Quote Originally Posted by Teah_Kaye View Post
You're not wrong, I don't really mind it with the way the system currently works because like you said the amount of money/time required to really take advantage of it in that way is so substantial. I should've clarified in my initial post that I only think more restrictions to retainers, islands, etc. need to be added if changes are made to make it less of a pain to level a bunch of alts. (And if shared storage became a thing, there should be some restrictions to prevent funneling of weekly tome gear or raid gear to mains from alts. Maybe just keep those particular items character-bound.)

Do you even need to buy a story skip to level your retainers to the current expansion cap? I'm actually not sure, I assumed you just needed to get to a high enough level yourself which is possible without completing the story as long as you've purchased the expansion.
Oh that one I don't know, good question. I don't think so. I guess you could always just unlock PvP or even, if you're going super low, dungeons, and level up every single day that way. For my alts I just either endure having to skip cutscenes (don't worry, I paid attention to all of the story on my main XD) or need to story boost them to get to the areas I want for the minimal things I can get them to access. But yeah, I didn't even think of that, if someone really wanted to do that with retainers, they could toss themselves into a leveling dungeon every day. It'd take forever I imagine, and I think going through base ARR without the skip if you'd not want to spend anything would make it faster (you'd then get MSQ dailies and then also PvP), but doing that on every single character is... a lot (trust me. I know, lol. I don't do it for the gil, I do it for RP, but I swear it takes a long time per character even skipping Cutscenes.)