Inventory Suggestion

[Malzian]

Not to be mean, but I did laugh. They have serious game design issues or at least we have been told. They would need to cancel stormblood and rebuild the game from scratch. I truthfully don't understand it. Is it because of playstation, japanese company, lack of skill they can't seem to get some simple features that are in other games.

The main reason for the limitation on the inventory system was the fact that the game saves character data twice as often as most MMOs do (every 15 seconds instead of every 30). As you increase inventory space you increase the amount of data to be written by a substantial amount and therefore it made it difficult to give us more space. Yoshi-P has said that they're reworking the way the game saves data to make it more efficient, which will allow them the ability to give us more space, but the change required new hardware infrastructure to do so which has been put in place for the 4.0 launch already.

[Moonlite]

The main reason for the limitation on the inventory system was the fact that the game saves character data twice as often as most MMOs do (every 15 seconds instead of every 30). As you increase inventory space you increase the amount of data to be written by a substantial amount and therefore it made it difficult to give us more space. Yoshi-P has said that they're reworking the way the game saves data to make it more efficient, which will allow them the ability to give us more space, but the change required new hardware infrastructure to do so which has been put in place for the 4.0 launch already.

I read the corporate speak as much as you. That doesn't explain the poor decisions of the design team. Just to point out a few how many beast tribe tokens, how many recipes reuse 2.0 items, I could literally spend a day pointing out bad itemization of this game. They also felt the need to charge when the increase retainers yet did not increase the number of free ones.

[Malzian]

I read the corporate speak as much as you. That doesn't explain the poor decisions of the design team. Just to point out a few how many beast tribe tokens, how many recipes reuse 2.0 items, I could literally spend a day pointing out bad itemization of this game. They also felt the need to charge when the increase retainers yet did not increase the number of free ones.

I'm not speaking entirely from the perspective of someone who just read the corporate line, but as a programmer and a network administrator as well.

For the most part people get the idea that 'saving data twice as often' is equivalent to 'writing down twice as much information'. Unfortunately, that's really now how these types of systems work. Speaking from the technical perspective there's a lot more to consider.

First you have to understand how data is saved which is not always 'we have new data here, write it next to the old data there' but more 'what of has changed that we need to record and how do we organize that data to record' even before going through the process of sending that data across the network to be written to a disk, all of which takes time that increases closer to exponentially than to linearly.

For the itemization, yes it's bad, but it fits into the current schema of how they process this data. If they add a new token that goes into your inventory, it's easier to fit into this schema than adding some new form of storage, i.e. A currency wallet for those tokens. Granted, they very well could add those tokens to the currency tab for seals and such, but they don't want to put you in a position where you've collected a thousand tokens from a 2.x beast tribe that you can't ever get rid of. The current system allows you to get rid of those tokens you no longer needed.

Personally I think they should itemize those tokens in the same way they did crystals, but there could be a dozen other reasons we're not aware of for why they didn't... Likely the whole turn-in system they set up for those is incompatible with the way crystals are stored, though let it be known that the whole 'drag the item here or right click' system was supposed to go away after Beta and never did.

So honestly, it does explain many of their decisions once you realize how that whole 'twice as often' bit affects the system at large and not just the small inventory part you're considering.

[Naunet]

Granted, they very well could add those tokens to the currency tab for seals and such, but they don't want to put you in a position where you've collected a thousand tokens from a 2.x beast tribe that you can't ever get rid of. The current system allows you to get rid of those tokens you no longer needed.

I mean, honestly, who would care if they have a bunch of beast tribe tokens they won't need anymore in their currency tab? It's much better than having them take up inventory slots. XD

[Moonlite]

Quality Discussion

I was meaning even more simple then putting stuff into tabs. I get that they have bad design issues. I was going one simpler every tribe gives same token. Shrinking down recipes. A quick search shows we have five different types of blood in game. If you can't solve the technical aspect of the issue why not start with a simpler solution. Instead of charging/punishing the player base.

[Malzian]

I mean, honestly, who would care if they have a bunch of beast tribe tokens they won't need anymore in their currency tab? It's much better than having them take up inventory slots. XD

Not the point. Those tokens sitting in a tab like that have data associated with them which needs to be accounted for. With them able to be tossed aside when you no longer need them, that's data they no longer need to store.

I was meaning even more simple then putting stuff into tabs. I get that they have bad design issues. I was going one simpler every tribe gives same token. Shrinking down recipes. A quick search shows we have five different types of blood in game. If you can't solve the technical aspect of the issue why not start with a simpler solution. Instead of charging/punishing the player base.

They really can't do the same token since then you can do a bunch of Kobold quests and get Vath rewards. They need to be distinct to the tribes to separate what you can buy with them.

As far as shrinking recipes, I'd be all for reducing the total number of materials needed, there's a TON of recipes at 60 that require an abhorrent amount of materials. However, like the beast tribes, the 5 different types of blood come from enemies of varying difficulty. Once again this is to force you to have to go to higher-level areas with higher level jobs to get those materials. Every single MMO breaks up their crafting like this, it's nothing new. The trouble is that none of the materials are never really unnecessary at the higher levels which forces you to hold on to far more materials than you should have to.

So what they're doing now is solving the technical aspect by working on the way they save the data as well as updating the hardware, and the PS3 support drop probably helped a bit too. It's a work in progress, and we're just going to have to be patient is all.