Please, no more inventory slots...

[TaranTatsuuchi]

All these clunky inventory systems...

They need to fix whatever backend problems require them to design things in such a way...

[basketofseals]

I'd give them a pass on it if this was a brand new mmo, fresh out of the gates with growing pains, but it's not. It's the second iteration of the first failed attempt after over a decade of developing a different mmo that had the same exact problems. So, it's not like they didn't see this coming and didn't have literally decades of experience both their own and other developers' to draw from.

I don't know why you're phrasing the absolute failure of 1.0 like it was some positive opportunity that they missed out on.

When 1.0 sank faster than a lead brick, SE did not look at it as a little mistake that they could learn a lot from. It was a huge mistake. Potentially as big as Spirits Within, and maybe it was even worse than that. It was a main, numbered part of their flagship series, and it was universally reviled. It was all hands on deck. Throw everything out and hold on preciously to whatever was worth saving. Break out the popsicle sticks and hot glue because there isn't even time to wait for the proper materials to come in. The repair job needs to start now. The entire company essentially went into hibernation trying to fix this broken mess.

There wasn't time to create a new engine while thinking about your future plans. This is supposed to be done before you start a massive project like this, but SE didn't have that luxury. We all know it's a bad engine, SE included. We also know there's no point saying "well they shouldn't have done this" to a mistake that happened over 8 years ago. The fact that they threw out their entire dev team speaks for itself. We're also realistic enough in realizing that any significant change to the game engine like this is going to take a significant amount of time.

[KisaiTenshi]

It's the second iteration of the first failed attempt after over a decade of developing a different mmo that had the same exact problems.

Inventory management is something that is not an easy thing to deal with in a MMO, because you have an entire chain-of-custody issue to deal with. "gold dupe" bugs happen by intentionally crashing the server to invoke rollback bugs caused by holding onto the inventory items.

So for each item you have, the game server has to verify that you in fact have that item. Just to switch two items positions is not a simple matter of "put item in A in B and item B in A's slot", the game has to actually make sure that item A and Item B exist, that you have them, that you have at least a stack of "1" of them, that you aren't currently moving it from the retainer, chocobo bag, or dragging it to/from any of the number of ways to sell or dispose of the item. This is also why when you dismiss the retainer after selling items, they are gone, and why you can't buy back items after you leave the zone. Every time you switch zones, the game client completely reloads all the data for the zone, and the server presumably saves your character to disk, unloads them from the zone you exited, and then loads your character back up in the new zone and the game client has to reload everything.

The only thing they could really do to fix inventory is by progressively removing things that are stored in the main inventory areas. Like the "glamour dresser" could be an easy way to dispose of all gear that you don't need since it can be retrieved later now. Just make it unlimited. There is no reason not to.

Realisticly the only stuff that should be in the players inventory are consumables. There should be no quest items, no raid "tokens", no relic gear progress markers, no untradeables/unsellables. When a player goes into a duty, none of this stuff but consumables and maybe a spare set of gear should be available. The rest of that space should be for picking up loot. If I can not use it in a dungeon instance, it should not be in the inventory.

[Penthea]

Hmm, I actually like that I have different types of storage so I can better organise my things. I have a retainer for crafting materials, another for housing items, I keep crafting materials I use super often in my saddle bags, my gear has its own section in the armoury chest...it makes it very easy for me to find things. I much prefer this to a sea of slots like I had in WoW.

[Sigma-Astra]

Just make a separate inventory chest for crafting/gathering items that stack up like in Guild Wars 2 where you gather what you need and have an option to send it directly to your gathering storage instantly.

This would solve 99.9% of problems for crafters and gatherers.

[Duskane]

all these Inv spaces
yet Armoire is still awful

[Limecat]

Given that there will always be an ever-expanding roster of junk needed to craft with, maybe they should strip away all the flavor and treat it as a currency. Instead of various logs for example, you simply collect "wood". Starting wood nodes give one wood per gather, staring recipes use one wood to craft. Then as each new tier of logswood and recipes comes along, you add more to both the harvest of the applicable tier, as well as the requirement for the recipes. So say, by this point we might ditch torryea logs for a node that gives 50 wood per hit, and recipes that are using 100/150/etc wood. You'd be able to grind old wood nodes of course, but the numbers can be adjusted however is needed to make it unreasonable. It's an ugly as hell solution, but at some point something like it might be needed.

[KisaiTenshi]

Given that there will always be an ever-expanding roster of junk needed to craft with, maybe they should strip away all the flavor and treat it as a currency. Instead of various logs for example, you simply collect "wood".

Ick no, they already did one round of that with V1.x to 2.x. With crafting, the technical better solution is to be able to party with your retainer(s) while they are in gathering jobs. As long as they are summoned, their inventory acts as an extension of yours. So while you craft stuff, you can craft directly out of their inventory. If you decide to go do gathering, anything you don't have stacks for in your inventory, goes in their inventory until they have no more slots. While the retainer is summoned, they are not on the market just like when they're summoned by the bell currently.

The trend in "crafting" games is that you have to gather materials that are better grades than previous, then craft tools to gather better materials, and thus you keep doing that until you can gather everything. Application of this to a game like FFXIV is not that different, except everything that is crafted only requires two materials, and to make something else, you make it from the intermediate materials. eg To make "glass" for a window, you gather sand, and put it in an oven. Done. Then if you want to make glass doors, windows, chairs, you take "glass ingots" or whatever and make it from that using whatever tool is required. In MMORPG's often items require 5 or so things. Usually you have to go kill something for leather, feathers, or wool. Then you have to go gather wood or mine metal, then you have to refine that wood from logs or metal ore into lumber and ingots, and then from ingots you make the first stage of the item, and then you keep building better items from the previous item to a point. This is perfectly fine, except that it creates artificial scarcity because so many materials are required that can't simply be gathered.

The game is missing the "sheparding" DoL job that was planned for 1.00, a job where you could gather wool, milk, etc, from animals that you farm. Imagine a DoL job that you can breed animals that have higher quality materials if you feed them right, or higher levels let you tame and farm materials from animals and some monsters instead of killing them. Then you wouldn't need storage, you just go to your sheeps and get what you need. Likewise one thing that Archeage probably got right was being able to just grow trees on your own property, and harvest them when they're done, without having to go find harvesting nodes. Now apply that to pretty much any plant in the game. That just leaves mining, and the solution to that is a big harder since rocks don't grow. Perhaps Alchemy desynth could work on raw materials to create rarer but lower-quality materials.

But I digress, some of us like seeing the complexity have an end result. I'm usually the first person to pooh-pooh crafting in single-player games because it's often awful and time-wasting. But games like Starview Valley, Terraria, Starbound and such have kinda put a spotlight on a more fun way to craft things by using MMORPG style crafting without the grindy-awful nature of it. You simply make better gear, and your good. Finding the materials to make that gear, however can take a while. Where as many FPS/FP-RPG crafting is basically "kill everything you see", eventually you'll get that thing you need.

[Iscah]

The other crafting-heavy game I've played is the solo-RPG Atelier Iris series, and I liked how they handled crafting materials there.

Basically the recipe will call for specific items BUT you can substitute other items of the same type, which might improve the item quality or make it into something else.

So (to borrow FFXIV items) if you are crafting "iron armour" requiring an iron ingot and hard leather, you could substitute boar leather and get a better quality iron armour, or you could substitute a steel ingot and discover the recipe for steel armour.

While the overall system was better and worse in different ways, the ability to substitute materials could go a long way to cutting down on how many types of each material need to be stored.

[Linx0r]

Unfortunately we will only get even more slots. The game doesn’t have a finite amount of individual items so as new crafting and gathering ingredients come out, there will be a need to increase inventory. If done verybgradually this wouldn’t be bad but we have tonnes of item bloat right now