need that change for gear condition. After all, the items already storable there have a condition, too, and we simply have to repair them to 100% before putting them away. (It's why there's a repair NPC standing right by each Inn.) They could let us store a lot more in the armoire, and still require 100% condition and reset spiritbond just as they do with the stuff there already.

Agreed, now we just need them to do it.

[Zojha]

Apples and oranges.

Both fruit! Both food. Both having certain nutrients whose tables you should certainly compare if you want to optimize your diet.

It is very clearly a double standard if people consider selling a bundle okay, but offering each piece of the bundle separately an outrage, because the features offered are identical in both cases - the only possible point of complaint can be the pricing. That's not debatable, that's plain fact. And it's a fun fact, as you could actually save money in the latter case by not buying the pieces you like, thus making it the far more consumer friendly option - in fact, if you look at most bundles, people would prefer to be able to buy the items in a bundle separately, because they dislike large parts of the bundle and pay for something they'd rather not have. Case in point: NPC haircuts and outfits in the mog store. Same naturally goes for expansions - someone might not like crafting, so not having to pay for it anyway as part of the bundle would be beneficial the them.

What I am pointing out is that people keep saying it's bad when cash can buy you ingame benefits, when in fact, that is a common and very much accepted practice. Every expansion does exactly that and therefore, it logically cannot be bad if it happens outside of expansions as well. Except people are not logical nor coherent and therefore apply the double standard that in some cases, buying ingame benefits for money is okay, whereas in other cases it is not. Why? Because.

Therefore, the argument that the cash shop is fine because it doesn't provide ingame benefits logically argues that expansions are bad and need to either be free or abolished entirely. That's just logical deduction. If that's not what you want to say, you need to provide a different argument to justify why the cash shop is okay. And if that's what you do want to say, well...your opinion, can't argue with that, can only disagree.

[Zafrei]

Both fruit! Both food. Both having certain nutrients whose tables you should certainly compare if you want to optimize your diet.

It is very clearly a double standard if people consider selling a bundle okay, but offering each piece of the bundle separately an outrage, because the features offered are identical in both cases - the only possible point of complaint can be the pricing. That's not debatable, that's plain fact. And it's a fun fact, as you could actually save money in the latter case by not buying the pieces you like, thus making it the far more consumer friendly option - in fact, if you look at most bundles, people would prefer to be able to buy the items in a bundle separately, because they dislike large parts of the bundle and pay for something they'd rather not have. Case in point: NPC haircuts and outfits in the mog store. Same naturally goes for expansions - someone might not like crafting, so not having to pay for it anyway as part of the bundle would be beneficial the them.

What I am pointing out is that people keep saying it's bad when cash can buy you ingame benefits, when in fact, that is a common and very much accepted practice. Every expansion does exactly that and therefore, it logically cannot be bad if it happens outside of expansions as well. Except people are not logical nor coherent and therefore apply the double standard that in some cases, buying ingame benefits for money is okay, whereas in other cases it is not. Why? Because.

Therefore, the argument that the cash shop is fine because it doesn't provide ingame benefits logically argues that expansions are bad and need to either be free or abolished entirely. That's just logical deduction. If that's not what you want to say, you need to provide a different argument to justify why the cash shop is okay. And if that's what you do want to say, well...your opinion, can't argue with that, can only disagree.

I'll just repost this here

One is considered a game, the other is considered nickle and diming xD

Having said that, I'm okay with the principle of a cash shop - I've bought from mog station - but when it becomes the primary source of income (*cough*eso*cough*) then developer resources focus on it as a priority and stuff that would otherwise be packaged in a game, gets shut behind the store. Then of course come the lockboxes. FFXIV has the right balance though exactly as it is now from a consumer point of view, in my opinion.

The fact that one is considered a "game" in its own right (or as close to it as possible) cannot and should not be understated. Then of course there's the question of where development resources should go - game content, or store? There's a clear difference if we're not splitting hairs.

[Antonio_Xul]

The day my inventory gets full and I don't want throw anything I have away, is the day I retire from this game and it's coming close. To hold onto gear for every role is insane! I've stopped leveling new roles, because that means more gear to hold. I have to hold onto older leveling gear to use for the next role I was going to level. Since gear passing leveling stage are also mostly locked to specific roles, also hurts the clutter. Materials for crafting, currency, chrystals, atma, etc. are the icing on the cake. Inventory is bursting and might have to just give up. Next patch is coming and that might kill me. I love this game, but inventory issue is a killer. They should've given us free retainers for veterans rewards every other rank or so.

[Welsper59]

The day my inventory gets full and I don't want throw anything I have away, is the day I retire from this game and it's coming close. To hold onto gear for every role is insane! I've stopped leveling new roles, because that means more gear to hold. I have to hold onto older leveling gear to use for the next role I was going to level. Since gear passing leveling stage are also mostly locked to specific roles, also hurts the clutter. Materials for crafting, currency, chrystals, atma, etc. are the icing on the cake. Inventory is bursting and might have to just give up. Next patch is coming and that might kill me. I love this game, but inventory issue is a killer. They should've given us free retainers for veterans rewards every other rank or so.

I, like so many others, feel this pain lol. It's generally never been too big of an issue to me to throw out or sell stuff that I was holding onto, but have a sensible means to recover (e.g. most crafted equips and dungeon drops). I've seen firsthand terrible inventory hoarders though... like REALLY bad. To the extent that even obvious trash items like Animal Skins take up multiple slots because they're too lazy to either trash it or even sort it (several "stacks" of 1-3 skins taking up slots), so they end up suffering inventory problems and seeking out other means to handle it, like multiple accounts/characters or a solo FC bank sharing. By comparison to my friends account that is like that in MMORPGs we play, I'd say most of our issues on the matter are paltry lol.

This is where I think games like WoW have really stepped it up, despite there having means to upgrade your inventory drastically anyway. The tools that WoW uses is either stuff they created or followed suit to how others have done. This being things like Heirlooms, which scales in power to your level up to whatever cap it is good till (lv80, 90, 100), originally helped speed up their leveling with increased exp gain and reduce the amount of inventory someone leveling needed. It has now even further reduced it by making those heirlooms disposable to the player thanks to the server storing data and allowing you to create that equip whenever you want across all characters tied to the user account(s).

Hell, even FFXI has stepped it up on the inventory problem after over a decade of relying on players to use multiple characters (each costs $1). Now, they've introduced equipment-only inventory slots, at least 2 of them in fact. In respect to how that game works, that's such a big deal to the degree that it'd be like we would have access to 2 extra 100 inventory slot bags anywhere we go and at any time (even mid-combat), in addition to them adding in more bank-like inventory (mog house storage)that are also mostly accessible from anywhere. There, however, we know for a fact that it does cause problems on server load lol. While it doesn't seem to affect server stability or load times to zoning with your character, the more equips you have in your inventory slots, the longer it is for the game to load your items/equipment list upon zoning in. If each inventory option were full, you're looking at maybe 30-60sec load times to access your inventory upon zoning in anywhere.

It'd be nice to have better access to inventory options, but there's no way they're going to do it for years to come. Inventory is a paid commodity in games these days. They'd sooner go F2P before letting meaningful inventory options be handed out, at which point inventory is only going to be a paid service lol. In other words, we'll never see it happen in the foreseeable future.

[Xenosan]

I've seen firsthand terrible inventory hoarders though... like REALLY bad. To the extent that even obvious trash items like Animal Skins take up multiple slots because they're too lazy to either trash it or even sort it (several "stacks" of 1-3 skins taking up slots)

Yesyesyes. It does shock me when screen-sharing with friends and see some of their inventory management. X.X;

I have strict adherence rules about hoarding/selling/tossing and organization OCD (like my first retainer carries ALC/ARM/CARP/BSM mats and the second only carries CUL/LTW/WVR mats and Materi-WTH IS THIS ROSE GOLD INGOT DOING HERE??? FKFKFKFKFKFKFKFKFKFKFKFK ..moved, whew that was close... ...DRAGON FANG!?).

It is concerning though though because I think for returning players who are just starting to re-invest in the game item management can get in the way, especially if they reinstalled and lost gear sets and are trying to sort their armory slots. The auto-gear button was a good addition for this scenario. hate to think people get turned off from the game for something like item management. vertical progression every new gear piece looking like another kink in the inventory overload for them, that can take the enthusiasm away.

[LunaFaye]

If it makes anyone feel better, I have all retainers you could possibly rent (paid not free ones) and 4 characters on my account. Yet I still have no space lol. It's not that I am hoarding everything possible but crafting takes up lots of space, then the gear sets (crafted/looted,tomes), relic items for multiple jobs, orchestra scrolls they sneak in your inventory and nobody wants, stacks of potions nobody needs and the list goes on... If I could pay for more retainers, I would but these are sadly limited, however I would welcome some inventory or armory increase especially if they are adding more jobs with 4.0.