How and where does retainers fit into the ff14 world/society?

Are retainers just out-of-the-lore, convenience kind of deal or is there an actual lore for who and where they come from? Cause I vaguely remember doing the retainer quests as a sprout. Apparantly some 'owners'/customers are stingy and poorly equips their retainers, leading to retainers' death sometimes. Like damm. Either retainer is extremely well paying job or someone is holding a gun point to their head to do whatever customers ask of them. It's also interesting how our retainers can study a job into oblivion and become one of the 'advanced classes' if asked. I'm really interested to know how they choose retainers cause they seem like a group of extremely talented,and service-friendly, people.

P.S.: Sorry for horrible grammar

Some of the specific retainer lore is fudged a bit for the sake of game mechanics. A retainer probably won't be a black mage whose power rivals the Warrior of Light. They're probably not robbing people and dragging around fountains, either. However the core concept is canon: there are people in town who take jobs as paid servants to be porters and sellers of goods on behalf of adventurers in the field. Some of them will even take limited-scope fieldwork like hunting or fishing. Originally, retainers did not do the latter functions; they were just NPCs that you hired to take your stock to the market, find a buyer for it, and return the profits to you.

This all goes back to FFXI and FFXIV 1.0.

In FFXI you could buy items out of another player's inventory if they marked it for sale. It was called a "bazaar". There was a tax if you did this in a town, so everyone informally came to an agreement: we'll all just put the rare items we want to sell tax-free in our bazaars, and AFK just outside of Jeuno in Rolanberry Fields. This led to dozens of characters just standing around selling stuff, which we jokingly called Rolanberry Markets.

In 1.0, either the dev. team inexplicably decided Rolanbery Markets was the superior player sales method, or the market board was just not anywhere near functional enough to implement yet. (Gonna guess the latter.) However, the dev. team made an official system out of the idea of Rolanberry Markets, and you could hire an NPC to do it instead of having to stay connected to the server using your character or an alt. You could hire an NPC to stand around selling your junk! And there was no marketboard. There was no market board! THERE WAS NO MARKET BOARD!!!!1!

There were just halls ... and halls ... and halls ... of NPCs. And you'd have to check each one individually. And it would take several seconds to load the user interface each time you selected one. It was a nightmare. I've seen some sh[kupo!]t, man. I've seen some sh[kupo!]t.

What were we talking about?

Oh, right, yeah, they're canon. Mostly.

In the original version of FFXIV (1.0) it was explained by the Retainer Vocate when you hired one that retainers are basically servants who sell their services to adventurers for money, and that they are not really true adventurer material but more adapt at mundane tasks like running sales at the Market Board:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by FFXIV Version 1.0 Gridanian Retainer Vocate Giles

"Retainers are men and women who offer their services in exchange for coin. Though they're seldom as sharp as adventurers like yourself, they're no strangers to life's more menial tasks. Tasks which your lot might not think worth your time."

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It appears to become a retainer that person has to register as one at the Adventurer's Guild, just like a new adventurer does. Furthermore, as mentioned by that same npc this seems to also serve as insurance for the client, in case the retainer decides to run off with the client's belongings and gil the Adventurer's Guild would reimburse the client for any loss made by a registered retainer in their employ.

ARR altered things a little though when the Retainer Ventures system was added to make them more like actual adventurers, but the jury is still out on exactly how effective they are in this role (considering they often bring back items as obtuse as parts of houses, it's entirelly possible they're resorting to stealing supplies from construction sites simply to make their master happy, so really I wouldn't trust them that much. ;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

ARR altered things a little though when the Retainer Ventures system was added to make them more like actual adventurers, but the jury is still out on exactly how effective they are in this role (considering they often bring back items as obtuse as parts of houses, it's entirelly possible they're resorting to stealing supplies from construction sites simply to make their master happy, so really I wouldn't trust them that much. ;)

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If you have a female Au Ra with Carefree personality, there's a high chance this is what is happening.