2.2 Retainers via Microtransactions

[Orophin]

I guess people don't really care that an NPC is playing a bit of the game for you, regardless if buy extra retainers or not.
But are more hung up on the fact that additional retainers cost extra on top of the basic monthly fee.

People are hung up on the fact that if paid retainers also have access to Ventures that those that choose to buy those retainers will have an advantage over those that don't, regardless how small it is.

Half of it is the issue where they haven't been accounting for inflation over the past ten years or so. People paying $15 per month back in, say, 2004, was much nicer than people paying $15 per month nearly a decade later. I'm waiting for P2P MMOs to switch to something like $17.99 a month or $20 and remove all microtransactions, but the problem with that is it's incredibly risky to assume people would rather pay an extra $5 a month to play your game than have to deal with benign microtransactions. If I was developing an MMO that was costing millions if not tens of millions of dollars, I would want to choose as safe of a pricing model as possible.

You have to take into consideration that bandwidth costs and storage costs are a LOT cheaper than they were 10 years ago too. It's all relative really. If anything, the extra money is covering the extra cost that game development runs these days.

stuff

You know just as much about the Ventures system as we do. We have no idea how fast the tokens in game accumulate or anything. So yes, anyone that has more RL money and is willing to dump it on more retainers innately has an advantage over those that can't. This is exactly what P2W is.

And apparently the Fantasia Potion being an optional service is totally okay? Guess what, that's a microtransaction.

It's also an item that doesn't give anyone an advantage in game. If the paid retainers come with the ability to undertake Ventures, they do.

The key word here is you can send your retainers to go and gather items for you. None of you bitter folk bothered to consider that RMTers could very easily abuse that system and completely destroy the Market Board economy? No. No you didn't. There's a REASON extra retainers cost extra. The system would get abused hard if they were all simply free.

If it's cost effective for the RMTs to drop an extra $1 a month to do this, what's to stop them from doing it anyway? From my understanding a lot of them use stolen CCs anyway.

[Kayo]

And you keep saying "RMT retainers". That's.. Not what RMT means.
RMT are the real money TRADERS that are bots in-game. That's who would benefit most if these bonus retainers *were* free! The bonus retainers are not *itself* "RMT". They're "optional services". See? Optional. Meaning you do not need it. Hell, I barely even have ONE retainer! Never had a need for one!

That all depends on how much retainers cost, how many we can have, and how efficient they are. Ragardless, botters usually hack accounts and use those to make new characters to avoid detection and/or rob the current ones blind. I really dont see much of a difference if they happen to hack an account with extra retainers. Unless retainers are super awesome and gathering, bots will still bot and use hacks for the majority of their farming.

As for RMT ive heard it as both Real Money Trading and Real Money Transactions ... regardless its just semantics, we all know whats being discussed here.

[Dhex]

You know just as much about the Ventures system as we do. We have no idea how fast the tokens in game accumulate or anything. So yes, anyone that has more RL money and is willing to dump it on more retainers innately has an advantage over those that can't. This is exactly what P2W is.

I know what I've observed. I don't see anything pay to win about having additional Retainers; they aren't going to beat Binding Coil of Bahamut for you, or farm Tomes for you. It at most allows you to farm a few items in an hour with less effort - in a market where things have essentially no value. In a game where everyone can level and gear a crafting/gathering class themselves.

Paying to win at what precisely?

Edit:
P2W in regards to Retainers and Ventures, "I WIN I WIN I HAVE MORE INVENTORY THAN YOU! CAN YOU FEEL THE WEIGHT OF MY EXTRA INVENTORY SLOTS PLEBIAN!? I CAN GET 99 APKALLU EGGS AND OTHER USELESS JUNK IN A FEW HOURS WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING AND YOU CAN'T AND I ONLY PAID AN EXTRA 15$ FEE MWAHAHAHA SUCH SUPERIORITY. WEEP AND QUIT THE GAME!" - Orophin's Nightmare (Yes you have nightmares in Caps.)

Edit again: I'd much rather pay to view and access my two Retainer's inventory in the field than pay to have access a bajillion Retainers at a bell I need stand next to talk to and can't walk away from while I manage my items.

[Beetle]

This feature isnt really needed. If you do need this feature your playing too many classes at once. Once I got all my jobs maxed out was able to toss away and store all my AF away also. Dont have space problems but I am holding alot of 1.0 items which arent being used ingame yet so that my fault holding onto those items. Also holding onto too many primal weapons I dont really use. Wish we could spiritbond those weapons like we did in 1.0.

[Gilraen]

I honestly don't see how this is any different from XI's practice of muling (buying character slots to use as storage and sometimes played to repeat quests for rewards). Paying for another retainer just adds 175 more storage slots and, with the Venture system, the opportunity to gather materials through quests that likely prevents access to said retainer for the duration... wait, this sounds familiar. Ah, SWTOR's companions! Remember that SWTOR started as a subscription MMO, too. Also remember that there was DLC that added more companions, if I recall the DLC wasn't free.

That aside, even if you don't buy more retainers, the ones you already have can still do Ventures free of charge so... I don't see what the fuss is about. So someone buys another retainer, the benefit is incidental at best.

[TheUltimate3]

That aside, even if you don't buy more retainers, the ones you already have can still do Ventures free of charge so... I don't see what the fuss is about. So someone buys another retainer, the benefit is incidental at best.

Incidental they may be. But benefits at all, they be.

[Felis]

Buying extra retainers with real money was planned since 3rd beta of old XIV. The planned price was 1$ each month for each additional retainer. It only never came because of the problems XIV had after first launch. But I always wished that I can buy a third retainer.
http://ffxiv.zam.com/forum.html?foru...07785645538689
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/g...s/post/3867586

At least, we don't need to buy extra character slots for 3$ each month anymore.

I hate to say this, but Micro-Transactions have existed in this game ever since the 2.0 release in the form of World Transfers. So complaining now that they are introducing additional services to their Micro-Transaction Service is kind of silly. If you were really upset about Micro-transactions being in this game, you should have started complaining when World Transfers were introduced to this game.

Since 1.0 to be exact. Each character slot have cost 3$ extra. Someone with 2 characters could have do 8 leves more each day than someone with only 1 character. 3$ extra for the double content.

[Skyhound]

Okay since people don't realize the potential problem with something like this and no one wants to explain it clearly:

The issue is NOT the fact that you can buy more retainers. The issues is what these retainers may be able to do. If they can go on Ventures, then it's 100% P2W no matter how miniscule the advantage is and only benefits RMT. Unless there's a limit on how many retainers you can buy, you can drop $100 and have all 100 retainers go out on ventures and farm stacks of mats for you. It would actually just be SE providing the bots at that point. Though from what it seems like, it takes these tokens to go on ventures which means that it wouldn't matter how many retainers you bought because they all have to go on ventures using the same token pool. However, this problem could appear again if SE starting selling Tokens in the cash shop.

The second issue is more of a gray area. Can these retainers sell to the MB? The MB largely limited by the inventory space of the retainer. If you can buy more retainers that can sell to the MB, that is an advantage. As a business owner IRL myself, I can tell you that is 100% an advantage and would be P2W. If you can only sell 50 items, but the next guy can sell 100 items then the next guy is going to end up making more money than you.

If the added retainers were JUST mules, then it would not be a problem. Yet, we have no idea what they are so SOME concern is valid.

[cotti]

I, for one, welcome my extended inventory overlords.

As said before, it was planned for a long time, and as well pointed by Dhex, it seems like tokens have a good chance of being acquired at the same rate for every person, no matter how many retainers you have, which would make things even more fair.

And even if it isn't, retainers bringing 7 Apkallu Eggs per real-time hour won't break the game. More storage isn't P2W. What's "winning" in a MMO? Getting "a thing" first to point on other's people noses? How is an extra retainer going to destroy the balance of that? What the hell are those individuals posting here thinking? This thread is a new level of bad.

Sometimes I wish we could use a flamethrower on forum databases.

[Felis]

Okay since people don't realize the potential problem with something like this and no one wants to explain it clearly:

The issue is NOT the fact that you can buy more retainers. The issues is what these retainers may be able to do. If they can go on Ventures, then it's 100% P2W no matter how miniscule the advantage is and only benefits RMT.

I have 4 retainers already on the same server, connected with the LS storage. You don't need to buy extra retainers to abuse the ventures (which nobody know what it do exactly) if you can have already 16 retainers without extra costs (if your LS leader allow it to bring 7 twinks into the LS).

And beside this. I think each retainer need to be leveled separat. And if they have the same level speed like the Chocobos, then nobody would level up more than 1 or 2 retainers in short time.