2014, jeebus. Allright, if It's straight from the horse's mouth you can't get much better than that. Thank you!
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Try playing Black Desert Online, you'll quickly realize how cheap FFXIV's mogstation prices are lol.
Underwear Chance+1 ... 15€
Nice glamour... 30€
Character and job locked, of course.
And we can even buy 7days glamours (with "veteran" money... that progresses with connection time and... purchases in the shop)
(More or less form what I remember, as range prices) Thought I really like the Lahn... I've decided to pass.
XD
Aion is kinda cheaper (to compare with BDO) but with sooooo many glamours it is insane.
I don't mind the glamours and stuff in the mogstation, the thing that bothers me is retainers costing additional monthly fees. And worse than that is the $5 a month app. We originally got the chocobo saddlebag as the second half of the promised inventory expansion, but then they relegated a bigger saddlebag to an additional monthly fee, so they likely won't ever give us a free increase in saddlebag size. The app doesn't provide a useful service on its own so the only reason to pay for it is the retainer and saddlebag upgrade.
BDO shop prices are outrageous, but I will give them a few points back for the fact you can buy and sell a lot of those shop items in game. Somebody's shelling out insane amounts of cash, but I got a neat outfit for the low price of a lot of in game money and a good roll of the dice :P
The retainers costing money is a legacy from FFXI, whereupon every extra character used to cost money, and we utilized those extra characters for item storage, earning them the nickname of "mules." At one point I had a base sub fee of whatever XI cost, plus an extra $5/month for each of the extra characters.
For XIV, they kept the item storage aspect (what we really wanted), charged twice as much, added in a bunch more features (use to sell items and also to farm items while you are afk), and then failed to lock down the extra features past the first 2 that are included for free with the base game.
Horse is out of the barn now. If retainers weren't anything more than mules were, it'd be a little less scummy.
Not excusing it, just explaining it, and that's a fundamental mistake SE can't go back and undo. I think at this point offering up to 4 free retainers would help a little bit, but it's still "pay a little extra and get a lot extra" if you're an omni crafter and a fashion hoarder like I am....
But hey, actual extra characters are free!
Adding to this. BDO has almost no in-game alternatives that are equally nice. You get the generic outfit everyone starts with and I believe two others. That's it. Everything else is through the cash shop at prices that make FFXIV seem cheap. Even better is furniture. You pretty much can't get furniture in-game but have to buy practically everything. Now I will say their housing system is better but still. Comparing FFXIV to a Korean MMO screams you've never played one.
It was at one point possible to trick the server into allowing you to befriend your own alts, but it's something that has since been patched I think.
Upon further reflection, mules in XI also did allow you additional market board slots - and allowed you to have a specialization in more than one craft, something not necessary in XIV. Only the most hardcore crafters had all 8 crafts leveled on 8 different characters, though.
If you mean charging for retainers sure they can. They can just say "starting in November retainers will be free" then stop charging people the retainer fee in November. People who had them would continue to have them. Others can go and unlock them.
But personally I rather have a normal bank and a materials bank, but you know, gotta fight the Flying Spaghetti Code Monster.
DOn't know about that it, retainers were taking place of selling your stuff because there wasn't a functional market board at the time during 1.0 so they were used as a Bazaar in the Marketplace area. But that plan backfired if you recalled going into the section for retainers to browse everyone's wares it took forever to load them. The retainer cost didn't come until way later after ARR relaunched because people start wanting more space. This is when mogstation only did server transfers and name changes for a cost.
Its true about the mules from FFXI though. At the time you had a limited, and I mean an extremely limited inventory space like initially 30 spots where your equipment also took up space. YOu had 50 spots in your moghouse initially. YOu could do the gobbie bag quests and such to expand it to like 80 or 90 spots. Mog bags came out later to store your weapons, armor, and tools and equip them that way with killing your personal inventoryThe cost was a $1 but sub was like 11.95 initially.
Retainers should be less expensive but otherwise let whales be whales