It's probably just going to be for storage space just like your mule in ffxi and the only retainers you can level and send out on ventures are the ones you get in game.
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I'm not going to read 8 pages to post this, so hah! (Sorry if this has already been posted a thousand times.)
1. I have all jobs 50, all jobs geared, a bunch of crafting jobs 50, craft regularly, a bunch of junk items from 1.X, all seasonals, more, and I am nowhere near filling up both my retainers.
2. It's not P2W because the currency to send out retainers is limited, it has a cap to how much you can gain in a certain time.
Tell me - How would they separate which retainers are which? You're only flagged as having x amount of retainers not only that, why would they separate it like this? That makes less sense that the retainers you can buy would have less functionality than the ones you get after a chain of piss easy quests lol.
..How does that make any sense? Not only that but it would actually be violating some laws if they did a setup like that.
This is exactly why I PAY MONEY for this game not to deal with microtransaction bs. SE you can NOT think this is accepptable in ANY way.
This is a complete betrayal of trust. And definitely will make me look for other games to play should this ever happen.
We pay you money to make content for the game. Not to make stuff to buy. We have already paid for this service that you are now selling us!
Technically, you pay to access their servers, not for them to actually make stuff.
/devilsadvocate
And I am a programmer (a laughably bad one, but one nonetheless) but it is possible to flag specific things to function differently. If they added a line of code or something to Station Bought Retainers, they could very easily set those ones to be different than the in game ones.
I do not like microtransaction as well but think of it this way. If you are given a choice of NEVER able to changing your character appearance and never have more retainer slot or have a "choice" of paying to made them available, i am sure majority of the population will ops for the later. NOW if SE start selling power then we got problems to be concern about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXA559KNopI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TT_SGL-oc
This video is main about f2p games and microtransaction but it also include some interesting concept.