Armor: Final Solution?

Put the AL in a seperate box, your skin box will get too cluttered otherwise.

I don't think keeping track of rune/inscription unlocks per each invidual skin really helps the storage issue, and even moreso if this is per character rather than account. It takes a lot of space to store all that data, which is after all, NOT inventory slots, but data on Anet's hard drives. This is part of the reason heroes don't have their own skill set or swappable armor pieces, cuts down on storage (as well as hassle)

Your idea makes things alot easier for players but it doesen't really save space unless you basically give PvE chars the PvP item creation system. Which I guess some people including Anet might be opposed to. Certainly Anet isn't going for your suggestion unless you can make it a mere small increase, like the hat maker or material storage. (250 iron in your inventory takes up at least 4x more data space than 250 in material storage)

A more reasonable storage-saving thing would probably be to make the skins and inscriptions/runes independent. It would have a huge impact on rune/inscription prices for the core classes however as you noted.

I have no idea how ANet stores the character data, but I kinda figured that each character has some sort of profile in the database that keeps track of skills they have avaiable, secondary professions, titles, exp, etc. Whenever you take an action in game, like capping a skill or buying one, in your profile it flips a switch (changes a 0 to a 1) and that skill is now available for your character.

Along those lines, this armor system would just involve adding several more lines to the player's database profile for the different armors. Then once you craft the armors, it flips the switch and it becomes available. This seems like an increase in data storage measured in bytes, not even kilobytes. Of course, this is pure speculation and I am no DBA.

Again, no one knows for sure how they store the data, but you say inventory space takes up 4x more space than something like the material storage. Well, creating multiple mules to store a lot of armor probably takes up a lot of data space too. Granted they do get 10 bucks for each new slot.

This armor change seems like it would take up a lot less space on the servers than the heroes for example. Heroes need to store armor data, weapon data, stats, etc.

This is such a good idea! I hope that it (or something like it) will be added! i love most of the armour skins and could afford them but for all the space

/signed x100000000000000000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution

Don't use that phrase.

Another, simpler, solution would be to have an Personal Armory NPC in each town that acts similar to the Hat NPC.

It would follow these rules:

1) You can show ANY armor your character has to the NPC
2) At any time (for a nominal fee) the NPC could replicate that armor for the character that originally showed him the piece of armor. Replication would include all inherent mods, runes, inscriptions, dyes etc...
3) Any armors you showed to the Armory NPC would load automatically when you switch character templates.
4) For armors you no longer intend to use you could have an option to delete it from the list.

Note that this would be character based and not account based like the Hat Storage NPC.

ANET obviously has the techonology to do this and it would not require any core change to the inscription or rune system. It would work for any armor modded in any way.