Realistic Solution to Inventory Space (Programming idea that would lower server data)

[KisaiTenshi]

Realistic Solution to Inventory Space (Programming idea that would lower server data)

First and foremost, I want people to read the full idea before jumping to any conclusions. This is an idea meant to solve current glamour issues in game while at the same time reducing the amount of data that is stored on the server for every character out there. To explain this I want everyone to understand a few things about how Square Enix is looking at things and how they make their decisions:

1) Money spent on the game must be kept within current budget

Whoa, I'll stop you there. This is not a "data expense" problem. Nor is it a storage problem. It's a synchronization problem. I'll tell you straight up from a game I had a NDA with that there is nothing necessarily stopping the developers from having infinite space, but it comes at one extreme penalty.

More items you can have = larger packet sizes, too large of packet means fragmentation. If you know how and why MMO players tamper with the MTU settings, you'd know that the maximum packet size is just under 1500bytes. Those 1500 bytes have to be sent every 200ms (for 5fps of game play.) Within those 1500 bytes you have to store your character's coordinates, gear, physics, etc

So if you sit there and watch a packet monitor you'll note that opening, the inventory, picking up or dropping an item, or consuming an item, re-polls every item. Hence part of the reason FFXIV can do all these AOE dances in the first place is that the game doesn't constantly have to send updates to 100 inventory spaces every 200ms when the inventory is open.

So if you had say, 1000 spaces instead, now instead of 100 items fitting in one packet, it now takes 10, which means it takes 2 seconds to open or close the inventory, and everything else in the game grinds to a halt until it does. That makes playing dungeons impossible without "locking down" the inventory in some way so only part of it is available.

So here's where I'm going to suggest another idea.

Reverse how the Armory system works. Instead of having 25 items per slot, have one armory page for each class/job. While in a Duty no gear can be swapped except what is in the Armory for the class/job the Duty is for. The reason it works the way it does right now is to allow re-using gear between classes, which is all and good... if all your classes are the same level and you really have no desire to glamor anything. In V1.0 they removed a few item slots to reduce the complexity of the models, not necessarily the data sync requirements.

Then with the game's main inventory, have a "Field" and a "Dungeon/Duty" inventory. Field inventory consists of the current inventory we have. The Dungeon/Duty can only contain finished consumables (and item drops from the Duty.) When the Duty ends, the player can keep the consumables in the Duty inventory for next time, but the gear drops must be transferred to the field inventory, a retainer, or destroyed before another Duty can commence. The "field" inventory would not be available during Duty's.

[kikix12]

Then with the game's main inventory, have a "Field" and a "Dungeon/Duty" inventory. Field inventory consists of the current inventory we have. The Dungeon/Duty can only contain finished consumables (and item drops from the Duty.) When the Duty ends, the player can keep the consumables in the Duty inventory for next time, but the gear drops must be transferred to the field inventory, a retainer, or destroyed before another Duty can commence. The "field" inventory would not be available during Duty's.

This would piss of a lot of players that do duty one after another. It solves one problem but generates another.

I believe it was you that mentioned storage items, and that's what I thought of as well when I heard about the data transferred. Instead of giving players more inventory space, give them items that can store items, but that need a cast time and an animation and cannot be used in combat. Make the tabs within those easy to customize by means of filters (for example, "food only", "gear only", "materia and glamour only", but also between 5 and whatever amount of slots the player wants that the developers feel comfortable, 25 or 50 per tab would be a fine range I believe) and the ability to name them. Make one tab for current run which you can access only before leaving the dungeon (as in, while the run is ongoing, all the way to the moment you leave the duty through the exit) with there being an option to automatically relocating those items to other spots based on the filters. If there is not enough space in them?! Drop em in normal inventory. None there either?! THEN lock the players until they decide what to do with the extra items. If someone doesn't have space, normally they just couldn't even get it in the first place, so it's already a more forgiving system.

That way, people could go from duty to duty with no downtime for clearing inventory, all the while not getting ridiculous amount of clutter to bring with them all the time. I daresay that lowering the standard inventory to 25-50 items for the stuff that needs to be possessed "here and now", with some extra spaces for random stuff picked on the field, from quests, from merchants or just from not fitting into the other "bags" would be good, to give more of that "bag space" (because let's be honest here, Square Enix could but does not WANT to give unlimited, or even "more than enough" inventory space, just enough to "manage with").