Quote Originally Posted by Kio View Post
If the reason why the wards are kept on life support is a financial one, I can't say I entirely blame SE for trying. the FF series mmo's have the unique and wonderful feature of centralizing around one character and one subscription. Unlike other MMO's on the market which gather a few extra bucks off people who have to pay to play as an alternative class. There's really was never a need for anyone to buy an extra character in FFXI unless...wait for it... you wanted extra spaces to sell stuff on the auction house. FFXIV is the same way, more or less, except switch out mules for future retainers.
Well that's not entirely true. There's probably only a handful of lesser mmos that require you to pay for additional characters - mainstream games like WoW and Rift give you ten per realm, 50 realms total or something equally ridiculous. That's a lot of characters for your subscription, and it's actually a lot less limiting than FFXI and XIV if you really take the time to think about it. FFXI could argue a convenience factor with having everything centralized, but it should in no way affect the standard mmo base price and it always felt like a heavy-handed tactic.

If they continue with these plans, I can guarantee you their next reviews will be even worse than the last ones, because when the game is fixed to a point where they CAN charge for it, what they DO charge for it will be in the spotlight. No one is going to understand why SE seems to need to charge 3$ per extra character \ 1$ per retainer when WoW lets you have 50 with your subscription.