Broken Billing

There has been a lot of talk over all of the in game and hardware problems that the team is working hard to fix, but has anyone looked at how broken the billing for this game is?

A base fee plus $3 per character. If you want 2 characters, you are already at a cost that is higher than other MMOs per a month. Is Square-enix still going to charge $1 a month for retainers? That will make it even harder!

There has been no mention to my knowledge as to whether or not retainers purchased would be applied to all playable characters or just one playable character.

Allowing players to have multiple avatars with different race/looks/builds beyond what a barber shop would provide feels like something modern MMOs provide without charging extra.

Maybe I could manage $1 per additional playable character, but $3?! How much money do you think the average gamer has?

I agree SE deserves to make money on their investment. But is there a technical reason we have to pay extra for something that feels like the norm in other MMOs? Why can't I buy a game card (or crysta card for that matter) in my local game store as a payment option? Why can't I give SE my credit card directly to you? I don't want to go through a third party and have yet another account I need to manage to play the game I want. I don't want to do business with this third party.

When you fix the game, please fix the broken billing practices too. If there is a more appropriate place to discuss this, I don't know it. Honestly, I'm not sure if anyone at square-enix listens if they are not the ones who watch these forums. It is a discouraging feeling when I get a pre-canned response. I like the responses on these forums better.

I want to pay for this game, but the billing practices need to make sense and be as clearly communicated as every other aspect of this game!

Most other MMO's also restrict you to one job per character, where XI and XIV have given you the ability to change to whichever job pleases you without having to change characters.

So the question is, what purpose do you have to make a new character? Visual reasons considering the flexibility of a single character.

As above said there is almost no need to have an Alt in FF14 besides wanting a different look, more inventory space or a teleport whore.

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Originally Posted by Jinko

As above said there is almost no need to have an Alt in FF14 besides wanting a different look, more inventory space or a teleport whore.

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Which of the above.. would make 3 dollars more a good price

http://andrewferguson.net/wp-content...ore-pewpew.jpg

The pricing is reasonable because of all of the above reasons.

2 char in FFXIV will cost the same as other mmorpg as 15$/month and for Tera if I remember right is 16$. As the OP said, you only need 1 char in here with 2 retainer = 300 slots while other mmorpg you can have 100 slots max. So I conside FFXIV billing is cheap, as even when I pay for 1 more retainer, it still under 15$/month

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Originally Posted by Alerith

Most other MMO's also restrict you to one job per character, where XI and XIV have given you the ability to change to whichever job pleases you without having to change characters.

So the question is, what purpose do you have to make a new character? Visual reasons considering the flexibility of a single character.

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If I recall, before release of FFXIV when this issue came up it was mainly for "RPing reasons". in XI, the main reason people had an alt was for storage related reasons, gardening or crafting mule, XIV has quite a bit of storage and even more so on the way when they finish the systems.

As they've always said:

Online gaming, be it Xbox live or MMOs are an investment, something you will dump a lot of money on. $3 isn't really that much when you think about it, especially if you absolutely have to have multiple characters, much like other MMOs give you free slots (this has been changing though from what I seen, they give you a few free with limited access to x, y, z feature then charge beyond that) because they're locked into 1 class branch per character.

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Originally Posted by Alerith

Most other MMO's also restrict you to one job per character, where XI and XIV have given you the ability to change to whichever job pleases you without having to change characters.

So the question is, what purpose do you have to make a new character? Visual reasons considering the flexibility of a single character.

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Thanks Alerith. Something I forgot to mention in my original post is that looks aside, how many people have friends that play on different servers? I ran into this a lot while playing on FFXI and WoW. At one point I think I was on four or five servers just because asking each group of friends to transfer to my server made no sense, because that would mean leaving everyone they have fun with on the server they have been playing on.

On a separate note, you may be able to convince me that $3 is worth it. But paying for a retainer still wont make sense to me even once they have fixed the market wards/player housing situation.

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Originally Posted by TwinMoon

Thanks Alerith. Something I forgot to mention in my original post is that looks aside, how many people have friends that play on different servers? I ran into this a lot while playing on FFXI and WoW. At one point I think I was on four or five servers just because asking each group of friends to transfer to my server made no sense, because that would mean leaving everyone they have fun with on the server they have been playing on.

On a separate note, you may be able to convince me that $3 is worth it. But paying for a retainer still wont make sense to me even once they have fixed the market wards/player housing situation.

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They said they going to do something with retainer so i bet it still needed :) and anyways retainers would be storage and 1$ is cheap in ffxi we had mule that cost 1$ i'm sure more then 90+% did not use a mule to play on morel like storage so in FFXIV they made it cost 1$.

Now i can understand being on different servers and wanting to play with your friends but coming 2.0 you can make it so everyone play on the same servers because it seem like we be allow 1 race change and it seem like server switch also.

and seeing how they be dungeon finder you can make it so you could do stuff together every day so not a issue there also and seeing how we can send PM now i sure we can send pm to ppl from other servers. So there you go problem fix the only thing you can't do is stuff like party and fight Open world HNM.

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Originally Posted by Jennestia

If I recall, before release of FFXIV when this issue came up it was mainly for "RPing reasons". in XI, the main reason people had an alt was for storage related reasons, gardening or crafting mule, XIV has quite a bit of storage and even more so on the way when they finish the systems.

As they've always said:

Online gaming, be it Xbox live or MMOs are an investment, something you will dump a lot of money on. $3 isn't really that much when you think about it, especially if you absolutely have to have multiple characters, much like other MMOs give you free slots (this has been changing though from what I seen, they give you a few free with limited access to x, y, z feature then charge beyond that) because they're locked into 1 class branch per character.

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Thanks for your reply Jennestia.

If the storage fixes meet expectations, It will really take a lot of wind out of my argument. regarding the $3 per playable character. I am doing what I can to bring friends on to my server as they show interest to manage the expense of money and time to be on multiple servers. If I want an extra character for role-play, that is convenience, and paying for it is something I'd expect.

Paying for retainers doesn't make sense to me, I'm hoping their plans to fix storage will handle this.

I still don't like setting up an account with a third party to pay. With how the game is improving, that won't be a deal breaker for me, but it is still a turn off, albeit, it may be more of a personal preference.

If there was more communication around this billing in general, I would feel more at ease to know they have at least considered and looked at it.

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Originally Posted by Alerith

Most other MMO's also restrict you to one job per character, where XI and XIV have given you the ability to change to whichever job pleases you without having to change characters.

So the question is, what purpose do you have to make a new character? Visual reasons considering the flexibility of a single character.

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This. Sorry but we don't need "toons" here. One character does all, and it should stay that way. I like the idea of having more than two retainers though, just hope they can prepare the market wards for such abuse. lmao

Not sure if friends on seperate servers is going to be an issue with the cross server system. You'll be able to group up with friends from other servers for events, raids, PvP and such.

Thanks everyone, for your comments.

If their cross server solution turns out to be like WoW's it might not be so bad, but that will probably tie into their UI updates as well. With Yoshida, I am hoping it will actually turn out better! What he has done in the past year is impressive. I guess I'll have to take the wait and see approach until 2013. At the very least I hope SE takes note of my less cosmetic concerns in this topic.

Being someone who has always had multiple characters in any MMO (for RP), this is a huge issue for me.
$3 per char is just far too much. It's not like we can play more than one character at a time. I'm worried I'll have to choose which to play each month and deactivate the others, rather than just playing how I like, and choosing which to play each day.
$1 per character I could definitely handle!
Retainers.. I thought it was very strange that SE said we'd have to pay for them. I don't remember any other (non-cash shop) games asking for extra money for extra storage. It seems to give an advantage to those who have more money and leave out those who are poor.

Anyways, I posted a question about this on the thread for the second "Letter from the Producer LIVE."

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...l=1#post394321

I have an alt because I had 25 on all classes prior to my bf starting..

Retainers are extra storage space, item spaces takes up data on the servers so you have to pay extra for that...... if you could as many as you wanted it would be to much data for the game to handle w/ ppl hording like 1k+ items per char

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Originally Posted by Firon

Retainers are extra storage space, item spaces takes up data on the servers so you have to pay extra for that...... if you could as many as you wanted it would be to much data for the game to handle w/ ppl hording like 1k+ items per char

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This I think is probably the issue that drives the charge. Though maybe with the new servers it won't be required. I hope that with the new servers they would think ahead and storage would not be an issue other then drive space which they can expand.

Whatever the case, I will not be paying more than 15 a month for this game.

i disagree about being chared for extra avatars but do agree the click and buy system is pretty rubbish, and also agree we shouldn't be charged for a retainer as you can't really play without one, maybe charge for the second and any after that. but first should be free