Quote Originally Posted by Balipu View Post
Well I'm no programmer but maybe the reason why wow can store glamour appearances and FFXIV can't is because wow has an ancient engine that retains some assets from the freakin WarCraft III engine. All that gear might not ammount to that many data,
The server doesn't care what the glamour looks like. If you've unlocked it or not is a boolean value: true or false (1 or 0 to the processor & database). That's true no matter what it is. Set aside a 1KB chunk of space for every character, use a bitmask, and you can store if they've unlocked 8192 glamour items. That's how the crafting and gathering logs know every item you've made/gathered at least once to give you an unlock bonus.

(I am a programmer.)