Patch 4.2 Extra Retainer should be free

Well. Stop buying retainers. No one buy retainers. That service will die.

But if you pay for 9 retainers, well. They won't stop. It is the same as DLC. If you don't want DLC everywhere, stop buying them.

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Originally Posted by Xlantaa

Well. Stop buying retainers. No one buy retainers. That service will die.

But if you pay for 9 retainers, well. They won't stop. It is the same as DLC. If you don't want DLC everywhere, stop buying them.

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You are correct, but its easier said then done. You only need a handful of player to keep renting the retainers, for SE to see it as a sucess. Its like with the F2P games. Majority of F2P players do not buy alot of items, maybe a glamour, inventory or a mount, but there are small group of players who spend alot of money (whales) and their monthly spending outweigh, the players not spending anything. I reckon its the same with FFXIV, if majority of the players decide to not spend a cent on the retainer service, it wont change a thing, because a small group of players will be renting 6 extra retainers for their characters.

Unless the whole community comes toghter and stops spending money on the retainer service, nothing will change.

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Originally Posted by Laerune

You are correct, but its easier said then done. You only need a handful of player to keep renting the retainers, for SE to see it as a sucess. Its like with the F2P games. Majority of F2P players do not buy alot of items, maybe a glamour, inventory or a mount, but there are small group of players who spend alot of money (whales) and their monthly spending outweigh, the players not spending anything. I reckon its the same with FFXIV, if majority of the players decide to not spend a cent on the retainer service, it wont change a thing, because a small group of players will be renting 6 extra retainers for their characters.

Unless the whole community comes toghter and stops spending money on the retainer service, nothing will change.

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Well. That's true. But we don't need all stop at the same time. But enough people stop using that service to no worth having it. Not necessary 0 users.

I'm not a crafter nor am I a gatherer. Therefore I don't need more space for those kind of things.
And there are no gifted Designers employed since a long time when it comes to Gear Design. So, I don't have to worry that I will need more space as long as the currently employed people are working on new future Gear design.

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Originally Posted by Xlantaa

Well. Stop buying retainers. No one buy retainers. That service will die.

But if you pay for 9 retainers, well. They won't stop. It is the same as DLC. If you don't want DLC everywhere, stop buying them.

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I’m a huge fan of the vote-with-your-wallet philosophy (it’s why I refused to buy anything off the Mog Station. I’m already paying you for that content Square, every single month).

The problem with that philosophy and retainers is that the game is designed to waste inventory space. I have two whole retainers JUST to hold on to glamour gear and that’s only for two different jobs, that’s in addition to needing 2 slots for any current crafting material (NQ and HQ), a good ten slots just to hold onto maps because for some reason they’re marked as unique items, the seven different current raid currencies, two slots for Chocobo summoning items and food, another slot for fish meal for gardening, etc. So many ways they take up inventory doesn’t have to be in the game or doesn’t have to be as bad.

Thankfully they’re making small improvements out help (999 stacks is appreciated, as 2is moving beasttribe currencies into the currency tab...mind you it came months after I started tossing those currencies to save space) but every patch adds dozens of new materials and gear we need to store.

The only way to have space for all of that is retainers. The game is designed in such a way that you either pay for retainers or you have or discard items that you earned. It is beyond frustrating. :/

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Originally Posted by Caitlyn

It would be really nice to have at least one additional free retainer PER expansion. That would make 3 or 4 free retainers in total.

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THIS! Returning to the game after a few years away, I really expected this to be the case. It is quite sad to see it is not so. :confused:

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Originally Posted by WellFooled

I have two whole retainers JUST to hold on to glamour gear and that’s only for two different jobs,

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How many times a week do you change your job glamour?

I see your point, but every other subscription game once you max out your storage your done. Square Enix is giving you inventory + 3 retainers. Thats a lot more space then WOW gives you for free. You can do what people do on other games. Start a guild and use guild storage for space. Have alts and use their storage and retainers for storage. Thats the alternative that you get with 99% of the other games you offer. No game gives you unlimited storage.

Im personally happy to pay 2 dollars a month per retainer. Its nice to have an extra miner and botanist running around for me.

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Originally Posted by Krotoan

How many times a week do you change your job glamour?

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Not incredibly often :P but how often I change my glamour has no effect on the point. Some of that gear took a substantial amount of time to acquire. In many ways, my glamour collection is the only evidence of much of my in game activity. The constant vertical treadmill means the stats on that gear is soon useless, but the visuals of it still hold value. The game should be designed in such a way that I never lose that value. As is, I barely have the space to keep a collection just for two jobs and that’s with extra retainers. It would be impossible with the base two.

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Originally Posted by Aniond

Square Enix is giving you inventory + 3 retainers. Thats a lot more space then WOW gives you for free. You can do what people do on other games. Start a guild and use guild storage for space. Have alts and use their storage and retainers for storage...
Im personally happy to pay 2 dollars a month per retainer. Its nice to have an extra miner and botanist running around for me.

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No, Square give us 2 free retainers only, not 3. If we had 3, I'd be happy and thanking them.
The storage in FFXIV is pitiful compared to WoW when you take into account that people are encouraged to level every class on one character. And you do have to take that into account because it's a major selling point. Each of my characters in WoW has one battle class, one gatherer and one profession, with no special gear or tools needed to gather or make things. My main here has all the professions, three gathering classes and several battle-classes most needing their own tools, weapons and gear.

FC storage. Don't make me laugh! Eight very large tabs in my WoW guild bank compared to the tiny little chest we have here.
When our FC started making Airships I had to pay for an additional retainer simply because FC storage couldn't cope with all the extra airship parts and items and function as general storage for our members.

Alts for storage? Sure, as long as you are willing to pay more for your sub. And even if you do pay more, enjoy never being able to mail them and needing friends to act as go-betweens when you want to pass items between them or as you suggested, having to make a single-person FC to get around that restriction.

Retainers used wisely, provide not only storage but a steady stream of income. More retainers means more items from ventures and more market board slots for selling things. Increasing the advantages in-game to those who are willing to pay more goes against the spirit of a subscription game.
And remember, even FtP games that sell storage usually do it as a 'once and done transaction'. Here we are renting it by the month.

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Originally Posted by Aniond

I see your point, but every other subscription game once you max out your storage your done. Square Enix is giving you inventory + 3 retainers. Thats a lot more space then WOW gives you for free. You can do what people do on other games. Start a guild and use guild storage for space. Have alts and use their storage and retainers for storage. Thats the alternative that you get with 99% of the other games you offer. No game gives you unlimited storage.

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WoW gives you a glamour log that holds over a thousand skins (account wide!) + 10 alts that you can mail items to (each with their own bags, a 200+ slot bank and a 98 slot material bank) + way more space in guild banks (8 tabs with 98 slots each) than our fc chests have. You can have more than 10 000 inventory slots on a server without counting in the glamour log, without your main character having to be in a solo fc and without paying a single euro more than the base subscription.

On top of this you can sell as many items as you want in the auction house and don't have to store them in your bag until previous things have sold. On top of this any expansion's recipes only use materials from that expansion so you don't have to store or gather old mats. On top of this all current tier gear can be disenchanted (=desynthed) in WoW, whereas we have to carry 310+ gear in our bags for two patches before getting anything back from them. WoW does in fact give you way way way more space and less inventory problems than FFXIV when all things are considered.

While SE has done many decent inventory upgrades lately, this game is still not up to par with its competitors. Being able to mail alts would be a huge step in the right direction. Another good step would be to implement desynth, GC turn in and extreme primal mount token exchange immediately so we don't have to carry all that stuff around for multiple patches.

And lets not forget that SE has a big focus on glamour and yet somehow does not truly provide us with a great solution. If you create such a big amount of glamour you should also think about the storage that they need to have at the same time. In Rift (that does not have the amount of glamour) you have a glamour log for the glamour and you can buy more bank space with ingame money. And that storage should be enough since you dont need that storage for glamour.

SE has thousands of glamour items but no unlimited system to store them. And at the same time thousands of items for crafting and gathering..and this will get worse. Yet we somehow are not even get one more free retainer per expansion..

Well im not using that mutch inventory space because i like it clean and know how fast it will be full once i start horting things. Thats why i only keep things i use and sell all other stuff onto the MB or to an NPC. But i realy wish they would finaly add a style Log like in WoW. In WoW once you collect an Item with a style you dont allready have the style gets saved in the Log and you can sell the item again, thats saves tons of space and makes collecting outfits far more fun because you dont feel limited or have the feeling that you wasting space (especialy when some items dont look so cool). I realy cant understand why it is so hard for SE to do the same thing in FF14.

If i should guess i would say its more they dont want (because with something like they would earn less money) than that they dont cant. The new glamour log shows that its possible to add something like that, but its far to limited and feels in compare to its big brother in WoW like a joke. 200 Slots are only 16 Items per slot and a bit. Also you cant remove them again only overwrite/delete once you log is full, whats the point in adding a shity penality like that? Atleast let people remove the items they dont need anymore, like in the current dresser. Sometimes it realy feals like SE likes to take the piss out of their customers.

I agree with you about the glamour-log. It feels rushed.

Maybe just maybe, if they had given us an extra retainer rather than spending development-time on simultaneously creating a whole new storage system (choco bags) and the Glamour Dresser, we might have got something more user-friendly and more like the system players have been asking for.

I understand that development time is limited, so I just cannot fathom why they decided to ignore the retainer-system we have (unless you want to pay extra of course) and then went and added 2 new storage systems on top.

Free to play games sell permanent storage increase because it's free to play. The game itself isn't popular enough to demand a subscription, so they do burst microtransactions. The whole point is not paying a subscription for the game. Why do it for storage?

FFXIV is different. You're already paying a subscription. So you get the mindset, "What's an extra couple bucks a month? Why not?" Voila.

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Originally Posted by Solarra

I agree with you about the glamour-log. It feels rushed.

Maybe just maybe, if they had given us an extra retainer rather than spending development-time on simultaneously creating a whole new storage system (choco bags) and the Glamour Dresser, we might have got something more user-friendly and more like the system players have been asking for.

I understand that development time is limited, so I just cannot fathom why they decided to ignore the retainer-system we have (unless you want to pay extra of course) and then went and added 2 new storage systems on top.

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Unlikely that the Glamour system would be that much better. Its restrictions are more to do the with game engine as I understand it and it is rushed. Yoshi P said before now that they hadn't been working on anything like this up to the release of stormblood so this system is probably only 6 months old. Just to compare, Blizzard was working on their Glamour system for over 3 years before they released it.

SE seems to often release systems and then build on them. That is what I suspect this is. They give it to us, let us play with it a bit, tell them what works and what needs to be improved and then adapt.

As for the chocobo bags they are mobile storage which is in some ways more useful than another retainer. The chocobo bags just pretty much pushed our roaming inventory up to 230. I think if you asked the majority of players which they would want SE to spend more time on first it would have been the extra 70 bag slots rather than a limited glamour system that needs a lot more work to reach its potential.

Yes, I too would have chosen storage over a limited glamour system.

However, given the choice between another retainer and the choco bag, I'd have chosen the retainer. Retainers have much more utility than just storage and since they are already in the game, giving us one more wouldn't have taken development time away from anything else.

I don't want to come across as ungrateful but I really am disappointed with this decision.

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Originally Posted by Aniond

I see your point, but every other subscription game once you max out your storage your done. Square Enix is giving you inventory + 3 retainers. Thats a lot more space then WOW gives you for free. You can do what people do on other games. Start a guild and use guild storage for space. Have alts and use their storage and retainers for storage. Thats the alternative that you get with 99% of the other games you offer. No game gives you unlimited storage.

Im personally happy to pay 2 dollars a month per retainer. Its nice to have an extra miner and botanist running around for me.

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While FFXIV may give each player more space...
Each player also requires more space.

A WoW character only has a single class.
A FFXIV character has up to 26 classes.