Mailing stuff to alts

Oh, for all that is good in the world YES PLS!

I'm an altoholic, and always has been. I had eleven characters in WoW, top leveled and top geared. And that was just on one server. I like making many since I write full backstories for them. The variety is enjoyable to me.

I have never played a game that is so player unfriendly in this regard. You have to add your friends separately on every character for example.

I had no idea about this when I started playing. When I saw I could have eight characters on my account I thought that, great I can make at least three to play around with and have them be different classes. Then I realized how extremely inconvenient it is because I can't add friends through a real ID thing, not send stuff between my own characters even though I've done all the work, the story is so linear, and you have to go through so much tedious stuff like collecting aether currents on each and every one.


This is one of the things that makes me take breaks since its so annoying, and takes away much of the joys one can get from a game like this. I now play two characters only but might even go down to one.

Sure you can make your own FC to be able to get things from one character to another, but what about having a FC house or go on Diadem journeys? I want to and need to be in a big FC to be able to do this.

Let's not fool ourselves here, it's about money. Or it's at least what I think.

There's no excuse for not allowing us to mail stuff to our alt characters on the same server. RMT money laundering prevention is not a valid arguement as RMT are usually in groups and can trade gil amongst themselves or mail it to their RMT buddies, and they could do so so many times that it could make it just as hard to track as any other means. In FFXI it was no problem whatsoever mailing items to anyone, including alts.

Please, can a community mod relay the suggestion to the dev team to allow us to mail items to our alt characters? *fingers crossed this thread actually gets a community mod response*

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Originally Posted by Saccharin

SE, do you want to inconvenience RMT a little and upset players greatly?

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No, they would never want to do that~ Which is why they limited how many friends you can add in a given day....

It is sad that houses don't come with chests. Since now you can give certain people access to your house. A housing chest to move and share amongst your friends or alts.

In an amazing awesome world. We would have housing locked to account and shared between the whole account. With a house chest that could store non trade able items. It has been a long time but I vaguely remember Aion storage was account based per server. This was at launch though.

Use a friend as a courier to deliver your stuff to your Alt, or talk to your FC leader about using a page of the Company Chest temporarily for transferring items en mass. The CC is also useful for transferring large amounts of since I am not aware of a limit on contribution or withdrawal.

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Originally Posted by Ashkendor

You can't really say that it "obviously hasn't hindered RMT significantly". There's no proof one way or the other. Yes they're still active, but there's no way to prove that they aren't less active than they would have been without the measures SE's taken already. RMT and all the spam and other bullshit that goes with it is just an unfortunate fact of life for a lot of games. :/

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Other games don't seem to have nearly the problem that FFXIV does though.

I played five years of FFXI, followed by five years of WoW, and got less RMT-related interactions in that entire span than I get within twenty minutes of logging on to FFXIV.

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Originally Posted by Ibi

Other games don't seem to have nearly the problem that FFXIV does though.

I played five years of FFXI, followed by five years of WoW, and got less RMT-related interactions in that entire span than I get within twenty minutes of logging on to FFXIV.

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You know. XI used to have the same amount of rmt spam at one point. I wonder what they did to control it because it suddenly died off after a period. They were like really bad in XI though for a while, shouts/tells/everything.

My GF and I made our own FC 3 weeks ago (already rank 6) - we put all of our alts in it...the convenience to freely move stuff to/from alts (via the company chest) is amazing :D I have been really lazy though - I need to use 5 more alts in there for storage...

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Originally Posted by Ayerinn

My GF and I made our own FC 3 weeks ago (already rank 6) - we put all of our alts in it...the convenience to freely move stuff to/from alts (via the company chest) is amazing :D I have been really lazy though - I need to use 5 more alts in there for storage...

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But the issue with that is, it would mean I would have leave my really good FC to be able to do that and I don't wanna do that, yes I do have the option to transfer thanks to my leader allowing me, but it's still an issue when you are limited with space from the company chest and I personally would love a feature to allow me to transfer to my alt via other means, I personally have 8 retainers and I still would love this feature, so it wouldn't stop me from using the extra retainer feature we have, infact it more than likely that I'll keep the feature so I can store more mats that I need that I mass craft everyday

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Originally Posted by Mags

Just buy a second account, friend yourself and bam! You can now mail stuff to yourself.

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Only if you pay my sub

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Originally Posted by LukeStuz

But the issue with that is, it would mean I would have leave my really good FC to be able to do that and I don't wanna do that, yes I do have the option to transfer thanks to my leader allowing me, but it's still an issue when you are limited with space from the company chest and I personally would love a feature to allow me to transfer to my alt via other means, I personally have 8 retainers and I still would love this feature, so it wouldn't stop me from using the extra retainer feature we have, infact it more than likely that I'll keep the feature so I can store more mats that I need that I mass craft everyday

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yep, that is an issue - I wouldn't even care to make an FC if we could 1) mail alts 2) houses get auto shared with alts

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Originally Posted by KitingGenbu

You know. XI used to have the same amount of rmt spam at one point. I wonder what they did to control it because it suddenly died off after a period. They were like really bad in XI though for a while, shouts/tells/everything.

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There was a HUGE gilseller site that ran dry when SE implemented large restrictions on the amount of gil traded in all forms in the game. This combined with mass changes to HNM/NM stuff(RMT was hording spawns and camping EVERYTHING 24/7, etc) had hurt RMT very badly and they retaliated with several DDoS attacks. That task force team was also decently sized. Eventually RMT began given up as their "supply lines" were severed. Oh man, I remember it all, RMT used to MPK whole shells that were camping(this lead to SE implementing measures to address that, hence you can't "train" mobs into players anymore). You name it, they done it/tried it.

Before that, the RMT pretty much owned every server's economy for a number of years.

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Originally Posted by Gilraen

It's intended to inconvenience RMT. XI muling was heavily used to launder gil as for the longest time there wasn't much of a limit on what you could mail outside of RA/EX items, nor to who as you manually wrote the name of who you were mailing. Understandably, RMT abused the hell out of that, millions of gil just circulating around like it's nobody's business. In this game they are trying to curb that with the mail system.

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I agree that completely unfettered Mail access would give RMT too much power. (Not only for moving items/gil around, but who wants their mailbox filled with RMT spam?) But we're not asking for unfettered Mail access to everybody, just for access to our own alts on the same account. Those are characters with far closer ties to our current character than anyone on out Friends list has. Moving gil or items around between unrelated characters is already allowed, just by Friending them. That's the part that RMT would use it for. So they're allowing the part that RMT would use while blocking the part that they wouldn't, but saying it's because of RMT.

SE just isn't making any sense on that. It's so nonsensical that I'm about convinced that in that Letter from the Producer Q&A quoted in the OP they must have misunderstood the question. It really sounds like they answered why we can't freely send mail to whomever we want (maybe thinking of alts on separate accounts) rather than why we can't send it to alts on the same account.

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Originally Posted by Lexia

True and not true at same time, ... so yes if you pay monthly you pay more for a standard account as opposed to entry account but you don't pay per alt like in some games like XI did.

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If you have to pay more or pay longer and the ONLY difference in what you get for that extra money is more alts, then I'd say we're definitely paying for extra alts. It's just that it's a single amount for alts 2 through 8 rather than paying one by one.

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Originally Posted by Brill_

This would fix the inventory problem. They could make cash shop items(like fantasia) bound to a character and other items bound to account to avoid loop holes of creating an alt to get a free fantasia.

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Fantasia is already bound so that it cannot be transferred through other means (like FC chest or trading through a friend). That would work for mail as well.

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Originally Posted by Exodus-E

Or, you could mail your stuff to someone you trust (who has your alts in its friend list) to act as an intermediary for moving stuff over.

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Yes, provided your friend is always online and never busy doing other stuff, or that you're in no hurry to get the items you transfer if they're not. And of course when you decide a friend is trustworthy enough, you'd better be right about that.

And yes, this is indeed one of the workarounds players use to make up for the lack of this basic feature, but it's enough worse from the requested access that it doesn't really make for much of a counterargument.

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Originally Posted by Anyan

Sure you can make your own FC to be able to get things from one character to another, but what about having a FC house or go on Diadem journeys? I want to and need to be in a big FC to be able to do this.

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And this is the problem with the other big workaround. If you want to use a private (or really small) FC so that you can transfer stuff, you have to give up on all the other purposes of having an FC.

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Originally Posted by Caelan

right, but silence is tantamount to admitting it's about selling retainers at this point.

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I don't think it has anything to do with selling retainers. This was frequently (sometimes rather vehemently) requested back when ARR first went live, and there were no retainer sales at that point, nor for a long time after. They didn't exist when that Letter quoted in the OP was written, for instance.

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Originally Posted by XiXiQ

They won't let alts share/access retainers you bought under the same account either.

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If they ever do, it had better be a separate feature not tied to those alts' own extra retainers. Right now if you have two or more alts and purchase an extra (3rd) retainer, all of your alts get a 3rd retainer. If you're genuinely playing each of them, they'll each have their own accumulation of items and will each need their own storage (and sell slots). Replacing that with a single 3rd retainer they all access would give you easy transfer, but at the cost of losing the ability to store and sell items for each character.

I'd like to see something like what LOTRO has, with Shared Storage that lets you share items with your alts as one feature and an upgrade-able Vault (per-character storage) as a separate feature, though they're accessed from the same place. Our Retainers would be the per-character version. Let us have another shared chest or other type of NPC lackey to act as the account wide shared version of retainers.

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Originally Posted by Twilite

There was a HUGE gilseller site that ran dry when SE implemented large restrictions on the amount of gil traded in all forms in the game. This combined with mass changes to HNM/NM stuff(RMT was hording spawns and camping EVERYTHING 24/7, etc) had hurt RMT very badly and they retaliated with several DDoS attacks. That task force team was also decently sized. Eventually RMT began given up as their "supply lines" were severed. Oh man, I remember it all, RMT used to MPK whole shells that were camping(this lead to SE implementing measures to address that, hence you can't "train" mobs into players anymore). You name it, they done it/tried it.

Before that, the RMT pretty much owned every server's economy for a number of years.

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Lol it honestly sounds like a more entertaining game than what we have now in XIV when you put it like that.

also worth mentioning: some people have their alts friended due to a bug early on in ARR, and they can mail stuff to their alts while the rest of us can't

My preference would be for them just to see all chars under your account, and put them on your friend list automatically. No need to change how retainers work, no impact on RMT, huge headache solved.

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Originally Posted by XiXiQ

My preference would be for them just to see all chars under your account, and put them on your friend list automatically. No need to change how retainers work, no impact on RMT, huge headache solved.

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I'll continue with the running joke since yoshida explained why they can't expand our inventory..."it would put too much stress on the servers."

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Originally Posted by XiXiQ

My preference would be for them just to see all chars under your account, and put them on your friend list automatically. No need to change how retainers work, no impact on RMT, huge headache solved.

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I support this idea 100%

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Originally Posted by KitingGenbu

I'll continue with the running joke since yoshida explained why they can't expand our inventory..."it would put too much stress on the servers."

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Seems far better to be putting stress on the servers than your customers. Not that I think having your alts on your friendslist would be stressful to the servers at all. The game already knows who your alts are, its how they check you aren't buying/selling to them via the MB either.

bump for discussion and the chance of a community team response

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

If you have to pay more or pay longer and the ONLY difference in what you get for that extra money is more alts, then I'd say we're definitely paying for extra alts. It's just that it's a single amount for alts 2 through 8 rather than paying one by one.

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You know if a person buys a time card it automatically sticks you in the standard sub and don't have a choice, so no you don't really pay extra for alts. In FFXI you paid for alts, you paid $11.95 just for your account (no characters) plus $1 for each extra character so you had to paid $12.95 just for the account and one character so if person had 8 extra character (which I sure people have here if not more and that can just be one server) they would of paid $20.95 so be glad it not on that system. Then it would be a valid argument that person paying for alts.

Here the link to official FFXI site where pulled details from since it been while since I played.
http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/envi/charge.html

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Originally Posted by Lexia

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Argue specifics all you want, but you are only getting extra alts out of that extra money. It's like buying a subscription to a theatre, with the silver package being movie tickets and the gold package being tickets + snacks. Buy purchasing the gold package you are purchasing the snacks, period. You're being charged extra, for the snacks, there's no arguing around it. It being $2 more than the silver package doesn't change the fact that you're paying for the snacks. You're not paying for one alt, no, but you are paying for the ability to use a group of alts.

The majority of players aren't even paying using time cards as if you're living in the States I hear most places don't hold them, and in Australia they're non existent.

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Originally Posted by Colorful

Argue specifics all you want, but you are only getting extra alts out of that extra money. It's like buying a subscription to a theatre, with the silver package being movie tickets and the gold package being tickets + snacks. Buy purchasing the gold package you are purchasing the snacks, period. You're being charged extra, for the snacks, there's no arguing around it. It being $2 more than the silver package doesn't change the fact that you're paying for the snacks. You're not paying for one alt, no, but you are paying for the ability to use a group of alts.

The majority of players aren't even paying using time cards as if you're living in the States I hear most places don't hold them, and in Australia they're non existent.

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How many people actually use the entry level account and only play one character? Really that option might as well not even be there. Also be glad it not under 1.0 pricing cause I believe that was expensive and what I can find from archives doing google search is this.

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You may choose whether you want to be billed every 30, 90, or 180 days. You must then choose the number of characters you wish to purchase for $3 each (up to 8).

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Which I believe was $12.99 base plus the $3 for each character and only could have up to 8 which I'm assuming is per account not per server. 2.0 only charges $14.99 for standard sub and allows 8 per server up to 40 characters total

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Originally Posted by Lexia

[...] Balmung is one of the largest servers and I have ran into maybe 2 people that use entry. [...]

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balmung might not be the best sample, since most of the rp population would opt for multiple chars i'd think. plus it's a legacy server so u have all the legacy folks runnin around with alt slots built in to their plan

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Originally Posted by Caelan

balmung might not be the best sample, since most of the rp population would opt for multiple chars i'd think. plus it's a legacy server so u have all the legacy folks runnin around with alt slots built in to their plan

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Ok true, I'll edit that out.

bump for possible community team response

It's always really annoyed me I can't send items to alts and that there isn't a shared bank. These are standard in any other MMO.

I agree, other games definitely do it better. I love this game but there are a lot of little QoL changes they could introduce that are standard elsewhere.

I know there are workrounds and in a FtP game, I'd probably just use them and not complain but since I'm paying a subscription, I expect more. Not being able to mail my alts is a constant irritation.

It really would be great if there could come a day where we could see this or some sort of alternative that didn't include pestering friends (I feel bad bothering them for things like this) or FC to try to trade stuff between your alts. Agree with Solarra too, love this game but there's definitely some QoL changes that are pretty much common on other MMOs, that we could definitely use

bump for possible community team response

Why SE, whyyyyy?… ;_;

I don’t see why there isn’t an option on our account settings (via mogstation or whatever) that we can click that allows us to automatically friend and mail stuff to those characters.


@Caelan: Keep bumping this thread. Don't let it die <3

All of my "main alts" are in the same FC which is my friend's, and I just use the company chest to move stuff around between characters.
But I do wish this was easier in general. It'd be nice to be able to just send stuff to your own characters.

Yeah, my main and two of my alts are in the same FC too. The problem is, we have a lot of members so our FC chest is normally packed to the gils xD Otherwise, I’d use that same method too.

I wish we'd get a dev response on this, it'd be super nice.

In the beginning all characters on the same account were going to be able to share retainers, therefore if you had 8 chars with access to 2 retainers each you technically could have 16 retainers and transfer everything between all your chars.

Then they backed out of that and said, "no we guess that wont be possible"

Then they said, "hey look extra retainers are only $2 each per month, what a deal! and we cant let you transfer items easily between chars, cause rmt." which limits you to chest trading or...making an alt account to store/trade items.

See what they did there.

this sums up our collective relationship with SE right now, don't cha think?

http://cdn4.gurl.com/wp-content/uplo...02/broke-8.gif

Is there any other sub-game that has this restriction? Or such a hugely restricted mail-system in general?
Complaints about the level of RMT pop up with depressing regularity here, so I can't help wondering if this is hindering it in any significant way. Even if it is helping to prevent RMT, inconveniencing a lot of customers who abide by the rules is hardly an ideal solution.

As others have said above, it would be really nice to see an official response on this.

Should have been able to do this from day one, ridiculous restriction.. fix it se plz

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Originally Posted by Solarra

Even if it is helping to prevent RMT, inconveniencing a lot of customers who abide by the rules is hardly an ideal solution.

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I'm sure they care greatly about that, which is why they limited how many friends we could add in a day. Heck we can't even add friends cross server like we could in XI lol...One step forward, 10 steps back. The SE motto.

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Originally Posted by KitingGenbu

I'm sure they care greatly about that, which is why they limited how many friends we could add in a day. Heck we can't even add friends cross server like we could in XI lol...One step forward, 10 steps back. The SE motto.

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That cause XI system worked differently, it friended the account not the actual character.