Free Company's

FC, Clans, Guilds however you want to call them need major improvement in the "Leaving" section. It's an absolute joke that people can leave a FC w/o any penalty...need some dungeon/trial done? Change to a FC that are doing them. Need something crafted? Change to a FC that has a crafter. This is not healthy because as a veteran member of a FC, would you put your own things on hold to help out a new member just so he can leave in the middle of the night? I don't know if FF community found this as an issue or not but I come from MMO's where I had to chose really carefully witch clan to join and have interviews on TS lol. Of course this is not that sort of game but there should be some sort of system to protect the FC and new members too. Instead of swapping FC's why not work with your mates into leveling those crafters?
Please let me know your thoughts :)

Everyone has the right to leave a place if they dislike it or doesn't feel necessary anymore, wihtout being penalized by such trivial things. Changing Guild/FC or whatever is an unvoidable step of a MMO's life cycle.

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Originally Posted by Kenji_

Please let me know your thoughts :)

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FC leaders can just as easily kick people for no good reason. A whole FC that I used to belong to was a victim of this and now the FC leader and his brother are the sole owners of an FC with a Medium house that 10 people worked for.

If members will be penalized for leaving FCs, something should be done about leaders kicking members too. But as it stands, SE's policy on this is that the leader can do whatever they want in an FC, and members have to suck it up or leave.

One member of the FC i'm in had some sort of fight with its former Leader and she left...joined the FC that I am in and after sometime she sorted out the dispute and just said that she is welcomed to the FC again so "Thank you and bye bye". I am sorry but this is not alright, for the most part this FC help't her out with end-game content and as you know sometimes you pause your own activities in order to lend a helping hand. Changing FC's is not unavoidable, I always chose the clan carefully before joining and chat with the leader about their goals and unless things become really, really bad I will always stick with my choice, because a person that changes clans at an alarming rate cannot be trusted.

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Originally Posted by Kenji_

Changing FC's is not unavoidable, I always chose the clan carefully before joining and chat with the leader about their goals and unless things become really, really bad I will always stick with my choice, because a person that changes clans at an alarming rate cannot be trusted.

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I think in that case, you can "blacklist" her from your FC and tell your friends too just to give them a heads-up.

Notably, members do not have any power in an FC unless you give them rank privileges so aside from wasted time, there's usually no harm done. As FC leaders (I am one too), we should be aware of the people that we let into the FC. That said, I don't like FC hoppers but also as I've said before (in my example above), members are in a more fragile situation when joining an FC because the FC leaders can control their privileges in an FC or even kick them out without any valid reason.

Edit:

This isn't to say that your situation should not be addressed, or that it isn't frustrating. I think the FC environment should be improved overall to encourage people to play together.

While I agree with you entirely, I don't think the issue is solely on the FC system, but more on the individuals themselves. Not everyone is going to look into options for FCs before picking 1 and sticking with it. I've been in about 4 different FCs since the release of 2.0, the first one fell apart completely due to the leader being a selfish stuck up pos, the 2nd one resulted in me leaving due to the leader throwing a hissy fit, or as one of my friends said "had a sex change and had his period", and ultimately resulted in a decent amount of their members leaving. The 3rd one just ended up being a dying FC where there was about 3 active members, so instead of sticking around not getting anyone else to join or come back to the game/FC, I went to a friend's FC and after a few months, ended up with the title of FC leader. I don't care to be a leader but according to others I do a decent job at it so meh, I'll keep the title if they like what I do I guess.

But I really don't think there is much that can be done to really prevent people from joining/leaving a FC and hopping around a lot unless they toss a 24hr timer on leaving a FC and not having a timer for members who get kicked. One of the games I was playing while waiting on 2.0 to launch had this type of system and it worked for the most part, however there isn't much to be done about trying to encourage people to want to do content together more often. As far as my FC goes, me and our top ranks will set a few random days aside and make sure its in the FC board for people to see when they login, we'll ask in FC chat if anyone wants to go and a majority of the time no one wants to go with, so we end up just doing the content with 2-4 people, or not bothering at all, since its generally for the good of the entire FC, or specifically for a few people to get something done, like a relic train or coil farming for our new members. The game is pretty solo friendly compared to FFXI, and thats what most of our members end up doing, soloing or doing stuff in DF/PF instead of with the FC.