Dear Square Enix: Please Remove the Glamour Dresser Cap

[JamieRose]

Just remove the cap on the dresser.
you would free up alot of space for hoarders like me.

As much as I would love to see this, we know it won't happen because then Squeenix wouldn't be able to charge you an additional monthly fee for extra retainers to increase your storage space.

[JTWrenn]

A list of boolean values is not the correct data structure, I would argue. If you store the dresser as just lists of boolean values, you're trapping yourself into a non-expandable situation. e.g. In the list of "Head" slot items, Item #1 is ItemA, and Item #2 is ItemB. A mapping of list positions to the item it corresponds to would be needed, and that's not sustainable, or maintainable IMO. At a minimum, you're going to want to store it as the ItemID, which is likely a UInt64. That's 4x the size of the boolean...but still probably not so bad.

And to add to that, you can dye a piece of armor first, and store it in the dresser, and that dye remains. I would hate to lose that, so now you're talking at least adding the DyeID in with that, which is probably another UInt64 value.

Why is adding a boolean to the existing table of items, which must exist, not a possibility? It's just mapped to the same list. Also, even at 4x the size of a boolean you are still only talking about 6tb for the entire user base. Also, a Uint32 would handle it just fine and that is a 4byte system. Considering they are only at 20k gear now, I don't think they will ever cross 4 billion. So 3 tb for the entire userbase, which would be easily doable on space constraints.

I would say get rid of the dye and place and instead unlock dye colors for all looks so you can mod them as you like, similar to WoW's system for enchant effects.

Either way the idea that it is too hard just doesn't add up. There are numerous ways they could do it.

[IkaraGreydancer]

It's a viable purpose when competitors have a built in system to allow people to change their glamour at will based on what they have acquired thus far in their respective games. People like collecting things, which is precisely why the carrot on a stick for any new content typically includes new glamour amongst other collectable rewards such as mounts, minions and emotes.

No matter how you want to try n justify it the fact is that's not the purpose. Doesn't matter what competitors are doing

[JTWrenn]

Sorry, but this is not true.

For booleans you need one bit and not two bytes. One byte is 8 bit. So you could store true and false in one byte. Take the first bit of a byte and flip it to 0 or 1 and you are done.

Cheers

I get the idea of a boolean needing one bit, but that is not how they are stored in an SQL database. Different systems store them in different ways, but most are 1 byte, or two bytes because of extra things attached to them for the storage. Like you might just have the data saying true or false, but how do you differentiate that boolean variable from the next one in it's own table? That requires unique identifiers so you end up using up more space.

I agree there are likely more efficient ways to do it, but if you had a database and you pulled 25 at a time, and then checked if they were available as you swapped pages with it, it would not be inefficient. You would do chunks at a time on a local database of items and options checked against an online database of unlocked true or falses. You would split up the database by types so it is pulling from different chunks and the amount of searching would be fairly minimal. As has been pointed out WoW does it just fine.

Now you could make it more efficient in processing by storing a table with everything in it to show the item, you wouldn't need anything but an item number, and then pull them. So using a unit32 field you could just make a list like that and it would work fine as well, but the pulls would be the same, as you are just pulling the look into a box based on the number, but it would cut out one search check at the cost of an extra 2 bytes per look.

It's in the weeds though. I was just trying to show that even in the worst case scenario the amount of space needed is not that big. 1.5tb for an entire player base up to maybe 3 tb if you just stored a list of numbers that correspond to the item identifier. Space was the debate on this particular response. I do agree the id storage would be more efficient for processing, but no boolean's are not usually stores as bits even though it is possible to do it that way.

[FakeCirka]

You cant make it infinite. Eventually the number would get so high it would start to go in the negatives. That being said, it could be increased to a very high number lol. They stated some form of a glam rework during a live letter, it was the one where they initially announced the graphics update. Im kinda hoping it moves to a wow type system personally lol