Monthly fee for 3rd retainer - your thoughts?

[HEC]

There is nothing you could do with more retainers than you can do with the 2 retainers you get for free

Sure you can - ventures, extra storage and extra selling slot - which generates (at least theoretically) more profit for players with more retainers.

Retainers are not stationed in 1 city, you can call them from anywhere and the wares you sell are also sold in every city, so, I don't get your point.

Yes - but the buyer get charged additional tax for cross-cities purchases so unless you have at least one retainer in each city or much lower prices to cover for the extra taxes you're not gonna sell outside the "home" cities as often.

[Niwashi]

This pattern of selling them has expanded the subscription from two tiers (Basic and Standard subscriptions) to six. Now, instead of choosing basic or standard, we're choosing between:
* Basic Subscription
* Basic Subscription with 3rd retainer
* Basic Subscription with 3rd and 4th retainers
* Standard Subscription
* Standard Subscription with 3rd retainer
* Standard Subscription with 3rd and 4th retainers

If they keep this sort of thing up, the next feature they want to add this way is going to give players at least a full dozen different subscription tiers to choose between (even if it only has two possibilities rather than three like this one). And that complexity increases exponentially.

If SE wanted a direct financial return for these new retainers, I think a better plan would have been to make them additional perks for choosing a Standard sub over a Basic one. Of course, many players (including me) have a standard subscription anyway, but in a game with as good of multi-classing capabilities as this one, a great many players don't want multiple characters, so it's worth having a perk besides just multiple characters to encourage the higher subscription tier.


(And yes, I know this suggestion sounds self-serving, since I have the standard sub anyway, but I really do think it makes more sense, and I'd be suggesting it even if I currently had a basic subscription.)

[Jinko]

I'm legacy so my sub is only £6 something, an extra £1 isn't guna break my bank.

[HEC]

If SE wanted a direct financial return for these new retainers, I think a better plan would have been to make them additional perks for choosing a Standard sub over a Basic one.

That's basically what I've recommended here.

I'm legacy so my sub is only £6 something, an extra £1 isn't guna break my bank.

I'll just re-use my reply from another thread to answer this:

You're clearly mising the point here - it's not about $2 / £1 - it's about the principle and the precedens this will set up. Once SE start charging for "services-with-almost-no-advantages" when and where it will stop?? Once they'll see we're willing to part with our money for somenthing relativelly minor like this what stops them from starting milking us for other "minor" service giving "slight" edge to players willing to pay? Do you really want this game to turn into "pay to win" one?? I for sure don't!

BTW - I think I might have tripped over you in the grass couple of times when wandering around Gridania

[Kyana]

Sure you can - ventures, extra storage and extra selling slot - which generates (at least theoretically) more profit for players with more retainers.

If you have the time to spare to get more Venture "Coins" and farm/craft the additional items to sell.
So, yes, it's all theoretical.

You're clearly mising the point here - it's not about $2 / £1 - it's about the principle and the precedens this will set up. Once SE start charging for "services-with-almost-no-advantages" when and where it will stop?? Once they'll see we're willing to part with our money for somenthing relativelly minor like this what stops them from starting milking us for other "minor" service giving "slight" edge to players willing to pay? Do you really want this game to turn into "pay to win" one?? I for sure don't!

I'll trust SE with this.
They have the same system in FFXI for ~12 years now?
I mean, we're not talking about Activision/Blizzard here.

Btw, it's not something "minor". If it was an item, mount or something like that, that would be a minor thing. You can only use 1 weapon or mount and you can only play with 1 character per account at a time.
But consistent retainers which are "working" 24/7 take up aditional server resources, and additional servers cost money.

[Alphadeus]

In regards to "where will it stop" when it comes to the stuff you have to pay extra for, the best answer I can give is "when people either stop buying or are overly negative". + 2retainers is a godsend for me, and it's not about being able to put up 40 extra items for sale. I never hit 20 items on 1 retainer.
Being able to have 1 war, 3 gathering retainers, that I can send out to get things, is great. I have to "farm" the ventures, though, which is fine. I also had to gear up the 4 classes. It's not as easy as having 3 gathering classes at 50. I had to earn those classes myself. I had to gather each item at least once.
The extra storage space is amazing, too. I can finally store materials by category, and hold on to stuff I wouldn't normally because of low space. I actually don't have much gear in their inventory, since it all fits in the Armory Chest quite nice. This is worth the extra 2 dollars a month, because it enhances the work I already put into the game.

[HEC]

If you have the time to spare to get more Venture "Coins" and farm/craft the additional items to sell.
So, yes, it's all theoretical.

You don't really need to dedicate (spare extra) time for that - game literarly THROWS both venture coins as well as GC seals at you all the time now. Just do your regular daily Beast Tribe Quests, duty roulettes and any "regular" dungeon or duty you'd do anyway and you end up with pile of ventures, GC seals and dungeons drops which will give you in total anything between 16 - 40 venture coins at least without extra effort. If you need more - a couple more minutes extra a day burning those spare leve allowances will give you another 10 - 20 if needed.

So - yes - it's all very much real

[Niwashi]

For myself, I don't really see this as a slippery slope towards pay-to-win. Whether you purchase extra retainers or not, you still have to spend in-game effort for every venture you want to send a retainer on. There's the effort to earn the venture tokens, plus the effort to either gather and craft to equip your retainer or else to earn enough gil to purchase equipment for them. The stuff retainers bring back is rewards for that effort, not rewards for having paid extra. Purchasing more retainers just raises your daily limit, so you have the option of spending more of your game-time on this particular subset of the game rather than other parts of it.

The slippery slope that I am worried about is the slippery slope towards F2P style billing complexity in a subscription based game. I want to buy a game, pay its subscription, and on that basis be able then to play the game. I don't want a system where that gets you the rudimentary framework of a game, but then there's an extra fee for item A and another extra fee for feature B and another extra fee for option C and so on and so on...

My other favorite MMO, Lord of the Rings Online, has gone that way. It was a purely subscription based game for the first several years it was out, and then switched to a hybrid version where they still have subscriptions (now optional), but also have a store where you can buy thousands of other features and items separately. While it hasn't entirely ruined the game, since it still has a great story to work with, it has ruined a great deal of the enjoyment of the gameplay. We used to be able to just get on and play the game. Now it's get on and choose what we want to pay for, trying to decide how much we can afford to spend, and then we can play that little piece. All development on the game since the Store was added has gone just into the Store. No new features ever get added to the base game itself anymore; they're always extra add-on purchases. I don't want FFXIV ending up that way as well.

[dspguy]

I see no problem with the price (I won't pay it). It is a convenience fee by SE. Either you level an alt to 17 and do the main scenario up to the point where you get retainers, or you pay $2. At least for the $2, you avoid the issue of transferring items between alts.

[ruskie]

Not giving any extra money to SE for retainers. In a pay-to-play game this is wrong.