Rank required gear and the impact on inventory

[Vesper]

As it has been stated before the developers are looking into Rank Requirements on gear. This is my personal opinion is a good idea. As it is now to many people just wear whatever they want regardless of rank. Now I am all for options and hell, I am guilty of wearing higher rank gear on my character as well. But the reason I wear over rank gear is inventory issues.

In most games having 100 inventory spots on character is more than enough, but that is not the case in FFXIV. In this game you are expected to rank several jobs, the current fatigue system pushed this multi-job concept as does the fact that crafting classes require you to rank some subs pretty high.

The main issue I see popping up near instantly if/when Rank requirements hit is that people are going to have very little inventory space. In this game I think the way inventory as it relates to gear needs a drastic change.

Let's assume one player has 5 jobs ranked. A Conjurer 10, Archer 17, Fisher 22, Carpenter 33 and lancer 22 you are looking at 5 different gear sets needed. On the low end you are looking at 7-12 items per class you play imo. In the case of archers/fishers even more based on arrows and lures required to play your class. You can expect to lose 50 slots easily due to needing separate sets for each class when Rank Requirements are added. Many players in game are playing more than 5 jobs and the longer the game goes on the more gear you will need to carry.

Also when it comes to gathering jobs our inventory is completely wrecked by our jobs. DOL job requires that we harvest all this raw material, but we need more space to do so.

Now there are ways to fix this, several in fact that I can see. Before we get to that I would like to mention something I would like to see. Inventory split up into several tabs...

• [Gear] Tab: Would only hold Armor, Weapons, Accessories.
• [Pouch] Tab: Would only hold consumable class items (Arrows, Bait/Lures, Bullets, Throwing items)
• [Inventory] Tab: Would Hold food, potions and raw materials as well as craft components.
  NPCs would go here. Also this tab would have a button that would allow you to [Sell All Junk] at once (Yes similiar to DA).
• [Repair] Tab: Works like crystal tab, takes up NO space to have items listed here for repairs. It would be separate from bazaars.
• [Crystal] Tab: No Change
• [Loot] Tab: No Change
• [Currency] Tab: No Change

Now with a revised inventory management system there are several ways to go up making gear management better.

• Option 1: Make it so that any items in [Gear Tab] take up no inventory space. Yes that's correct carry as much as you want. Very drastic, but fairly simple IMO as the mechanic exists for crystals, would need some modifying im sure.
  
• Option 2: Give all the inventory tabs, except for crystals and repair tabs their own inventory space. Each tab gets 50 slots for their item types. Instead of just 100 inventory spots overall. This is a better overall system imo and opens up the opportunity for Inventory Increasing Quests
  
• • Option 2-B: Giving each inventory space 50 slots at the start of the game offers flexibility at the start of the game. But ensures that as time goes on you are going to need more space still a great reason for some new inventory side quests that are story based! Make it so that Every 10 ranks of DOL, DOW/M and DOH will get inventory quests. Eligibility of doing these quests would be based on your HIGHEST rank DOL, DOW/M or DOH.
    
    These would be available to do every 10 ranks and yes if you ranked them all (DOLs, DOHs and DOW/Ms) you would get extra inventory space that stacked, doing the DOL R10, 20, 30 etc would still allow you to do the DOH & DOW/M quests to further your inventory more.
    
    Its nice to do quests and get rewards, but its even better to get rewards that are useful across the entire life of your character.

Those are my thoughts on what could be done to improve the inventory system. Feel free to discuss or post your own ideas.

[Fieros]

Looks good to me. Few points:

*The [Junk] Tab- only items I have come across that fit your description of junk are the beast coins.
*Quests for more space is nice. With the stacking across classes, how much did you have in mind per quest?
*When grinding up weaver will I have to first unload all of my equipment onto a retainer so I have room in my [Gear] Tab for the items I am grinding? Or will the proposed quests give me more space than I will ever need?

Again, I like the ideas presented- just want some clarification.

[Vesper]

Well if you look at the current Rank cap of 50, that would be each Archtype (Land, War/Magic, Hand) would EACH get a total of 5 quests. So that is 15 inventory quests total.

So I think a fair amount would be a 5 slots per quest, so if you have one of each of the three archtypes capped at 50, that would be a total increase across all inventory tabs of 75 slots. So it would make it so you had 125 slots total. If ranks were increased to 100 overtime that would be 200 slots at the final level cap... years down the line.

As far as the junk tab goes there are a few more items than beastcoins, but yeah after thinking about it, it makes sense to not have it. Perhaps instead move beastcoins to the currency tab? If there is any planned use for them down the line.

You would need to have space for grinding accordingly yes. I could see a [Finished Items] tab being added that holds a max of x amount.. But once the item is taken from the tab it would not be able ot og back into the tab.

[Veasna]

Personally i'd love a seperate tab for my weapons and gears and also one for repair materials, the latter drive me nuts. My crafter carries around 15-20 different repairmaterials alone at all times. This idea or repairkits for that would work.

[Reika]

It would also help if the items you have equipped were no longer part of your inventory stock, as you are wearing them... that should help free up space.

[Jibe]

It would be nice to have seperate tabs, but I think that your idea of having unlimited gear space might be over the top. By all means lets make currently equipped gear not affect inventory space, but I think that unequipped gear should still take up slots.

SE has a "bag" and "pouch" slot that are not currently being used to my knowledge. I think they should add craftable bags and pouches that you can equip that would increase your inventory space instead. That, along with adding some inventory increasing quests, maybe similar to what FF11 has, would be cool IMO.

The ideas you had to seperate out different tabs for organization are awesome too. I just don't like the unlimited gear slots thing. Personal opinion.

[Vesper]

Another option is making it so that when you choose [GEAR] in the menu it would give you a dropdown list of all your jobs. So you can click on say Archer and now it brings you to the gear window where you can equip gear for your archer. Hit escape once and it bring you back to the job list, you can now add gear for each job you have. Once you put the jobs main weapon in hand it changes not only your job but also auto changes your gear to that job.

Add to this gear not costing space in inventory while equip and the problem is solved imo.

So the end result of this version of the idea is each job can have their own separate armor sets setup through job specific equip management screen. Any gear 'slotted' in this revised window is removed from your inventory and takes up no space. Basically allowing you to carry once set of gear for each job that takes up no space as long as its equipped.

If you want more than one set of gear per job, then you deal with the inventory space. I have seen a similar setup in a couple older games and it worked pretty well IRC.

[HunkaMunka]

If I may:

The solution to a full purse is not to carry a bigger purse, it is to carry less stuff.

Anyone who has a full purse now will probably have a full purse for their entire xiv career. The only way to prevent such things from happening is to either use or sell items as you acquire them. Saving everything indefinitely for the slight chance that you may have some use for it at some unknown point in the future is not the most efficient way to go about things.

Please keep in mind that every slot of storage space you want to have available has to be paid for. I don't literally mean you should have to pay SE to increase your inventory on a per-slot basis, however, every item you want to store has to reside on a server somewhere. That costs money; and ultimately, as the players of xiv, it costs us our money.

As it stands we each have 300 slots at our disposal, 100 on your main character's person, and another 100 on each of two retainers. If you are desperate for more storage, add a 2nd character for a storage mule which would provide an additional 300 slots of pure storage, you never have to dress a mule. Sure, you would have to pay for this space out of your own pocket when SE starts billing, but maybe you'll have worked out your storage issues for yourself by then.

I do not follow your quest breakdown. Why would DoW and DoM not have separate quests available if DoL and DoH each have their own series? Also, you want to have the base inventory size reduced to 50 slots if these quests are implemented? What happens to my 49 items if I am currently sitting at 99/100 when this goes live, and which 49 for that matter?

A junk tab? (WTF is DA? Sry, I'm not familiar.) Why would SE include items in xiv the sole purpose for which is to be sold to npcs to generate cash for players, when there are already many, many more efficient ways to make some kind of income? Just because the use for an item is currently unknown, or locked, or not yet released does not necessarily make these items disposable as junk, nor does it mean save them forever with your fingers crossed. If you really think something is just worthless junk, never forget that one man's trash is another man's treasure.

Speaking of tabs: do food and potions not count as consumables?

If I am reading your proposal correctly: basically, you want the majority of items currently in your inventory to no longer require slots, and have the total number of base slots reduced, and have quests added which would allow your number of base slots to be increased.

To exaggerate the consequences of this and make my point more obvious: what happens when tens of thousands of characters are each carrying ten thousand unslotted items? Even if it's only 500 unslotted items, for 1000 characters, that's half a million items. 10,000 characters, each carrying 1000 unslotted items... makes for 10 million items that have to be accounted for. How many active xiv accounts are there on each server right now, 5, maybe 6??? What happens when this game isn't a total bomb any more and people start to play seriously. This number gets really big really fast.

What about the number of slots on retainers? Will they remain unchanged and unchangeable? Why have you completely omitted any discussion about the use of retainers, or changes to the use of retainers, from your proposal?

What about someone who has no interest in leveling their DoL & DoH classes? They just got hosed out of 2/3 of their inventory increases because of a subjective decision regarding their play style.

Not trying to be a total jerk here or anything, but it seems that you have proposed a massive change to a substantial and central game system without clearly thinking through the consequences of your proposal.

If SE changes gear, and the armory system in general, by adding a rank requirement instead of keeping the ideal rank system currently in place, then it will indeed drastically increase the number of slots required to level several jobs simultaneously. Deal with it. Perhaps a more effective solution would be to lobby to keep the current ideal rank armory system in place instead of following a total overhaul of the armory system with a total overhaul of the inventory system.

If you think 100 slots on your main is bad, and seem to have forgotten about the 200 slots available on your retainers, you should have tried some old school xi when you started the game with 30 slots on your main and 50 in your residence. Oh yeah, and 16 of those 30 personal slots got filled just by equipping your character, assuming you had no food/potions/ammo reserves/etc.

300 slots is HUGE, especially when so many items stack to 99 now.

FFXIV is not a warehousing challenge. Try consuming some of your inventory, or selling it to someone who can make use of it now instead of saving it and praying for the day you can use it yourself.

TL;DR you lazy bugger!

[Vesper]

Right now the amount of inventory we have is not too bad, because you do not have Rank Requirements. WHEN rank requirements come in you will need separate gear for EACH job. There are over 15 jobs in game right now, with more to be added down the line.

If you equip your only your gear slots you are looking at 9 slots used up per class you want to play. NOT counting Accessories, offhand slots and REQUIRED ammo/bait for some classes. Add in a few accessories and you are looking at around 12-16 slots lost per class.

The game WILL become a burden to play as it was envisioned. The of the major points of the Armory system was changing your class on the fly. If you find a group and they have too many Marauders you quickly swap to a new class within the rank range. THIS was mentioned many times in interviews and promotion for the game. It was suppose to be flexible and easy to deal with and for the most part, atm it is. But when rank requirements come in its not going to be anymore, its going to get cumbersome.

Yes we have retainers, but running 5-10 minutes back to town, then back again each time you need to swap to a job you don't have the gear on you for is going to upset people and fast. Yes you can use anima, but it will burn down very fast fast.

Any other MMO where you play one main class and choose a craft and a single gather job our inventory would be fine, actually our inventory would be amazing. But in a game where you have over 15 jobs to play and it is expected you are going to play these jobs on one character it is not.

Two things that would make everything better is if they allowed the summoning of retainers anywhere it game for the purpose of grabbing and dumping some gear. and then finally get those additional retainers for a fee that were suppose to be in-game a couple months after launch.

They realize that inventory is a hassle, which is why they decided to toss people a free retainer.

Changing and adding in hard Rank Requirements its a huge change to the game, one that effects more than just the ability to 'put something' on. Everything needs to be examined thoroughly. I am just bringing something up and posting some suggestions, are there better ways to come to a balance I am sure, but posting feedback and suggestions is what this place is for.

Try consuming some of your inventory, or selling it to someone who can make use of it now instead of saving it and praying for the day you can use it yourself.

I keep very few items I can't use or am not very close to using.

I play a fisher so I need to carry various baits and lures just to play my class efficiently where no other class needs to deal with baits and lures to target their fish.

I play and archer which requires the carrying of several stacks of arrows, though nowhere near as bad as all the crap I need to carry for fishing.

I actively level several DOW and Several crafts, trying to rank up a culinarian is painful with all the different ingredients required. Our average synth has several more items than any other average synth.

I am hardly being lazy, but I am trying to be proactive and make sure that they are looking at all angles when this change comes in.

If you think 100 slots on your main is bad, and seem to have forgotten about the 200 slots available on your retainers, you should have tried some old school xi when you started the game with 30 slots on your main and 50 in your residence. Oh yeah, and 16 of those 30 personal slots got filled just by equipping your character, assuming you had no food/potions/ammo reserves/etc.

I did play oldschool 11 and that sucked, but last I checked this was not FF11 and as such let's leave the (But 11 does it this way) out of the discussions. Crafting and Synthing were not full fledged sipported jobs unto themselves in that game as they are now.

[Amineri]

I agree wholeheartedly with the OP.

I think the difference in opinions here is between people that primarily play combat classes, and those that play crafter / gatherer classes.

I play all craft and gather classes. This is 11 classes, with both a primary and secondary tool for each, resulting in 22 inventory slots simply to carry those tools. That in itself is a major chunk of inventory space.

I too am guilty of using higher ranked gear ... when I started botany and fishing, when my mining rank is rank 42, I still use my rank 35-37 mining gear, even on a rank 1 fisher/botanist. The reason? I simply have no room for additional gear to wear. The gear wears out crazy fast, but I can repair it myself, so it works out. As Vesper pointed out, if actual rank restrictions were put in place, I would be in a world of hurt.

A further burden on gatherers is that gathered items still run the gamut of NQ / +1 / +2 / +3, instead of the NQ / +3 options that come from combat drops. This results in gatherers requiring twice as much inventory to hold the results of gathering, compared to the combat classes.

Regarding crafters, it is not uncommon to create a large number of items to skill up, and then have to hold those items for several ranks, as those materials will be used to skill up in the future. As a concrete example, I have 7 stacks of Woolen Yarn that I created at rank 38 Weaving. It will not be viable for me to use that Woolen Yarn to make Woolen Cloth until rank 40 weaving, meaning I must store a large quantity of yarn for two ranks.

Now, having discussed the problem, I have a slightly different suggestion from Vesper.

In the Leatherworker's Guild in Gridania there are leather bags on display on the counters. These items are modeled and visible in-game, but there are no recipes or items in order for players to acquire them. My suggestion is that bags be added to the game. Perhaps some mechanic such as items only being able to place/retrieve into/from a bag while that bag is equipped, would solve a large number of these problems. Bags with items could be stored on retainers, but again the items could only be retrieved by placing the bag in the correct item slot.

My $0.02