Frustrating Design

[Penthea]

If I had asked "why is this round" and you had answered "because it's not a square", you would have given me about the same insight as you gave me with this reply.
Thanks for the try though.

P.S.
Just in case, I'm not mocking you.
What I was "asking" is "why are they not the same", and your answer, interpreted literally, is "because they are not the same"...
Now, giving you the benefit of the doubt, maybe you where implying all the technical details others, like Tridus, explained. But you didn't explain anything, and I clearly was not aware of them, so your answer is not providing any information, it just looks like a tauthology.
Bottom line, it might lead to less misunderstanding if you were to articulate your point a bit.

But that's the answer. That is how the inventory works in this game. I'm not trolling you, not trying to be cheeky. You asked a question and I answered it. You can dislike my answer all you like, it doesn't change that retainer and saddlebag inventory is not considered as the character's personal inventory.

[Shouko]

SE doesn't toss the devs much money in which to work with, they keep citing too hard, too much stress on servers or some other excuse as not to do something. You just kinda go ok, whatever and deal with it like the rest of the players that have been dealing with it since 1.0/2.0 days.

Most people here are the same way but we've just given up caring for the most part and just do what we can to keep playing or move on in some people's cases.

[Dirich]

your post

You are right.
Still, I've been there (starting from HPC background), and I've seen others been there and I've never seen anybody get it wrong. You need to completely disregard the hardware having physical limits in order to get this particular detail wrong, but if there is an industry that deeply think about (cores and caches) physical limitations it is the gaming industry.
Probably it was the work of someone new and they were not really doing a good job with code reviews.

Regarding the full replacement of the legacy code, I have to agree with others: between spending a year or two rewriting it, it is more cost effective to spend such time to develop new content to retain your current playerbase. They would otherwise be developing what could be rebranded as FFXVI (or FFXVII or whatever number they'd be at by the time they are done with).

[Dirich]

But that's the answer. That is how the inventory works in this game. I'm not trolling you, not trying to be cheeky. You asked a question and I answered it. You can dislike my answer all you like, it doesn't change that retainer and saddlebag inventory is not considered as the character's personal inventory.

"Saddlebag is not Inventory" is a tautology and definitely NOT an answer to the question "WHY is Saddlebag not Inventory?".
I am not able to articulate this point more, as it seems self evident to me. And to be honest, at this point it's mostly grammar we are discussing, as others gave very detailed replies to my "why".

[Skivvy]

"Saddlebag is not Inventory" is a tautology and definitely NOT an answer to the question "WHY is Saddlebag not Inventory?".
I am not able to articulate this point more, as it seems self evident to me. And to be honest, at this point it's mostly grammar we are discussing, as others gave very detailed replies to my "why".

Why? Because this game is built on a base of sticks and mud. The servers can barely handle anything, lack of data/server space is always being used as an excuse as to why things can't be implemented. Whether or not it's true, this game feels as if it is fed the tiniest budget, and they are not going to rock the boat with trying to fix poor systems.

You'r pretty new to the game. As time goes on, you will discover that SE implements features in the most ass-backwards way possible. Usually far more convoluted than it needs to be. It's the SE way.

[Penthea]

"Saddlebag is not Inventory" is a tautology and definitely NOT an answer to the question "WHY is Saddlebag not Inventory?".
I am not able to articulate this point more, as it seems self evident to me. And to be honest, at this point it's mostly grammar we are discussing, as others gave very detailed replies to my "why".

It seems the answers you want are detailed to the point of knowing how the code works. I'm simply explaining things from the point of view of a player interacting with the game. Retainers and chocobos are npcs who hold things for you, you own the stuff they hold but you can't use it unless you take it from them. The same as how you can't use the hammer your friend is holding, even if you own the hammer. I'm sorry I offended you with trying to be concise.

[Tridus]

Thanks for the very in depth reply.

I don't see why the state of the inventory must be constantly synced with the server. If it's closed, no syncing is necessary, if it's open, you can sync on action (which is low rate due to being human interaction) or even batch the changes (at risk of losing the batch in case of crashes). Also, as you mention, this stuff is done by transmitting the changes and not a full snapshot of the state.

If it's closed, some things still need to be known (if you have a quest item, if it's full, if you do a search on something someone links), but yes, all of that could be synced when you login and simply updated with changes rather than resynced constantly. I have no answer for why they did it that way, except perhaps they thought it was better than doing the work to avoid desync bugs. Clearly, scaling wise it was a mistake.

Ok, it's from 1.0, but how on earth can a major software house that's been around since the 90s (at least and afaik) end up with issues of such a basic nature. It's literally programming 101. Then again, I've seen codebases where literally everything was handled via the equivalent of std::list, so maybe I should wonder why this kind of stuff still surprises me.

Nobody here is going to know why those decisions were made. In certain things, Japan is well behind the times in software best practices, but they should have known this from working on XI. The current team is pretty much stuck with it unless they can get the go ahead to put the work in to change it. I'm sure you're aware of what a big deal a change like that would be, although IMO it's the correct thing to do for the health of the game. It would solve so many limitations they run into now.

5. I think there's been a small misunderstanding. I'm not against emotes in dialogues, those do add to the immersion. What I am arguing is that there is no reason to block character movements while a moogle is waving his hand, turning around and walking into the sunset.
The example is one of many from the daily moogle tribe quest. After a month of doing them, I just skip the text, but I can't skip that 1-2 seconds pause of wait for the moogle emote script to end, even though my character is not doing any emote.

Ah, I see.

3. I updated the second post with an example of excessive double checking: teleportation. Excessive to ask for confirmation since you can stop the teleport cast anyway.

That's just a UI thing, and I have no idea why they do it. I tend to agree it gets excessive. Console players have it a bit easier there because it's just another button tap, but I find some of those dialogs aren't all in the same place with a mouse so I have to move around to confirm and it's kinda tedious. I certainly wouldn't complain if they changed it. Perhaps you should post that sugestion on the UI forum.

[illgot]

For you to go to the trouble of making a "complaint" over something this trivial..is just sad.

His complaint is more valid and thought out than your complaint of his complaint.

This game is a complete nightmare code wise and SE does not give the devs enough time or money to actually fix the game so instead the devs have to find creative ways to work around the existing code. This game was also hampered by the limitations of the game console so that was another difficulty to overcome.

If it was possible to just add additional primary inventory the devs would, but since it is not, they developed the saddlebag system.

[Ziggyzapps]

Dear FFXIV designers (and/or devs depending on how you do things at SE),

I've just spent a month affected by bug where I couldn't select "Use" on most of my items. Turns out the reason why is that I had my saddlebag open.

How it take u a month to figure that one out? lolol

[Iscah]

There was a similar discussion a little while back that included an official response from one of the programmers, which explained that due to complications with how some other parts of the data storage (mailbox items if I remember correctly) were configured, it is actually impossible for them to add more inventory slots without a lot of reprogramming or possibly data loss. They worked around it as much as they could by expanding each ‘page’ of items from 25 to 35 but they cannot add more pages.

So, it looks like that’s where the saddlebag comes into it - they can’t make it part of the inventory but they can work around and give us this other thing that has to be handled separately but is better than nothing.