Glamour Plate and Glamour System Idea

[Bunyon]

I wanted to share some thoughts regarding glamour which are based on some assumptions and ideas that are not wholly original.


1. The Big Assumption

Yoshi P said in the Q&A that Glamour Plates are a server issue. My assumption of why glamour causes so much strain on servers is because when you glamour an item the game doesn't just keep track of the type of item, but the complete unique item, all the metadata regarding its unique id, quality, stat changes, who crafted it, etc.

But when it comes to glamour, I think all the game really needs to keep track of is: what item it is, the dyes, and visor on/off (which is coming to body armor now too). A plate should really just be a list of these three things for each slot. The problem is that this would require fundamentally changing how glamours work, because instead of keeping track of real unique items, they would have to revamp the system to look for a new generic item type that only has a couple of user defined choices (the dyes and visor system).


2. The Band-Aid Solution

Lets say changing the system is impossible, and plates put too much stress on servers to bring them everywhere you go. My first idea is this: storing plates in the glamour dresser.

At the very least, I think it would be nice to be able to have the ability to create lets say 40-60 plates at the glamour dresser, and then you can exchange the ones you want to carry around with you. At least would let you make and save all sorts of ideas, without having to replace the ones you have. When you visit other servers, you still have the same number of glamour plates.



3. The Revamp

Now, lets say changing the system isn't impossible and the original assumption is correct that simplifying glamour items would ease the burden on servers. The second idea which I think has been proposed before is basically having a sort of Glamour Book, which keeps track of all armors in the game.

- Whenever you use a glamour crystal on an item, it would bind the item to you and "activate" that item in the book. It wouldn't be a "real/unique" item, it would just be a binary yes/no for each one.

- Whenever you use a dye on an "active" item in the book, it would "activate" that dye for that item. With the dye condensation, I feel like you really only need to save binary yes/no for each dye type.

- When you make a plate / glamour something on, you just select it from the book. It only needs to keep track of the "simplified" items.


This is basically my ideal scenario, because you would create a whole new world of people trying to collect all items (without removing the same need for glamour crystals and dyes), completely erase all need to keep ever increasing the glamour dresser, and potentially help increase the plate number without increasing server stress.

[TwiggieStardust]

Let us link hairstyles to glam plates!

[Khryseis_Astra]

All in favor of anything that would let us have more plates! Especially when we don’t have enough for every job…

No idea of the technical issues involved, but it seems like they’re figuring out they can do things in stages to get to their end result, like making gear sets into outfits, and then those outfits can be transitioned to the Armoire in a later patch. Hopefully there is some sort of work around they can do for the plate system too.

[Wildheaven182]

They might make new technological breakthroughs in netcode in 5-10 years. It was already an incredible, impossible hurdle to invent the new technology of pop up chat bubbles in game for the first time.

Or maybe they'll finally get their own game launcher to even work one day, but I know that's shooting for the stars.

[Tersi82]

Bump to the top with you thread

[Vintersol]

Make the 20 Plates tied to the current Job. It can't be that hard.

[Kaurhz]

Ideally there should always be at least 1 plate : 1 job, that way at least every job can have an individual plate, inc., crafters and gatherers.

The issues around the glamour plate is probably tied to what it's loading and how it is loading it across that 'instance'.... I know people have requested that glamour dresser is a housing item, they have given a reasons why they can't do it, so it's probably partly tied to that.

Would also be nice if hairstyles could be linked to a plate, but I can understand the possible limitation on that.