Quote Originally Posted by Talraen View Post
If you want to argue retainers should be free, great, but what does that have to do with my point? Free retainers should be free, not semi-free based on a shoehorned-in system where you can do one-time storage with indefinite retrieval. As long as retainers are paid, they should probably work the way they do right now. Making them free is a completely different discussion.
Generally what I've seen in regards to paid storage solutions - across any computing industry - is an expansion of services over time. Maybe you originally paid for 5GB of cloud storage, and now it's upped to 15GB, no extra charge. Maybe your cell phone plan used to have by default 1GB of data, and now it has 2GB, no extra charge. This generally happens because the cost of the associated infrastructure gets cheaper over time.

So, whatever infrastructure is supporting the expanded Retainer functionality should also generally get cheaper over time. It's therefore reasonable to expect some additional carrots to be thrown people's way in order to avoid them getting angry. One option would be the ability to have 'one-way item access' after a Retainer is no longer paid for, maybe a capability that's only granted if you've paid for them for at least three months, I don't know. There are plenty of others. But the system is exploitative; it always was, and it's steadily becoming more visible. That type of business model needs a steady stream of carrots in order to work properly; it can't all be the stick of limited MB space and basic sub levels of storage (which isn't much of a stick anymore, regardless). Might it discourage long-term Retainer subscriptions? Sure. But those are going out the door at some point anyway, and larger numbers of people subscribing infrequently works too, and is far more sustainable into the future.