Suggestion: Save UI Config / Gear Sets / Etc Automagically

[WindyGamer]

I looked and did not see a place to post a suggestion. Let me know and I'll copy this there or submit a ticket or whatever... Trying to play nice here.

So. The Power supply on my computer just died. Blew the main filter cap - Yep. BIG POP and gone. So I have another computer and I downloaded the game and away we go, Right?

Well no. Actually I'm looking at more time to recreate my environment manually than it's gonna take to get a new power supply. Here's why.

I have a few characters. a dozen or so, but I'm playing like 3 right now.
One has every DoL/DoH job that I'm leveling. and has finished shadowbringers, so that's like 4-5 more DoM/DoW jobs.

So, not only is all the system and Character settings lost. Ok so I can recreate the key bindings and ui tooltips and other junk.

BUT ALL THE GEARSETS are gone too? I don't mean to shout BUT HOW ARE GEARSETS NOT AUTOMAGICALLY SAVED!

Yes I know there is a saving thing. But it's manual. Should we go back to a SAVE button on our retainer and inventory store too? How are gear sets not the same as XP and Inventory and Retainer store?

How is it ok for this stuff to just be tossed if you lose your local hard drive, which I dont think I have, but might have easily when the PS blown. I don't actually know yet.

Where do I report this as a suggestion? I could not find it.
Is there a way to upvote this to a freaking bug?

So, maybe out of the dozen or so characters I have I'll redo what I need to continue playing into Shadowbringers with my second toon. Hopefully I'll have my computer rebuilt and back online to continue with the rest of them after that.

sigh...

Ceruleum Vent off

[WindyGamer]

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
The black lists are saved, but not the gearsets... Well good for that. I would have hated to type all the blacklist entries again ... Ceruleum level sarcasm vented....

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Do you not back up your documents? Otherwise, pull the hard drive out and grab the xiv folder.

Blacklists are saved because they are server side. Character ui, gear sets, and hotbars are all local saved in your documents folder.

[WindyGamer]

Do you not back up your documents? Otherwise, pull the hard drive out and grab the xiv folder.

Blacklists are saved because they are server side. Character ui, gear sets, and hotbars are all local saved in your documents folder.

Yes. I am a retired Software Engineer. I know this and the recovery procedures. Basically replacing the PS on a 2 day ship will be the quickest way to get all this back. I'm suggesting [ arguing ] that all this stuff should be saved server side because it takes a ton of time to recover and is updated quite frequently. For example to be more clear, Gear Sets keeps all gear updates So very time you click the up/down arrows - what do you call them - to update a gear set, you need to go back to the character screen and do the manual click to save that data for that character. Or mark it down on your fridge black board to do it before you log out. Saving data in the MMO database is mostly a matter of saving us TIME in the game. Right? Recovering XP is really just a matter of spending time. But they are very careful to save items and XP to save us time and effort, but apparently we have forgotten all these other things that take a lot of time to recover because we call them Configuration, and save them locally. I suggest it is a big mistake to save GAME stuff locally. Save stuff that is dependent on the local computer locally, fine. Save character information locally, Mistake.

ANd yes, I use carbonite. BUt not from this computer, but from a central computer on my network of more than 10 machines. And I frequently, manually, backup local documents to my central server. But my "documents" don't change several times a day. My gear sets change many times a day.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Yes. I am a retired Software Engineer. I know this and the recovery procedures. Basically replacing the PS on a 2 day ship will be the quickest way to get all this back. I'm suggesting [ arguing ] that all this stuff should be saved server side because it takes a ton of time to recover and is updated quite frequently. For example to be more clear, Gear Sets keeps all gear updates So very time you click the up/down arrows - what do you call them - to update a gear set, you need to go back to the character screen and do the manual click to save that data for that character. Or mark it down on your fridge black board to do it before you log out. Saving data in the MMO database is mostly a matter of saving us TIME in the game. Right? Recovering XP is really just a matter of spending time. But they are very careful to save items and XP to save us time and effort, but apparently we have forgotten all these other things that take a lot of time to recover because we call them Configuration, and save them locally. I suggest it is a big mistake to save GAME stuff locally. Save stuff that is dependent on the local computer locally, fine. Save character information locally, Mistake.

ANd yes, I use carbonite. BUt not from this computer, but from a central computer on my network of more than 10 machines. And I frequently, manually, backup local documents to my central server. But my "documents" don't change several times a day. My gear sets change many times a day.

Well, your documents do change several times a day, as the save folder for XIV is located in your documents folder, so technically, yes, they do

I have mine set to backup any changes to both google drive and a separate hard disk on my pc, as well as having them moved to my laptop every so often just in case something messes up. I'd wager that saving character data to the server would break the game if you change things multiple times in a few seconds on thousands of characters. Hence why we are limited on inventory expansion. You are looking at it the wrong way. Most games DO in fact save your game locally. The servers in this instance, are only keeping track of the things the server absolutely needs to, while the rest is saved locally.

And hey, you have a backup. Thats great, now you dont need to start from scratch like you were complaining.

And honestly, being a retired software engineer doesn't mean that much as these limitations are generally based on hardware configs. I've had software engineers ask me why I needed to turn off the server to replace pci HBAs before lol....

The limitations here are most likely backend disk write bandwidth for backups of every character online. Depending on the servers they are using, unless it's all pcie flash, or SAS flash, constant writes to even 10k or 15k SAS hdds will have a limit on what they can stably achieve. And going past that causes instability or possible backup failures, which could cause character data corruption, which would be bad.

[WindyGamer]

Well, your documents do change several times a day, as the save folder for XIV is located in your documents folder, so technically, yes, they do

I have mine set to backup any changes to both google drive and a separate hard disk on my pc, as well as having them moved to my laptop every so often just in case something messes up. I'd wager that saving character data to the server would break the game if you change things multiple times in a few seconds on thousands of characters. Hence why we are limited on inventory expansion. You are looking at it the wrong way. Most games DO in fact save your game locally. The servers in this instance, are only keeping track of the things the server absolutely needs to, while the rest is saved locally.

And hey, you have a backup. Thats great, now you dont need to start from scratch like you were complaining.

And honestly, being a retired software engineer doesn't mean that much as these limitations are generally based on hardware configs. I've had software engineers ask me why I needed to turn off the server to replace pci HBAs before lol....

The limitations here are most likely backend disk write bandwidth for backups of every character online. Depending on the servers they are using, unless it's all pcie flash, or SAS flash, constant writes to even 10k or 15k SAS hdds will have a limit on what they can stably achieve. And going past that causes instability or possible backup failures, which could cause character data corruption, which would be bad.

No, I'm not starting from scratch. Just a couple of hours down time bring up the other computer on FFXIV and then almost an hour bringing up each character so I can play it. I'll only really be bringing up one of the characters to play on Friday and a couple of hours installing the replacement PS when I get it and getting the systems switched back - Hopefully.

Well, I should say a Computer Engineer, since I've hand built most of the computers I have. Anyway.

TLTP - Too Long To Post... Thoughts deleted...

But I still think SQX should consider backing up the "Character config" not the system config data to the FFXIV database "Automatically" and remove that foolish IMHO manual button.

Just my thoughts. Ceruleum off.

[YellowCrystarium]

Well, your documents do change several times a day, as the save folder for XIV is located in your documents folder, so technically, yes, they do

I have mine set to backup any changes to both google drive and a separate hard disk on my pc, as well as having them moved to my laptop every so often just in case something messes up. I'd wager that saving character data to the server would break the game if you change things multiple times in a few seconds on thousands of characters. Hence why we are limited on inventory expansion. You are looking at it the wrong way. Most games DO in fact save your game locally. The servers in this instance, are only keeping track of the things the server absolutely needs to, while the rest is saved locally.

And hey, you have a backup. Thats great, now you dont need to start from scratch like you were complaining.

And honestly, being a retired software engineer doesn't mean that much as these limitations are generally based on hardware configs. I've had software engineers ask me why I needed to turn off the server to replace pci HBAs before lol....

The limitations here are most likely backend disk write bandwidth for backups of every character online. Depending on the servers they are using, unless it's all pcie flash, or SAS flash, constant writes to even 10k or 15k SAS hdds will have a limit on what they can stably achieve. And going past that causes instability or possible backup failures, which could cause character data corruption, which would be bad.

Could you sound any more snippy in this post? Jesus christ.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Could you sound any more snippy in this post? Jesus christ.

He knows backups are important things to have, being a software engineer.

I explained precisely why having auto server backups wouldn't work, since he's saying he changes his settings all the time. It would have to back up all characters online at any change to be effective, which would be a ton of data writes, which is the reason we already don't have more inventory that people complain about. This would exacerbate the issue.

He also already has a backup with which to start, as hopefully most people playing on a pc have, as hardware can fail. Ps4 users can make use of ps+ cloud saves, and there are tons of options on pc, like Google drive, one drive, various other cloud backup providers. There's really no excuse to not back up your personal data, since that tends to be pretty important stuff. And xiv saves directly to documents, making it easy to include in your backups, since it's not buried in a hidden folder somewhere like some games.

[Iscah]

Gearsets don't take that long to set up, do they? Equip weapon, hit the "recommended gear" button, save gearset? Possibly with a 'neutral' set to equip in between if you don't like your gear auto-unequipping.

Anything else you can just recreate as you need it.

[WindyGamer]

Gearsets don't take that long to set up, do they? Equip weapon, hit the "recommended gear" button, save gearset? Possibly with a 'neutral' set to equip in between if you don't like your gear auto-unequipping.

Anything else you can just recreate as you need it.

It's not just gear sets, and not just hot bars, it's really the whole experience that makes it for me. Take a dozen toons, with 4-12 jobs, average 5, and most above level 50, then delete your config files. Give it a try. I'm sure you'll enjoy this little exercise like I have.

Actually. I've only done three toons and I'll wait on getting my new power supply.

If this is not a problem for you, then you don't need to upvote the suggestion to SQX.
If you like manually saving this config when you change it, don't upvote.
If you like setting up google cloud or drop box or whatever other database to save this stuff automatically, rather than having SQX do it, don't upvote.
If you like manually saving stuff, then suggest some other parts of the MMO, like Retainer Gear, or Achievements or something else that we should save manually to lessen the load on the network and servers at SQX.

Ceruleum sarcasm off.

Seriously tho. I think this has not gotten any attention at SQX because the number of jobs has creeped up on them. If someone had dropped us into this whole thing with eighteen [ did I count right?] jobs in the game, and each one with hot bars and gear sets, and shared hot bars and macros, and color settings and key bindings and more and more changing skills with each patch and said - "oh yeah. You have to save all that stuff manually" there would be a hew and cry from the roof tops. But they add a couple of jobs per expansion and we forget it was once quite reasonable to save it manually.

I'm suggesting it no longer is reasonable to manage this stuff manually. At over 1 MB of data per toon, it's no longer reasonable to worry about it "manually".

Just a suggestion.