The Armoire Update in Patch 7.5: A Technical Placebo for Relic Collectors?

[GlowClam]

Greetings, fellow survivors of the Inventory Infarct,

I have to admit: When I read the Patch 7.5 notes, I felt a brief spark of hope. "Job-specific equipment can now be stored", my inner organization freak already saw my retainers being liberated from the mountain of Gerold’s masterpieces (Zodiac, Anima, Eureka... you know the struggle).

But after a quick analysis in-game, I realized: The asterisk (※) is, once again, the true Savage-level Raid Boss.

The Bitter Reality:
Anyone hoping to finally shove their hard-earned Relic Weapons into the Armoire will be sorely disappointed. The system only swallows "certain" items, which is code for: static Artifact (AF) gear without a soul or materia. My relics remain in exile within my retainer’s inventory because our current server architecture is apparently still struggling with the flexibility of a Jenga tower in a hurricane.

The Technical Analysis (Or: Why we are still stuck in 1980):
As someone, whose first computer was a TRS-80 with a whopping 16 KBytes of RAM, my heart bleeds. We are sending rovers to Mars, yet Square Enix seems to manage our equipment database on floppy disks.

The Bottleneck: Every time we change zones, it seems the entire physical "item instance" packet is shoved through the pipe.

The Problem: Instead of using a lean integer-based catalog (Do I own Item X? [1] Yes / [0] No), we are dragging "instanced objects" everywhere.

The Result: My retainer is a warehouse for data clutter that the Armoire won't touch because that cabinet is seemingly only designed for items so "static" they might as well be fossilized.

My Proposal for a Database:
Stop pretending items need to be "physical" objects that we eventually have to throw away due to storage limits!

Global Catalog: A simple "check-off" system. A database flag uses less than 1 KB. If you’ve earned it, you own the "look" forever.

Currency Consolidation: Turn tokens and totems into simple integer counters in the Currency tab. No more inventory slots for "Totem of the Month."

The Loporit Reboot: Put us in cryosleep on the moon with the Loporits for 250 years so the developers have enough time to purge the engine of the 1.0-era legacy debt.

Until then, I’m stuck micromanaging my relics one by one while considering renaming my retainer to "TRS-80", it didn't have any space either, but at least it was honest about it.

How about you? Have you managed to fill your Armoire with the three "approved" items yet, or is your retainer still crying every time you log in?

[VeyaAkemi]

I actually cleaned up approximately 500 slots between glamour dresser and retainers this update, I had whole-ass dungeons worth of gear, and I found myself needing to go back to those dungeons for more items that I hadn't considered saving before, as a hoarder, I find that it benefited me a lot.

That said, I otherwise agree that Relics are the real elephant in the room, I have brought it up before, and I wish there was a definitive solution for it.

[Espon]

They said it's a work in process and this patch was just them starting with Dawntrail dungeon items and artifact gear. I'm sure it'll be expanded over the next expansion. I'm guessing relics with customizable stats are more difficult to deal with since that requires more information to be stored as its currently designed to strip materia, dye (armoire and compacted sets), crafter names, and other details..

I've managed to clean out a lot from my retainers and glamour dresser by being able to put things into the armoire or compacting sets into 1 item.

I dunno what kind of coding goes into this game, but it's like a game of Jenga where you keep piling more and more pieces on top, hoping the thing doesn't topple if you make any kind of changes. Also, for some dumb reason you decided make the first layer out of marbles and called it 1.0.

[SalamanderIX]

I think they're just pushing the limits of what's possible given their current systems. For now I'm not complaining, i did save somewhere around 350 inventory slots across all my different storage. The process of doing so, and the result.. I'll admit feels a little bit messy, but I can work with it.

Although I think what they are working towards, it will all make sense. In all likelihood the armoire is just going to become a place where you can hold all your glamours, infinitely. Whereas the Glamour Dresser will become the device for creating the glamour plates.
Of course, their current system is clunk and weird, and first they will have to improve the armoire. The thing lags so much trying to move around it, it feels like the server might break every time I click on a tab. The layout of it was clearly was never designed for so much gear either.
So, they'll improve the armoire, and make it hold absolutely everything, that's the direction we're headed. It's not a catalogue, but hopefully it'll be snappier and easier to use where the solution was good enough.