Part 3 - It’s not (that) easy

Now, I talked about how using those bits can identify the items in order, and that sounds great. But there’s a catch: we haven’t defined an order persay. You could say that we go chronologically through the list of items, and sort them like that, but that ends up adding extra load on… well… load times. So, what if we could give our system a bit of a push, and a way to easily access individual items quickly?

To do that, we have to give them a number as an identifier (or ID). From there, these items would be easy to find, since you wouldn’t need to look up the list of all items to find just one. Also, since there is now the possibility to retroactively add items to a previous expansion, like what we saw recently with the Fae King’s weapons, splitting them by expansion could be as simple as looking at the level, or as tedious as adding another ID for the expansion (0 for Mog Station, 1 for ARR, 2 for HW, etc).

In addition to that first part comes the UI. You would have the grid as it is, but it would show darkened versions of those icons for the items you haven’t unlocked yet. If we’re shooting for the moon, I’d personally like to have it in a new collection menu, with information on how to obtain a certain piece (aka, if it’s from a dungeon, trial, shopkeeper, crafting, etc).

Finally, there’s also the question of what to do with the current systems. Honestly, there isn’t much to do. The Glamour Dresser could contain the aforementioned UI while also continuing to support the Plates system. Items would still be registered by “offering” them to the system. Although, this time, there would be no need to remove them, so keeping a distinction between NQ and HQ would not be required (that would potentially double the amount of data required to save this on a server).