Its no small secret that inventory in xiv is especially cooked compared to most other games. In fact if you compare it to its direct competitor WoW it has less inventory space. The only difference is armory but thats only because XIV allows multiclassing. As the game has grown only minor inventory changes have been made and only to the armory to allow you to hold the required items to gear all classes. Their "great improvement" of chocobo saddlebags was in fact just jingley keys to sell their app on a $5 a month subscription since they gave you half of it and made viewing what you could have had integral to inventory storage. While i'm not a fan of that its not necessarially a problem. The problem is the systems that have been deliberately harmed in an effort to retain retainer sales.
The glamour system - The glamour dresser is an improvement. This much is true but the problem is its implementation. Rather than a wardrobe like gw2 or wow for skins they elected to keep it as an inventory system. With every update they continually keep treating symptoms without fixing the problem. All because they need dresser scarcity so dedicated players who continue to pay monthly wouldn't be opposed to paying "Just $2 more for another bank tab." They know the ones who will pay for retainers are the long term players and collectors. So they design a system that dedicated players almost need to pay into. Considering the data storage requirements of each item are less if its just a skin code rather than an actual item you cant even argue it saves data space. Its literally just an additional section to the excel spreadsheet that is your character data. There is no reason why we have this awkward system other than milking the dedicated playerbase, crafters, and collectors.
Material storage - Crafting/gathering takes up a lot of inventory in any game but most games have an alternative bank as material storage. In GW2 you can even auto deposit crafting reagents to your material storage from anywhere with a button press in your inventory. WoW has an account wide reagent bank. Rather than using additional retainers as a gil sink to reduce the already hyper inflated gil you pay real money on a MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION to access additional storage. Deliberately inconveniencing crafters to make money.
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The glamour system - The glamour dresser is an improvement. This much is true but the problem is its implementation. Rather than a wardrobe like gw2 or wow for skins they elected to keep it as an inventory system. With every update they continually keep treating symptoms without fixing the problem. All because they need dresser scarcity so dedicated players who continue to pay monthly wouldn't be opposed to paying "Just $2 more for another bank tab." They know the ones who will pay for retainers are the long term players and collectors. So they design a system that dedicated players almost need to pay into. Considering the data storage requirements of each item are less if its just a skin code rather than an actual item you cant even argue it saves data space. Its literally just an additional section to the excel spreadsheet that is your character data. There is no reason why we have this awkward system other than milking the dedicated playerbase, crafters, and collectors.
Material storage - Crafting/gathering takes up a lot of inventory in any game but most games have an alternative bank as material storage. In GW2 you can even auto deposit crafting reagents to your material storage from anywhere with a button press in your inventory. WoW has an account wide reagent bank. Rather than using additional retainers as a gil sink to reduce the already hyper inflated gil you pay real money on a MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION to access additional storage. Deliberately inconveniencing crafters to make money.
Continued on next reply
Continue reading...