Suggestion: Make a Tab like WoW for gear collection

[Napiboy]

They should implement a gear tab that shows your all the gear you have collected throughout the game and is able to transmog your gear from straight out of. i know the glamour system is already well set in place but what WoW has is much easier to keep track and easier to glamour your gear from. it will also remove a lot of the gear cluttering we got going on.

[Rongway]

There are 3,722 weapons, shields, and tools; 8,326 armors; and 2,594 accessories. Subtract the 886 belts from the armor category, and that's a total 13,756 visible gear items. This data is directly from the Lodestone's Eorzea Database.

To store this information uncompressed for one character would require 13,756 bits. At 8 bits per byte, this is 1,720 bytes.

XIVCensus shows 15,058,908 characters across all worlds, and 605,525 "active" characters based on acquisition of the Dress-up Raubahn minion from 4.1 story. To store all glamour data for all 15some million characters would require an additional 26GB of storage space. On modern systems, this should (should) be a non-issue. However, if all 600some thousand active characters accessed their glamour catalog just once, it would require an additional 1GB of data transfer. If all these characters accessed their glamour catalog once per week, it would require an additional 4GB data transfer per month. Once per day, 30GB data transfer per month.

The devs have shown a consistent interest in keeping data access and transfer down, so I don't see this happening. They won't even let us access our 200 slot wardrobe + armoire everywhere.

[Feronar]

You mention 13756 visible gear items. Does that take into account that not every item has a unique appearance? In other words, the total number of unique item appearances would be much lower than 13756. On top of that, 30GB per *month* would be a laughably tiny amount of data usage for a company like Square Enix. Many ordinary people go through that amount of data in just a couple days watching Netflix and whatnot.

[MorbolvampireQueen6]

im pretty sure there are only 700 unique glamor items lol the biggest majority is rehashed from older things basicy

[Rongway]

You mention 13756 visible gear items. Does that take into account that not every item has a unique appearance? In other words, the total number of unique item appearances would be much lower than 13756.

370 items contain the word "Replica" in their name.

Of the non-Replica items that share exact appearances, the vast majority are accessories, and in these cases there are usually two or three different color schemes within each set of model-sharing items, so let's say of the generally five roles that accessories fall into post-ARR, three in any set are exact duplicates. That eliminates 3/5 of the accessories, or 1557 accessories.

Of the weapons and armors, it's quite rare for two items to share exactly the same appearance; in most cases there is some difference in texture mapping or bump mapping even among items that use the same model.

We're still looking at 11,000~12,000 items per character, about 1.5kB of storage, and 0.9 GB data access and transfer if everyone looks at their glamour catalog once; 27GB if everyone looks at their glamour catalog just once per day.

[Callinon]

There are 3,722 weapons, shields, and tools; 8,326 armors; and 2,594 accessories. Subtract the 886 belts from the armor category, and that's a total 13,756 visible gear items. This data is directly from the Lodestone's Eorzea Database.

To store this information uncompressed for one character would require 13,756 bits. At 8 bits per byte, this is 1,720 bytes.

XIVCensus shows 15,058,908 characters across all worlds, and 605,525 "active" characters based on acquisition of the Dress-up Raubahn minion from 4.1 story. To store all glamour data for all 15some million characters would require an additional 26GB of storage space. On modern systems, this should (should) be a non-issue. However, if all 600some thousand active characters accessed their glamour catalog just once, it would require an additional 1GB of data transfer. If all these characters accessed their glamour catalog once per week, it would require an additional 4GB data transfer per month. Once per day, 30GB data transfer per month.

The devs have shown a consistent interest in keeping data access and transfer down, so I don't see this happening. They won't even let us access our 200 slot wardrobe + armoire everywhere.

Good data, but we could streamline the bandwidth requirements a bit. There's no need for the entire library to be downloaded and uploaded every time someone looks at it. That data could be downloaded once and stored locally. Then you'd only need to upload changes, not the entire library. Periodic integrity checks to avoid shenanigans and I think we could easily cut your bandwidth estimate by 2/3 or more monthly.

[Rongway]

Good data, but we could streamline the bandwidth requirements a bit. There's no need for the entire library to be downloaded and uploaded every time someone looks at it. That data could be downloaded once and stored locally. Then you'd only need to upload changes, not the entire library. Periodic integrity checks to avoid shenanigans and I think we could easily cut your bandwidth estimate by 2/3 or more monthly.

Yes, we could. But anyone whose been around long at all knows how much the devs love to cite data integrity, data access, and data transfer. They would never go for those kinds of optimizations, however effective they may be, and they would think very hard about every GB of data access and transfer no matter how trivial we might think the numbers are. That's all I'm saying.

[Niwashi]

Of the weapons and armors, it's quite rare for two items to share exactly the same appearance; in most cases there is some difference in texture mapping or bump mapping even among items that use the same model.

Well, there's also 442 Aetherial gear items, which I believe are all visually an exact duplicate of a corresponding crafted item. But again, that's not enough to change the feasibility of any particular plan.

anyone whose been around long at all knows how much the devs love to cite data integrity, data access, and data transfer. They would never go for those kinds of optimizations, however effective they may be

I'm not so sure. They apparently went with that pattern for their "Search for < item >" feature. When we open a retainer's inventory, the armoire, glamour dresser, or saddlebag it downloads that inventory list to our system, and if we later search for an item, it uses the already downloaded list to answer if and where we have it. That's why if we haven't previously opened one or another of those, the search won't be able to find them. Their data integrity concerns are handled by wiping the local copy when we disconnect, so we need to pick it up again for each gaming session (since the system doesn't know whether our previous gaming session was on a different client platform).

For looking at our unlocked glamours list, a local copy should be sufficient. It's when we want to use it to actually glamour an item that they'd need to double check whether their database agrees that we have it available, and then only for that particular item. Refreshing the local copy with a complete list from the server is the only time the size matters, and they could limit that to specific locations and only happening the first time in a gaming session it's accessed.

[Canadane]

As much as people want a glamour log, I wouldn't get your hopes up.
I'll just keep reciting the same old "Stop hoarding gear."
That piece you don't wear often? Toss it. You can get it again. Very few non-replicatable items cannot be stored in the airmoire. Everything else can be re-acquired in the game by some means.

[Callinon]

I'll just keep reciting the same old "Stop hoarding gear."

Never!

Honestly this is a stupid problem for SE to have. It's been solvable since the day FFXIV launched and it only gets more solvable as their hardware improves over time.

I also feel it necessary to point out that storage and bandwidth concerns over additional retainers are apparently alleviated by a $2/month subscription.