Why does the new inventory UI show less items on Expanded than before?

[Vhailor]

Piling on here. The new inventory display is a significant step backward from the old display (100 items visible vs. 70), and the Key Item tabs feel pointless. Give me an "Expanded" view that shows all four panes, preferably with Crystals attached as well.

As an aside, is it really so much of a strain to add ten more spaces so we're at an even 150? 140 is an exceedingly strange number, and 150 would have allowed a very nice "Expanded" view showing six 5x5 inventory panes, a single pane of Key Items, and a pane for the crystals. It would have been glorious.

[Sindele]

With the new 5x7 layout, the inventory, armoury chest, and saddlebag all share a unified interface. And with four bags instead of five and a half, sorting by tab works a lot better. Also the item search feature now specifies the correct tab while using the expanded layout.

Except for my 8 retainers, who now all have an interface that went up by a page in total - an awkward half-page at that. Very unified.

Also, /isearch specification was actually *more* accurate before once you got over the initial hump of figuring out how it was numbered. All it tells me now is that it is somewhere in a vague mass of 70 items, marking yet another loss of granularity.

[Sindele]

So, for those who haven't seen it, the FFXIV reddit has a translated post from the Lead UI Designer Hiroshi Minagawa on the new layout. (I'm not going to reiterate it here, go read it if you're curious.)

While I understand and accept the technical limitations, I still have to confess that I'm in the camp of those who can't accept it as it is. It's certainly the right technical decision to make, but the burden the current (and still-incomplete) solution imposes upon what is essentially the most vital component of the MMO user experience during the time it will take to implement a superior display solution is a bitter pill to be told to swallow, and I'm not convinced that we couldn't have continued on with a long-term insufficient but short-term superior setup until the new one was more robustly featured.

[Commander_Justitia]

According to the UI designer:
They couldn't expand it anymore without doing this 100->70 grid change. But in return it will be easier in the future to add more functions.
Basically it was needed to add saddlebags and the glamour dresser, in this timewindow to 4.2(they wanted to do it fast because the amount of work was predictable in current system compared to the 25er grid option which was unpredictable because of several reason).
They try to work on 10x14 now, but that would be only for PS4 and Windows64bit PC user, because of memory issues.

The question is for me how long they can add stuff while not revamping the old code anyway at some point. Glamour dresser is not really in the best shape, it would have been wasted devtime too if they replace it at some point later with a total different feature...
I feel like the whole retainer/market-board/inventory/armory/glamourlog needs an update into this decade. I don't want to know how much time I spent at retainer just clicking.
They would run way better if it would be possible to copy those things from other mmo like gw2 or wow. Don't need to reinvent the apple.
In PC mmorpg you have your community building addons for you, less work for your company. But with Ps4 idk if we ever get addon support.

[Callinon]

So playing WoW, I've had a display showing my 136-slot inventory and my 210-slot bank open at the same time displaying all their slots at once and my computer's memory has not burst into flames. "Memory issues" with displaying an entire inventory at once doesn't pass the smell test.

[Commander_Justitia]

So playing WoW, I've had a display showing my 136-slot inventory and my 210-slot bank open at the same time displaying all their slots at once and my computer's memory has not burst into flames. "Memory issues" with displaying an entire inventory at once doesn't pass the smell test.

Sure if you do it right at the start, you wont have so big problems later but it probably takes way longer. I don't think they had that time for 2.0.
It's not the first time they do something weird because of engine/code limitations. You want them to put the money/time in new content or new engine/fixes you will most likely never see or notice much, but could make things way easier in the distant future?
I wonder what would be all possible if they release a new mmorpg with all the experience they gathered now, but mmorpg were not exactly topseller in the last years, mobile games were much more profitable. I still doubt it will happen, but I see a gap for a big one in a few years, current top mmorpg getting really old

[TaleraRistain]

Technical limitations aside, when you intend to make UI changes like this, you don't just spring it on the community, especially not with a "Sorry, we can't go back" type of excuse. I'm a software engineer and with any UI changes, we have to consider the effect on our users and WARN THEM that changes are coming. We have small numbers of users who test the change so we can get feedback on it, before we implement into the full production system. My company unfortunately did have to learn the hard way in the past, as they used to do exactly what SE did, and it lost them customers because they were so furious about the unasked for and unannounced UI changes as they had incorporated the previous versions into the way their business worked.

[Callinon]

Sure if you do it right at the start, you wont have so big problems later but it probably takes way longer. I don't think they had that time for 2.0.
It's not the first time they do something weird because of engine/code limitations. You want them to put the money/time in new content or new engine/fixes you will most likely never see or notice much, but could make things way easier in the distant future?
I wonder what would be all possible if they release a new mmorpg with all the experience they gathered now, but mmorpg were not exactly topseller in the last years, mobile games were much more profitable. I still doubt it will happen, but I see a gap for a big one in a few years, current top mmorpg getting really old

I'm not seeing this as a problem that'll improve if they just ignore it. Systemic design problems are only going to magnify over time if they aren't fixed.

Honestly, I should be able to specify how I want my inventory displayed. Maybe I desperately want 10 tabs of 14 slots each. Maybe I want 1 tab of 140 slots (I do), or 2 of 70 or 1 with 100 and 1 with 40. There's no good reason to deny me that level of customization. Telling me "yeah we know you had this and were fine with it, but now it's this, it's worse, and you can suck me" is not a great user experience.

[LunaP]

Didn't Yoshi mention around 4.0 going forward they they were looking at dropping DX9 and the 32bit client for 64bit only ? So that they could move forward w/ improving the game immensely to be more responsive and make use of resources better?

[drebbe]

Don't worry we just have to wait until patch 2.2 when we get add-on support.... oh wait....

+1 on reverting back expanded view to one page. Tabs are considered bad UI design unless you are separating different categories. Fail on SE's part here.