inventory-space
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Final Fantasy XIV offers more retainers for a price
A new patch for Final Fantasy XIV is out and playable today. It's full of stuff to do, things to craft, and of course, items to acquire. This might not be a welcome bit of news to players already struggling to fit items into their burgeoning banks. But help is here, after a fashion. If you truly can't reduce your items any other way, you can now buy more retainers to take care of the many things you've still got kicking around in your inventory. The downside? It'll cost you real money. Players are allowed to purchase up to two additional retainers for their characters at the price of $2 per month for each. The extra retainers are available to all characters on your account and will not be deleted if you discontinue the extra monthly fee but won't be accessible until you pay again. For more details on signing up and interacting with your normal retainers, check out the full update.
More inventory improvements coming after Warlords launch, larger bags in the meantime
For the avid collector, inventory problems have reached critical mass in Mists of Pandaria. The previously announced toy box and heirloom storage will arrive with the launch of Warlords, but many are still wondering what to do with their ever increasing transmog collections. A solution is on the horizon, but it won't arrive until sometime after the expansion's launch. If the already announced inventory improvements aren't enough, there will also be slightly larger bags added in Warlords. These will probably be 30-slot bags, and I would be surprised if there is ever a larger bag than that once the inventory changes are fully implemented. When it comes to what items will qualify as a "toy box" item to be removed from your regular inventory, Blizzard will be adding these on a case-by-case basis and looking for player feedback on the future beta and PTR to help identify items they may have missed. For example, should a trinket such as the Super Simian Sphere be turned into a permanent toy instead of a trinket? What about a popular quest item like Dartol's Rod of Transformation?
Pathfinder Online asks what's in your backpack
Are you the sort of player whose inventory is forever overflowing with items of indeterminate source? You'll want to break that habit before Pathfinder Online is released, because you'll have more to worry about than just the upper limit on items in your inventory. The latest development blog on the official site explains the Encumbrance system, another limit on how many items you can carry due to a combination of size and weight. Hauling around a lot of large and awkward items is going to mean less ability to carry everything else, while lots of little things like herbs will be more easily carried up to the inventory limit. The blog also has more details on what happens to your inventory when you die -- some of your items are instantly destroyed, and only those items specifically bound to you will be exempt from looting. The game is also implementing an item decay system, ensuring that nothing you have is all that permanent, although with the encumbrance system in place that might be something of a blessing in disguise at times.
Final Fantasy XIV explains changes to money and items
A lot of changes are coming to Final Fantasy XIV when the relaunch finally comes around. Changes to currency and item properties are among the less interesting of those changes, but they're certainly going to have a big impact on the game. A new update from the development team explains in depth what will be changing, what items will be removed, and what will happen to currency values. The currency one is what's going to throw the largest number of players for a loop, as the game is reducing all money values to a tenth of what they once were. To reduce numbers, all money is getting the ones digit removed, meaning that players will be 10% as wealthy as they are now, but all vendor prices will be 10% of their current values. Net purchasing power should be identical. There will also be a number of items removed from the game, altered, or otherwise changed with the new version. Players will lose several key items and ammunition, and other items will be bound to a player to prevent trading. Take a look at the full rundown for all the particulars on graphics, money, and other mechanical shifts to inventory management.
The Daily Grind: Should inventory space be infinitely expandable?
MMO inventories may not be the single biggest source of frustration in MMOs -- or even in the top 10, depending on the player -- but every online gamer has butted his or her head up against their limitations at some point. As virtual vacuums, our characters are Hoovering up all the junk, tokens, armor, weapons, livers, scrolls, twigs, fishing pole, fish, plankton, and lit torches that lie in their paths. Because of this, our bags are often full to bursting and our backs sore to aching. Some MMOs give players a fixed amount of inventory spots (such as LotRO) and that's that. Some games like RIFT allow for the collection of bigger bags, while others like Fallen Earth challenge players to keep tabs on weight management as well. However MMOs handle it, inventory space is constantly one of those things of which players can't get enough. So should inventory space be infinitely expandable? Are we to a point that the limitations of backpacks are no longer welcome in MMORPGs? Or do these limitations still have a good purpose (beyond the coding headaches that an infinite inventory would give to the dev team)? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Mog Log: Patching holes
Due to a general case of it's-the-blasted-holiday-season, I didn't get nearly as much playtime with Final Fantasy XIV following the November patch as I would have liked. I had to wait a couple days to really sit down and engage in a nice play session to really get a feel for all of the changes that had been wrought on the game by the update. And in a way, I'm glad I knew that I would need some time and thus focused on the community piece last Saturday, because it's meant more time to really appreciate the improvements. The short version, if you're allergic to page breaks, is that this patch solves a huge number of issues, to the point that I imagine many players who couldn't see past those issues to the core game will be better able to see what's at the root. But there's a lot of unpacking to do, so I'd still recommend hopping past the cut for a breakdown of the patch as a whole as well as a brief look for what the December update still has to do for Final Fantasy XIV.
Ask Massively: I am happy when I get to talk about Transformers edition
If people haven't noticed by now, I have fandoms that don't generally intersect with MMOs. So I'm happy to see that the Transformers MMO will be wide-ranging, while at the same time I understand that many of the things I want out of the game will not be happening. Then again, almost none of the things I want dovetails with more casual fans. Considering how strongly Hasbro is pushing the newly unified Transformers: Prime continuity, my vague hopes of seeing something set on Cybertron post-Reformatting are unlikely to come to fruition. (I will still be happier than those people who assume the series peaked 26 years ago.) Leaving aside my personal pet causes, we've got the usual cocktail of questions for this week's Ask Massively, complete with a discussion of the dark art of modding and the far lighter art of inventory storage. If you've got a question for us, you can leave it in the comment field or mail us at ask@massively.com.
