Retainers and FC's Not Useful?

[Gilthas]

Is the point of this to make the housing districts look like there are actually people in them? Housing wards are always dead, maybe this is to create an illusion of more ppl playing?

If they really wanted to get more people in the housing districts they would add stuff to do there.

So what exactly... is the point of this feature? Cluttering the lawn with NPCs that serve no purpose other than... keeping you from walking the 30 feet to the closest market board? I mean development time was spent on this and I am just trying to understand why someone greenlit this.

It's called flavour. What's the point of having furniture too? Or multiple house options? By your logic FC houses should just have a garden plot and chocobo stables since everything else either serves no function (overwhelming majority of furniture) or provides services that can be obtained elsewhere (retainer bell, armoire, vendors).

Basically, stop being a stick in the mud.

sooo that means no extra storage for the fc but now anyone who has access to your retainers now has acces to your retainers storage and gil?? hmmmm ...

Not sure how you reached that conclusion.

[Lissandra]

Now for the next step...SE, can we please be allowed to alter the appearance/clothing of the vendor npcs inside our homes?

[Shadex]

Basically, stop being a stick in the mud.

Deal if you stop being such a pretentious @$$. If that was there intention to simply add a MB to our lawn then they should just come out and say it. Don't muck it all up with convoluted NPC interaction and housing permission nonsense. Just say,

New Marketboard Accessibility through Lawn Gnomes!

and be done with it.

[Maxion]

I felt honestly that they could have spent time on allowing friends to access the teleport to your house or some way of letting others do that, as well as access furnishings & NPCs inside said house. Instead we get retainers on the lawn? I dunno about anyone else, but I seem to have issues in where my friends or FC mates can't get to my house rather quickly and end up not going because of the longer time period it takes to get to it.

[FoxyAreku]

From the patch notes:

Once a retainer is placed on estate grounds, items that they currently have listed for sale on the market can be purchased by anyone who speaks with them. The retainer's sales history (up to 20 entries) can also be viewed by other players.

Sounds to me like they are nothing more than another way to interface with the MB...

uhh....yeah....as in, the 20 items that that retainer specifically has for sale.
You wouldn't be able to access anything else but what that SPECIFIC retainer has.

It's silly and probably not needed, but it's an interesting idea.

[Kahnom]

I think the main reason was to let people show off their retainers. Nothing to do with sales. I know some people who have iLvl 110 retainers since they got all their gear handmedowns. They are like, STUPID PROUD of their overdressed retainers, and would love for someone else to be able to see them.

Me, personally, all my retainers are dressed for business and too busy harvesting and mining to bother with showing off.

^this is what i think as well.

[monterrey4ever]

People really thinking this is a Market Board disguised as retainer need to read carefully and try a little bit to understand. I know it's a big sentence but you can do it!

[EZ5902]

As long as you have access to some form of housing, whether it be Free Company or personal, you will be able to place retainers on the property. In terms of adding a special retainer specific to Free Companies, the development team determined that the resources required to create such a feature would be too high and as such have no plans to create a special FC retainer in the future.

I'm sure many of us still would like to dress our NPCs in our homes still, and would also like to put our retainers actually inside too, any thoughts/plans on this?

[JonBigwood]

If you want to avoid the small walk, you can save the expense of putting a summoning bell in your house, you can just put your retainers there instead. This is the practical advantage, from my point of view. Few people will go around the residential area shopping at retainers when they can go to a market board and see all the retainers.

By the way, an in-home market board, like the in-home summoning bell, would be a nice addition. The only drawback is you wouldn't meet that much your neighbours at the market board, or residential areas would maybe look emptier, but it would be very nice to have the possibility of having the market board inside the house.

If you want to buy from a friend (maybe more expensive than the best buy) you can use his retainer if he has a visible one, usually you don't know the names of your friend's retainers. Not the most probable use, though.

There's also the visual thing of seeing retainers, the gear they have, etc. as others have said.

[HeroSamson]

The problem I have with setting the retainers in the yard is that they didn't higher how much stuff you put in your yard.

So you have to remove stuff in order to put your retainers outside.

Not sure if mansion or medium houses can put more stuff in the yard but why limit by size on outside, if someone wants to pack their yard full of tree's they should be able to do so sure a limit should be set but you get yard to look very very empty with only a few things in it for example.

Stepping stones and you make them go straight to your door then you only have room for like couple more items outside so stepping stones is a bad idea.
As for the retainer thing is not flying cause I don't want to remove things from my yard.