It would never be a one time fee. Look at the extra retainers, it is $2 per month. It would be a monthly fee per extra character if they did add this feature, they have to maintain that extra data each month and will charge you for it monthly.
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I know how you feel. I have 13 characters, 4 on Balmung, 8 on Gilgamesh and 1 on Coeurl (a little clone that I made there for ENTM server parties) but while it might be nice to have more on one server, I do think it may actually amount to more effort and cost in the long run, because I doubt they would do such a thing as a one time fee. And it is a bit of a load to deal with all of them come events... I only have most of them leveled to 30 because of events and only one character at 60. but each of them is precious!
Ah, just a note. The game allows you to have 2 retainers per character for free. You have to pay a monthly tax if you want more retainers than you're allowed. Likewise, the game is supposed to allow 40 characters for free. As I mentioned, my idea was just to buy a slot so that I can play 9 of my 40 free characters in the same server, not to make more characters than my account allows. Just like server transfers are a one time thing, this should be too; it's basically like transfering one of my free slots from another server to the server of my choice.
This is how I personally see it, anyway (or how I'd like it to be, haha ;; )
Terrini> *Laughs* You're right, playing many alts can be a bit overwhelming sometimes. Though I find it a lot of fun too, and they make me enjoy Eorzea much more; they always give me things to do in this game. As you well said, alts are so precious, haha ^^
Ahhh... that embarrassed me a bit, haha ;; Thank you, and I'm glad that someone who isn't in the same boat as me can still feel as they can understand where I am coming from, or why people would find enjoyment in it despite the hassle it can admittedly be. Frankly I enjoyed the FF story and I've re-watched a number of cutscenes on occasions through alts, so maybe that's part of the reason why it seems more bearable to me. Don't get me wrong, it can be tedious at times - especially when without a mount at the beginning - but to me at least, I think I would be more worn out from leveling alts on the same character through fate and dungeon grinding; so in the grander scale of things, the MSQ option feels a bit less taxing to me somehow.
To be perfectly honest I don't even play all of my eight characters that regularly. I go through phases where I will give some more attention than others but will otherwise focus my interests around the two or three characters I would consider my Main Group. My lalafel for instance doesn't get that much attention but I will occasionally log in for events and the like or just to take silly screenshots with my friend's lalafel because, like me, she loves that sort of thing and when she has any random idea I'm free to login at any time and go about helping her. Having a secondary sub... I'd need a VERY good reason to log in on any character there because it would come at the expense of a whole month's subscription. I can't just do so on a whim like I would at present so that makes the price tag 100% not worth it to me I believe.
While it's not a case of making a character, playing them once and then getting bored(albeit remaining sentimental), it's certainly not that I actively juggle all or even most at once - I am not that insane, haha. Nor do I remain on top of gear progression and the like. I have grown a little tired of following that so religiously considering how irrelevant it is for non-raid content anyways so even those in my 'Main Group' are somewhere between i210 and i220.
While not ideal, I would still accept this. With retainers, you can choose if you want to re-sub them for that particular month and you can activate them at any time. So that way, even if they are technically locked out one month later on down the line, I need only pay for the character(s) I want unlocked at the time if I am not interested in playing x or y character who also remain locked. Granted you can't choose 'which' retainer in that example, but I would hope characters would be different were this route taken. I'd still love a one time payment option, regardless of how steep it was(I'll easily pay the same price as a mount honestly), but beggar's can't be choosers so I wouldn't rule the additional sub out.
Knew this was a Balmung post lol. The server already has an over population problem. Last thing we need is to make that worse by allowing people to have more alts. There's a reason the server is locked and this will not improve that problem. XD
then the two accounts idea could be good. Just have one account activate per month. they will need to select which one you want activate in that month. If they tell me, " WELL my friend and I want to play the character I have on the other, OMG I can't decide!!!" then that is a problem because it shows the incapability to decide what they want.
Well, if this is really getting in the way, they need to fix their backup process. Of course, they need to have backups of everything, but only the characters who are actually logged in are changing and need to be re-backed up frequently. As already pointed out, no matter how many characters you have, only one can be logged in at a time, so only one should need it's back-up copy to keep being constantly refreshed like that.
This part I agree with, though. If you're going to have that many characters, it doesn't hurt to branch out a bit. Meeting more people along the way can be a good thing.