mailing alts

Why is this still not a thing? We're in the "third" expac and we still can't mail stuff to alts? There are ways around this and they haven't destroyed the game. I promise there won't be any rivers of lava running through big city streets, cats and dogs getting along, people stealing candy from babies and refusing to help old women cross the road if you give us the ability to send mail to our alts. I'm not asking cross severs either. Just alts on the same server.

Either this or a small number of inventory slots shared between characters on a server would be an absolutely wonderful QoL fix. It's not like you can't already move items between characters via a friend or the FC, so why not just give up and make things easier for us, SE?

Seconding this with the great force of my army of alts.

This would be a great new feature, and you could also let us share our houses with our alts too.

They’re probably worried that people will abuse it for money gil or something.

Yes! Much needed QoL improvement.
And yes to sharing houses, too.

I vote yes, I'm tired of making my FC keep half a tab open to transfer stuff. sure it works.. but they have better uses for that storage.

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Originally Posted by Fredco191

They’re probably worried that people will abuse it for money gil or something.

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You're probably not wrong, but as said before, it's not like people don't already do this. The FC I'm in is made from mostly alts, and we pass things around either by asking each other for help or by using the FC chest when there's room in it. And that's before we get to people who have more than the one service account who can already mail things to their own charas because the game doesn't recognize them as belonging to the same person.
It's not that we can't do the things they're worried about already, so why not make it easier? Especially when alts keep people playing when they would've otherwise unsubbed.

"Anti RMT" i believe was the argument for removing the feature back in 2.0

I don't understand how preventing mailing things to your own alts would even affect RMT. I'd love to hear their argument behind that. In any case, I support removing this restriction 100%. I have a handful of alts on Gilgamesh and this would make things a lot more pleasant. Let us mail to our alts! ^_^

I feel like it was done this way to prevent RMT-related item/gil/whatever moving, but it's honestly been nothing but an absolute pain for regular players who happen to enjoy making alts (like myself).

Honestly I've completely avoided taking an alt of mine out of my private FC, despite wanting to try getting her in an RP FC suited to her background and goals, all because moving items or money between her and my main would be an absolute nightmare. I hate having to always ask a friend (or wait for a friend to be on) just to move one or two items at a time. ; ;

Even just the shared inventory slots idea would be a good step forward in eliminating an issue that's been prevalent for years.

Yes it would be a wonderful quality of life change to let us mail to alts.

Honestly, I'd like to just skip over mailing ourselves (although it's a silly restriction) and go straight to having a "company chest"-like item strictly for ourselves and our alts. Maybe something that could be found in our in room.

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Originally Posted by GetFoesReqd

I don't understand how preventing mailing things to your own alts would even affect RMT. I'd love to hear their argument behind that. In any case, I support removing this restriction 100%. I have a handful of alts on Gilgamesh and this would make things a lot more pleasant. Let us mail to our alts! ^_^

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Me too: considering the fact that gil farmers use multiple computers and it's really easy to set up an fc of their own to transfer stuff. They can keep the prohibition to not mail people who aren't friends, but make an exception for alts (or allow us to friend alts.) It would be nice compensation for having to deal with random RMT people trying to friend you. I get that they thought there wouldn't be alts but they allowed us to have more than one character on a server so they should pony up and let us send things to ourselves.

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Originally Posted by Spirlia

Honestly, I'd like to just skip over mailing ourselves (although it's a silly restriction) and go straight to having a "company chest"-like item strictly for ourselves and our alts. Maybe something that could be found in our in room.

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a account wide inventory system would be nice, like in GW2

I would love my alts to be able to share my house.

I was WoW player. This game always have mails for alts.

When first time play FFXIV and wondered why can't send us alts....

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Originally Posted by OwlBlackX

I was WoW player. This game always have mails for alts.

When first time play FFXIV and wondered why can't send us alts....

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Yeah, I came from WoW too. Started two months before HW hit (during WoD, that was.) So I've experienced that and the ability to send mail to your alts in that game doesn't give you a huge advantage in game money. What breaks the auction house is the bots.

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Originally Posted by GetFoesReqd

I don't understand how preventing mailing things to your own alts would even affect RMT. I'd love to hear their argument behind that. In any case, I support removing this restriction 100%. I have a handful of alts on Gilgamesh and this would make things a lot more pleasant. Let us mail to our alts! ^_^

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I feel its more about discouraging people playing alts then anything RMT related. It does nothing to stop RMT. RMT will always find a way around any restrictions put into place. Even if it did hinder RMT, taking away any QOL benefit to the normal player over small fears isn't a very smart thing to do and is a really bad business sense choice. Deal with RMT as they come, never deny QOL features to players.

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Originally Posted by Aylis

snip.

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But that makes no sense because they get more money by way of a subscription if people have alts than they do if people don't have alts. If they really, truly wanted to discourage people playing alts, they'd jack up the subscription fee more or make it so that, when you buy extra retainers, you only get them on one character. The artificial restrictions are easy enough to circumvent already (albeit they're a pain in the booty.) Friends, the MB, or FCs all work.

It might, if you look at it another way, be a nice way to free up houses too, since you can technically have two houses (an fc and a personal one) and the most popular way to transfer stuff is via personal fc's. I know a lot of people with alts have FCs just for themselves with both a fc house and personal house. Maybe if we could transfer stuff to ourselves, some people wouldn't feel compelled to make personal fcs. (Just to put a silver lining on this...)

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Originally Posted by Aylis

I feel its more about discouraging people playing alts then anything RMT related.

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And why would you want to discourage people from playing alts? I don't get it. Having multiple characters is fun... maybe you should try it.

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Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra

And why would you want to discourage people from playing alts? I don't get it. Having multiple characters is fun... maybe you should try it.

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The reason you can't mail things to alts is because you have to friend list the alt, which requires that alt to be on at the same time as your main. which as far as I know you can't do either pc or console. They would have to change the friend thing, then rmt spammers would just spam us to death with mail.

Alts have never been a thing that SE has handled well as FF games always controlled all the jobs/classes at once for the original RPG's and then XI came out and they stuck with the same concept but on a single character instead.

I want to play house with my alts so they must be allowed to share the property just like tenants do!...

Why Yoshi-P hasn't made this happen yet!?...

The FFXIV mailing system is shit
You have to add your FC mate, LS mate to your friendlist to be able to send them mail...
Same reason you cant send mail to alts...

btw... it help the cash shop
What about up to 6 more slave to wear your things? ;)

The REAL reason is to conserve on server space, as all that inventory being used up on alts is taking up server space.
It literally affects nothing else, nor does it help/hurt their ability to do anything other than save inventory space. (Also the mail system acts as a sort of inventory space too, as u can hold onto a ton of stuff in ur mail, w/o actually picking it up. Which I still have stuff in, from 2.0)

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Originally Posted by Shouko

The reason you can't mail things to alts is because you have to friend list the alt, which requires that alt to be on at the same time as your main. which as far as I know you can't do either pc or console. They would have to change the friend thing, then rmt spammers would just spam us to death with mail.

Alts have never been a thing that SE has handled well as FF games always controlled all the jobs/classes at once for the original RPG's and then XI came out and they stuck with the same concept but on a single character instead.

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XI let you mail things to your alts freely ;) You could even mail things to yourself which came in handy often.

For XIV, they really need to update the current system so that any alt on your account is automatically treated as a friend with housing privileges.

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

You could even mail things to yourself which came in handy often.

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I would love to be able to do this. Would make it so I could keep more maps and do tons of at a time without spending anything on the maps.

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

XI let you mail things to your alts freely ;) You could even mail things to yourself which came in handy often.

For XIV, they really need to update the current system so that any alt on your account is automatically treated as a friend with housing privileges.

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XI wasn't alt friendly is all I meant.
XI also didn't have the bot problem for RMT spam that it does in XIV at the initial time of being made, hence why they're not doing it for this. I agree it's handy to be able to mail to an alt freely but XIV isn't a free as other games sadly and it's plagued by not being able to be funded by it's own subs.

I don't really have anything to say about the house stuff.

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Originally Posted by Shouko

XI wasn't alt friendly is all I meant.
XI also didn't have the bot problem for RMT spam that it does in XIV at the initial time of being made, hence why they're not doing it for this. I agree it's handy to be able to mail to an alt freely but XIV isn't a free as other games sadly and it's plagued by not being able to be funded by it's own subs.

I don't really have anything to say about the house stuff.

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Is there any source as to them saying RMT is the reason why they won't unlock the mail system / make alts more user-friendly? I've always chalked it up to SE implementing things in the most ass-backwards way they could imagine.

This would be a massive QOL update for this game. Perhaps find a way to track accounts that send more than X amount of mail daily and investigate further? I'm sure they could find a way to make it work .

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

XI let you mail things to your alts freely ;) You could even mail things to yourself which came in handy often.

For XIV, they really need to update the current system so that any alt on your account is automatically treated as a friend with housing privileges.

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Not sure when they added the functionality, but in FFXI you can even mail nearly all RA/EX items to alts on the same server as well. As far as I know the only exceptions are AF2 from dynamis and the rewards from main story missions (like raja's ring.)

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

Is there any source as to them saying RMT is the reason why they won't unlock the mail system / make alts more user-friendly? I've always chalked it up to SE implementing things in the most ass-backwards way they could imagine.

This would be a massive QOL update for this game. Perhaps find a way to track accounts that send more than X amount of mail daily and investigate further? I'm sure they could find a way to make it work .

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I'm too lazy to look it up but I believe it was one of the questions in a live letter near when 2.0 came out.

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Originally Posted by Ferth

Not sure when they added the functionality, but in FFXI you can even mail nearly all RA/EX items to alts on the same server as well. As far as I know the only exceptions are AF2 from dynamis and the rewards from main story missions (like raja's ring.)

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Oh yeah, I absolutely LOVED that little surprise when I went back to the game! That could go a long way for XIV as well, although with the game being in its prime, I can see them not wanting to unlock that option yet (sadly).

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

Is there any source as to them saying RMT is the reason why they won't unlock the mail system / make alts more user-friendly? I've always chalked it up to SE implementing things in the most ass-backwards way they could imagine.

This would be a massive QOL update for this game. Perhaps find a way to track accounts that send more than X amount of mail daily and investigate further? I'm sure they could find a way to make it work .

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No official source that I know of has said this.

I agree it would be nice to have but it's probably tied into coding of the game saying that you need to be online in order to receive an invite of some sort. In order to bypass this they would most likely have to change the way invites work.

I suspect the real reason they haven't changed it, is just not a high on their priority list or they just don't care enough to change it.

Wouldn't it make sense for them to just adjust the mailing system to recognise alts on your account without removing the 'friends only' buff? Surely all that would need to be done is a slight coding change that would recognise your alt as a mailing applicant rather than a 'friend.' Mogstation, etc, is able to see characters on your account / server, so why can't it in-game? xD

They'd just need to maybe add a panel in FL/BL and make it AL (alt list) or w/e.

In wow, if you had a mail add-on, it would automatically suggest a character in your alt list before friends and guild members by simply reading script (or something to that effect.) Can't be that hard. :S

Because then folks would just grind to make alts with retainers and they make money off people that don't to jump through hoops to move items around

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Originally Posted by kamenkuro

Because then folks would just grind to make alts with retainers and they make money off people that don't to jump through hoops to move items around

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They'd probably have to address that by making it alts can't use the MB to sell things if your main is at its limit.

E.G if you have 2 retainers on your main, with 20/20 on both currently selling then your alt automatically cannot put anything up until something sells. Dunno how that would work via coding though...

It would create a pretty massive balancing issue for people who don't really use alts, since you'd have a ton more extra storage and MB slots to sell stuff. Yea you can "work-around" it now, but if it were easier it would be abused as everything tends to be. Consider payment practices too. They'd likely lose some money from people who have a lot of retainers as they wouldn't be as required, you can have up to 8 characters on a server or something right? That's a lot cheaper per month than hiring 7 additional retainers or whatever.

Also not sure, are additional retainers account-wide or per character? (I don't know)

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Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

It would create a pretty massive balancing issue for people who don't really use alts, since you'd have a ton more extra storage and MB slots to sell stuff. Yea you can "work-around" it now, but if it were easier it would be abused as everything tends to be.

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Then...make alts and enjoy the same storage? :X

(of course this is excluding us Balmungers. locked server foreveeer, lul)

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Originally Posted by Shouko

No official source that I know of has said this.

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It was in an official statement from Yoshida back pre-relaunch and again post launch he discussed it and blamed rmt. They used RMT as an excuse for many a things back then. But what it comes down to is they are making a lot of money off of extra retainers and they don't want to give that up. Its not something that people will quit over so they can just do it and give an excuse like rmt and it wont make any difference.

I could try to find it but that was 3-4 years ago now so its likely buried as a preliminary search didn't pull it up. But I can dig if I get a few minutes.

There was more than a little hubbub about it as it has made zero sense since day one.

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Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

Also not sure, are additional retainers account-wide or per character? (I don't know)

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Yes, you get all retainers you pay for account-wide.

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Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra

And why would you want to discourage people from playing alts? I don't get it. Having multiple characters is fun... maybe you should try it.

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I actually do play alts, and yes it is fun. I'm just looking at another picture here, No ability to mail things to alts, no house sharing with alts to save on the housing issue, no shared bank with alts/no account wide sharing with alts, going through hoops and ladders in cases just to get the alt on the same server, the armory system which lets you play as any role you want without needing to make an alt. This all tells me this isn't a very alt friendly game due to the lack of convenience in terms of alts.