free companies

[Eremite]

FC's are in a bad place right now because they don't have any particular use aside from a social linkshell with benefits.


FC Buffs/Actions:
* 99% of the time, this is Heat of Battle for XP. Not actually that useful since it's only from killing mobs/bosses. Nobody grinds mobs to level, so it's only useful if you're running highest-available dungeons to level. Most people in the FC aren't doing this.
* 2nd action is a wildcard and rarely helpful.
* If you have Squadron unlocked, you can get these same buffs as a scroll that you can activate precisely when you need it for 2 hours.

Diadem Access:
* Being in a FC with an airship used to give you access to a better version of the older version of Diadem where there was a combat system inside. This was neat and would get groups together to meet up at the FC house and depart together. This is scrapped.

Airship/Submarine:
* The theory is everyone works together to donate resources to build airships that can be sent out like retainers. The reality is maybe one or two people do this and keep all the rewards. Other people are incentivized to make their own FC if they care about doing this content.

Party Finder and a unified sense of purpose:
* Some FCs try to do stuff like "Map Mondays" or "Savage Saturdays", etc. People have varying schedules though and it's infinitely easier to just queue up with random people in party finder who you'll never speak with again and hardly talk to while you churn out some maps, etc.

Guild Housing:
* More incentive for people to split off into their own tiny FC so they can have an extra house slot.
* Private rooms are just crappier apartments that you can lose if you leave the FC.

Discord / Outside Comms:
* If you have something you're interested in, there's a Discord for it. It doesn't encroach on your chat window and you can mute it whenever you want.

FC Tags/Descriptions:
* More incentive for people to split away from large FCs so they can have more space to customize their character with their own custom guild tag, name, description, etc.

Social Chat in-game:
* You can have so many more Linkshells and Cross-World linkshells that this is just redundant.

I could go on, but the short story is FC provides no real benefit and design choices have actively pushed people into avoiding FCs so they can make their own.

-edit-
I suppose the one thing that I didn't consider is that it does provide a physical place to hang out in-game with the FC housing if people actually use it instead of idling in Limsa/etc. You have MB, summoning bell, etc there but can't world hop for better market prices. Also the crafting stations (IIRC) are useless for anyone who was at the max crafter level before the expansion dropped, so those are pretty much only useful for very new players.