How much would storage cost for WoW's Wardrobe system in FF14?

[LilimoLimomo]

So for those who don't know, WoW has a system called the Wardrobe, which basically keeps track of every equippable items you've ever owned. So for example, if you get some pants from a dungeon, your Wardrobe makes a note that you've collected those pants. And then even after you throw away the pants, and you can always glamour those pants onto your outfit. As someone who likes collecting and is always hurting for glamour storage, I'd love to see a system like this come to FF14.

But I've also always assumed such a system would be expensive to maintain. So many items, that's a lot of data to store! But then I thought about the fact that WoW somehow does that...so how expensive is it really? I decided to try to find out.

First, a warning: I'm a programmer, but data storage is not my specialty. So it's possible that there may be aspects of data storage that I'm overlooking, and if that's the case, I hope someone will bring them up! Other than that, I've done my best to collect and calculate information in good faith out of genuine curiosity, so let's proceed!

First, I decided to do a bit of digging to see if I could find any interesting ways to compress large amounts of boolean data (since having or not having any given item can be represented by either a 1 or a 0), but I wasn't able to immediately find anything beyond the basic recommendation of storing 1 item per bit. So I'm guessing there's a more efficient (and thus less costly) way to store data way, but for now let's just use this basic method.

According to the Lodestone, at present there are 5,176 "arms" and 12,041 "armors" in the game, for a total of 17,217 equippable items. Let's estimate that ARR, HW, StB, ShB, and EW are each responsible for 1/5 of that number, meaning that every expansion adds roughly 3,444 new equippable items to the game. So every expansion requires 3,444 bits per character, or 431 bytes.

But we'd need to plan for not just what we currently have, but for the future. FF14 has been going for 10 years, and they want to go for 10 more years, so let's add in Dawntrail for a total of 6 expansions, then double that number and assume that accounts for the next decade and some change. So 12 expansions at 431 bytes each means that every character requires 5,172 bytes of data for this Wardrobe feature alone.

There are lots of ways to store data, but AWS is a pretty common and competitively priced way, so let's use it to get an estimate of what storage rates will be. The most basic kind of data storage on AWS is S3 Standard, which is described as "General purpose storage for any type of data, typically used for frequently accessed data"; that sounds fine for our needs. Every month, this service charges $0.022 per GB. There are 1,000,000,000 bytes in a GB, so we can store Wardrobe data for 193,348 characters for just over 2 cents per month.

I don't have enough knowledge to know how the character count will grow over time, so I won't try to estimate that. But just to try to get a tangible feel for how that rate translates into real-world costs, let's see how much that pricing would cost for all of today's players. At present, there are just under 30 million characters in FF14 according to https://ffxivcensus.com. So here's our math:

Number of characters * Storage required per character * Storage cost rate = cost

Number of characters = 30,000,000 characters
Storage required per character = 5,172 bytes per character
Storage cost rate = 0.022 dollars per month per 1,000,000,000 bytes

30,000,000 characters * 5,172 bytes * 0.022 dollars per month / 1,000,000,000 bytes = 3.41352 dollars per month

I'll be honest, I'm surprised by how little that is. I'd gladly foot that bill myself! And I would guess that if anything, the costs above are more inflated than they need to be; there are likely ways to reduce the storage per character, and there are likely ways to reduce the costs of storage by choosing more appropriate service plans or by using your own infrastructure.

I am genuinely curious if there are other costs associated with storage that would meaningfully inflate this number...because if there aren't, then I feel like I've been mistaken considering the cost of storage to be an impediment to a system like this. There are naturally other costs — such as the costs of actually developing the Wardrobe feature and its interface — so it's not like this feature would be free.

Anyway, if you've got experience with data storage, etc, I'd be curious to hear your perspective on whether I'm missing anything here; sometimes you don't even know what you don't know until someone else points it out. Thanks!

[DPZ2]

Data storage cost could be a problem.

A worse problem would be this: The data is saved server side, and any time you want to access the data, the entire table has to be read in from the server. Multiply this by the number of potential players requiring the data be read from the server, as well as updates to the data every time new equipment is received and you're suddenly talking about another magnitude of network usage on an already chatty system.

WoW's system is mostly client-side. The day WoW decides to share worlds with console players is the day that client-side no longer works as well for such things.

[AmiableApkallu]

Yeah, in this day and age, I'd say that storing data is actually relatively cheap, even after accounting for storing multiple copies for redundancy and all that. It's the cost of moving it around, whether it be in dollars or network bandwidth, that get you.

For example, in my line of work, I have heard stories where Amazon gladly offered to store terabytes and petabytes of data in S3 for free. Which sounds like a fantastic offer, until people ran the numbers on the data transfer costs, and realized that it came out to thousands and tens of thousands of dollars, unless they put all of their other infrastructure into AWS, which would still end up costing lots of dollars.

[MistakeNot]

There is one aspect of storage of gear you have missed. Dyes. One would like to be able to swap between several differently dyed gearpieces. Storing the color along with the gear piece adds to the storage needs. But even if that adds a magnitude or two to the storage needed it would still not be overly costly.


But, the amount of storage is not the main problem really. As you have found, that is fairly cheap.

No, most likely the main problem is rather the cost of accessing it. Cost in computer resources.
There is a lot going on under the hood in FFXIV, and apparently items in regular inventory eat up a lot of CPU power (and probably network bandwidth) just by existing when you move around.
There is a reason why our glamour dressers are only accessible from a couple of places, none of which are in the open world. And that reason is not just because the developers are evil.

Now, I am obviously not familiar with the internals of FFXIV's code, but from various comments dropped by the developers over the years I have got a strong impression that it is not trivial to add more storage in any form.
Or rather, adding it is trivial - making sure the game runs smoothly with the added storage is not so trivial which is why the devs have been very careful with adding storage.

[Jojoya]

In addition to the issue of dyes being additional data (WoW doesn't have a dye system), there's another difference (unless the Wardrobe has changed since the last time I played)

WoW's collection system does not allow the item to be instantly recreated and placed back into your inventory. It's more of a list has a data point that changes depending on whether you have acquired a specific appearance and multiple items with the same appearance will be bundled into a single listing.

The Glamour Dresser allows a stored item to be recreated as the specific item it had been, including the dye customizations, and not merely a generic appearance so it can be equipped again. Where WoW might have a single appearance listing that covers 6 different items, FFXIV has to have up to 6 separate listings in case the player wants to recreate one of them.

If I'm being honest, I'd still rather have WoW's system. I'm good with inventory management and rarely need to remove a stored item so I can equip it again. But I know a lot of players who do use the glamour dresser partially for storage of items they're actively equipping on an infrequent basis (leveling additional jobs that use the same gear set months apart mostly). Changing to WoW's system and removing the recreate item function would make things more difficult for them.

[DrWho2010]

also didn't the transmog system of WoW take like about a decade to program and implement? and people here are just like just copy it? ughgh

[Jojoya]

also didn't the transmog system of WoW take like about a decade to program and implement? and people here are just like just copy it? ughgh

I don't remember any drama about how long it took them to create it. WoW was just late in getting around to adding one compared to other games at the time.

[Arohk]

also didn't the transmog system of WoW take like about a decade to program and implement? and people here are just like just copy it? ughgh

The engine WoW runs on is also ancient, thats why the game lags when ever you got a pvp battle with more than 20 people.

But don't forget the glamour Dresser is one of the worst glamour system you can have, it must store the item itself inside the dresser instead of just a checklist with an "obtained" yes/no variable.
They can't even make the glamour dresser a housing item because of how badly it is implemented.

WoW doesn't have dyes but weapon enchants, you simply pick the enchant you want from a list of enchants (the dye in this case) and apply it to your weapon. (no dye item required)

[Calysto]

I didn't check the numbers, but you'd need a bit more space, for things like character id/dc/world.

That said, you could also reduce the space by using a npc requiring you to submit a complete set for things like armors.

The "dye" thing is not an issue as it's not replacing the dresser but is more like an evolved wardrobe, that could also be accessed via the dresser then dye.

The data access is probably the main issue, but with "limited access" like the dresser and a similar system for updating it it would likely be manageable
The main problem would be "already acquired" check, but that could be solved by downloading the array on login/update then using the local data for that.

[Hasrat]

As nearly hinted at, in addition to the space, and the access, you've got the simple fact of coding. Before you even get to any of the other issues, you've got to face whether our current inventory infrastructure can even handle such a system. I seem to recall it's sorta come up before that some of the inventory woes are rooted so deep in the core of the game that they'd basically be better off just making a new game rather than trying to fix the problems. They've come up with a few clever tricks to squeeze more inventory space, to change rewards and the like, doing what they can within the rickety framework. But it's no joke to say that a poorly implemented inventory solution could literally be game breaking.