Suggestion: Improved Glamour System

[KhevanFarstryder]

I was thinking about the glamour system in FFXIV and lamenting the lack of storage in the glamour dresser and all the overflow glamour items sitting on my retainers. I started thinking about my favourite glamour systems and immediately the system in Guild Wars 2 came to mind.

For those that haven't played Guild Wars 2, when you get a new armor item, you can unlock the skin of that item to be used for glamouring other armor items. The skins that you have unlocked are just kept in a browsable list/database and you can apply them to other armor (of similar type - ex fending, casting, healing, etc) as many times as you want.

And thinking about FFXIV's glamour system, I think it can be tweaked to be a similar system. I was bored so I mocked up a prototype of what GW2's glamour system might look like in FFXIV.

Unlocking Glamours

Here goes! Once you get an item with a glamour you haven't unlocked yet, you could just right click on the item and in the context menu there could be an new "unlock glamour" option. They could add a line to the mouseover tooltip for each item to show whether or not you have unlocked it already. This would make it easier when rolling on loot in dungeons/raids to quickly see if you have that glamour skin unlocked already.

If it was an item that is tradable (ex. crafted gear), when you unlock the glamour it binds the item to you so that it is no longer tradable. This is so that people couldn't just craft one item and pass it around to all their friends to unlock it as well. When you click the "unlock glamour" it could give you a warning that the item will become untradable so that you have a chance to cancel it if you want. For untradable items (ex. raid or dungeon gear), you wouldn't need any kind of warning.

Browsing Glamour Collection

There would need to be a way to check which glamours you have and haven't unlocked, so there could be a glamour collection panel similar to the achievement panel or the challenge log panel. I know they're going to be changing the look of the achievement panel in Endwalker, but I couldn't find any high-resolution versions that were populated with achievements so I just went with the look of the current achievement panel.

This is what I came up with so that you could hopefully explore your glamours. There could be a count of the total number of glamours you've collected, buttons to filter complete and incomplete sets, categories down the left side, and maybe even a search button to make it easier to browse your collection. It could look and function very similar to the achievement panel.

[KhevanFarstryder]

Continued...

Applying Glamours

To apply your glamours to your armor, it could function very similar to the way it currently works.

You go to an inn room, click on the glamour dresser, but instead of bringing up your glamour storage chest, it would just go straight to your glamour plates in one panel and your glamour collection in the other. Similar to how it works now, you would select a plate to save the glamour to, then when you click on one of the armor slots, it would filter your collection to just show items that can go in that slot. Also similar to now, you would filter your collection by selecting the job for which you are trying to build the glamour plate so that only items that the job could wear will appear in the collection.

I included a button in the Gear Selection panel to hide or show glamours that you haven't unlocked yet. This way, you could preview glamours on the glamour plate that you haven't unlocked yet (but of course you wouldn't be able to save the glamour plate with unobtained glamours on it). This would help you decide if it is a glamour you want to collect and would give you an general idea where to find it if you did (dungeons, trial, raids, etc). There would no longer be a need for the "Open Armoire" button since all the items stored in it are already unlocked in your glamour collection.

Pros:
- you only have to unlock each skin once, then you can apply it as many times as you want to the armor you are wearing
- your unlocked skins are account wide so you can use them on any of your characters once they are unlocked
- best of all, once unlocked you can discard the original item that you used to unlock the skin so that it is not cluttering up your retainer space!

Cons:
- you would no longer be able to pre-dye items prior to placing them in the glamour dresser. You would have to dye them on the glamour plate itself. I think this could be alleviated by make it a little easier to obtain high-end dyes. Maybe a vendor that sells them for a ton of crafter scrips, similar to the newest dyes in the Firmament.

Anyroad, that was my thinking on how the glamour system could be updated and improved! I think it would add another collection to the game for those that like to collect stuff and they could even add in achievements for total number of items collected, collecting certain tough sets (like raid or alliance raid gear), etc. Most of all, it would free up tons of inventory space and improve everyone's glamour game since you could access literally any glamour you have unlocked instead of just being restricted to the items you have happened to keep.

[DrWho2010]

yoshi-p has already said no to a glamor log. not possible with the way the game is currently programmed.

[Lihtleita]

yoshi-p has already said no to a glamor log. not possible with the way the game is currently programmed.

not gonna lie i would gladly give up my house for extra data if everyone got a glam log.

[DrWho2010]

housing data has nothing to do with attaching glamor log data to a character. the way character data is stored, transferred and checked on so much by the current system makes a glamor log impossible.

[Lihtleita]

housing data has nothing to do with attaching glamor log data to a character. the way character data is stored, transferred and checked on so much by the current system makes a glamor log impossible.

isnt that the same kind of check thats performed every time a house/retainer/saddlebag is used?

[Rongway]

isnt that the same kind of check thats performed every time a house/retainer/saddlebag is used?

The retainer database tables can only be accessed while you're at a bell. The saddlebag database tables can only be accessed when you're not in an instance. The internal housing database tables only when you're inside the house. They limit the places we can query the databases so that the servers aren't inundated with constant access requests, because access requests take server resources to look up the data and bandwidth to transmit the data. The server resources and the bandwidth are also things that the devs have an interest in minimizing, besides the storage space for the data.

[Lihtleita]

The retainer database tables can only be accessed while you're at a bell. The saddlebag database tables can only be accessed when you're not in an instance. The internal housing database tables only when you're inside the house. They limit the places we can query the databases so that the servers aren't inundated with constant access requests, because access requests take server resources to look up the data and bandwidth to transmit the data. The server resources and the bandwidth are also things that the devs have an interest in minimizing, besides the storage space for the data.

in this case wouldnt limiting acessing the glamour log to the glamour dresser be that smart move? thats already halfway what they did.

[Rongway]

in this case wouldnt limiting acessing the glamour log to the glamour dresser be that smart move? thats already halfway what they did.

I don't know exactly how the current glamour data is stored, but here are my best guesses as someone with a graduate degree in computer science.

There are almost 20,000 equipable items in the game. If you ignore belts, this number will go down; but let's assume the number of items will stay about the same or go up once we account for the items that are coming in Endwalker. That means we need log_2(20,000) --between 15 and 16-- bits to differentiate between all the different equipable items in the game, and another bit for HQ/NQ. So the glamour dresser needs 2 bytes per item to remember what the item is. The glamour dresser also remembers an item's dye. We have something like 120 dyes, and another byte can handle that. There is other information for items in general, but the dresser doesn't need to care about those things, and you're even warned that some data will be lost, such as condition and signature, when you put things in the dresser. So ignoring that information, we need 3 bytes per item in the dresser. A 400 item dresser then should require 1,200 bytes.

If instead we stored 1 bit for each equipable item we've ever obtained, the catalog would require 20,000/8 bytes. That comes out to 2,500 bytes, which is over twice the minimum data required to support a 400 item dresser. So if they're worried about storage space now, it could be much worse with a glamour catalog. There are of course data structure optimizations and compression algorithms that you could apply to reduce the storage required in either case, at the cost of increased processing requirements, but then we get back to how much processing would need to be done on many glamour catalog access requests over a period of time.

I know, 2.5 kB is not a lot. But with 24 million registered players, the total data required to store just glamour data would be about 60 GB.

And that's all before we start talking about how an increase in glamour data size would affect the data transfer volume (and cost), even with it restricted to dressers in inns.

[KhevanFarstryder]

yoshi-p has already said no to a glamor log. not possible with the way the game is currently programmed.

Darn, I didn't know it had already been ruled out by Yoshida-san. Thanks for the source quote. Ah well, back to organizing my retainers... T.T