It's not a needless restriction, it's a feature that's never existed in any MMO i've ever heard of, there is no precedent for this. there are plenty of ways aroudn the issue. If you can't go to them, have them come to you. or wait for going to them to become possible. there IS a reason why legacy players can transfer off. Offering to wipe everything on your character except vanity items is such a niche service I can't forsee them ever adding that, especially when the majority of interest in it would go away as soon as transfers off legacy worlds are available.
(edit due to posting limit)
Usually there does. basically, if it's never been necessary before, it's not likely to be necessary now. There are many mmos out there just like this one and none of them have had to offer this.Despite what most people on these forums think, there doesn't have to be a precedent for everything,
The only reason this issue exists is you can't transfer off of a legacy world right now. It's a TEMPORARY RESTRICTION to protect the economies of the other servers that will eventually be removed.
There are two very obvious simple solutions, that eliminate the need for your desired service: Either your friend transfers to your world (I see no reason why he can't) or you wait until you can and transfer to his. To have square enix waste time developing a subsystem that loses most of its value as soon as the temporary restriction is lifted is a waste of SE's development time for too little benefit.
This really shouldn't require an explanation, as Yoshida and SE have talked about this many times, but the reason is economic. Many new servers were created for people who wanted a "fresh start" with a completely brand new economy and no preexisting items. Because of this, we have the legacy worlds full of people with many level 50 jobs and lots of gil or sellable/tradable items. To suddenly introduce all this gil / goods into a server which is brand new without these goods would be a shock to that server's economy. For this reason SE wants to wait until the economies of all the servers have more equalized. It's not hard to see these economic differences. The large-gil bans you may have read about were temp bans applied only on non-legacy servers for people who had exhorbitiant amounts of gil that could not have realisitcally been obtained in the amount of time the game has been online. These temp bans were not imposed on the legacy servers because the legacy worlds already had large amounts of gil in the system so it was much more plausible for someone to have that much money.So tell me then... As you continue to insist that there IS a reason for why Legacy players can't transfer off of Legacy servers, would you care to enlighten me as to what that reason is?
It is far from unusual for any MMO to restrict transfers to a new world for a certain period of time for this very reason. FFXIV is merely the first MMO which had many already-populated servers due to version 1.0's demise.
Like I said, the restriction is temporary and will be lifted as the gaps between the legacy and nonlegacy servers fade over time. We WILL be able to transfer off the legacy worlds- just not yet.
There is no shenanigans. Go create a character on both a legacy and nonlegacy server right now. Compare the market price histories. There are major differences between legacy and nonlegacy worlds. The differences were largest at day 1 of launch, and over time the differences will decrease (the more gil you have, the more that gets taken out of the system, which contributes to equalization).Because until we're shown actual data, I call shenanigans on the vague economy comment that we've been fed, which would indeed make this a needless restriction.
--deep breath--
At any rate, the economic reasons being given are real, significant reasons. It's not just some cockamamie nonsense someone made up to ruin your day.