The storage excuse doesn't hold water. Retainer NPCs have less than 200 variables - 100 item slots, 10 bazaar slots, name, race, sex, equipment, currency, etc. Each of those variables is merely a few lines of code referencing an object stored on the game servers, meaning the file size for a single retainer is miniscule by today's storage standards - thousands of retainers would fit on a thumb drive. As for why they haven't implemented the system yet.... who knows?! I had 32 FFXI characters to store all of my crap at a cost of more than fifty bucks a month (had to have two accounts to have that many characters), so it isn't that the community isn't willing to pay for it!