3rd Retainer by Default, please?

[Riardon]

In short words, the EU servers will only make a difference for people from Eastern Europe (a minority) and a lot of people who use low quality ISPs for one reason or another.

Judging from your own experience and only is not the correct thing. Apparently the vast majority of EU players (and EU is not only Spain and UK) have problems and they demand a server in central Europe or such. That's the reason SE forced to promise they will make one here and they announced so during the Fan Fest. Let's not complicate it more with technical details and such. Let's head back to the topic because we derailed it a bit.
Back to our topic I don't think SE will give us a 3rd retainer for free. I think we have enough space with the exception of people gathering gear sets and loads of materials. Those people have troubles and to be honest they will run into inventory problems even if SE gives us a 3rd retainer.

[Lyzern]

I'll say it:

Paid retainers are a P2W aspect. No matter how big or small. When you can have ventures twice as many times by paying, no matter how small the fee or the reward, it's P2W and it needs to go, it doesn't belong in a P2P game.

4 Retainers max, 2 default, 2 paid with GIL, not irl currency. That's how I would see it perfectly set up. Maybe 1m gil for 3rd retainer, 10m gil for the 4th retainer.

I just hate having my inventories always full with stuff and the possibility that people are spamming ventures twice as many times as me just because I don't wanna spend 4 euros more. It's not even about the money, it's about the principle.

[Kosmos992k]

I'll say it:

Paid retainers are a P2W aspect. No matter how big or small. When you can have ventures twice as many times by paying, no matter how small the fee or the reward, it's P2W and it needs to go, it doesn't belong in a P2P game.

Except you can't have ventures twice as many times by paying. You have to have the venture tokens to pay the retainer, all having the optional retainers does is allow you to burn through your venture tokens twice as fast until you run out. Some people try to say that you can earn ventures from all sorts of things, OK, you can get 6 from your daily beast tribe things, that's not even an hour of time for 4 retainers, since you need 8 venture tokens for 4 quick ventures. If you spend 3 hours playing and want to send 4 retainers out on quick ventures every hour, that's going to cost you 24 venture tokens. You'll spend your playing time earning ventures to pay your retainers with.

There is this fallacy that the additional retainers magically generate extra things or gil, the truth is, at most, they temporarily increase the rate you can do certain things at, until you run out of ventures to pay with, or items to sell. The thing is, you have to have the ventures to pay the retainers with, and you have to already have the things to sell. Once those resources run out you're back to square one whether you have 2, 3 or 4 retainers.

[Intaki]

until you run out of ventures to pay with

If you are actively playing the game this will never happen unless you choose to let it happen.

[Kosmos992k]

If you are actively playing the game this will never happen unless you choose to let it happen.

You have a finite limit on dailies, and as I have previously said, actively playing in order to generate venture tokens for retainers to use, is simply another way of using your time. You could just as easily be gathering the items you send your retainer to gather (and you'd be quicker). The retainer does not, can not, generate anything without effort from the player. with 4 retainers, if you play 4 hours, you can burn through 32 venture tokens. How many tokens can you obtain in that time through regular play (assuming you do not start with a stock pile of things that you can exchange for ventures)? Let's assume you spend 50% of your time doing things that do not generate venture tokens, how many can you earn in 2 hours (again without a stockpile of items)? There are limits. 6 beast tribe dailies will only net you 6 tokens, where are the other 26 coming from? Remember that means you have to generate something like 32 tokens every day you play to use those retainers the way you want to describe as automatic. Doesn't sound very automatic to me.

Ventures are hardly a limitation you think they are. Any crafter can quickly, cheaply, and easily gather grand company point that lead to Eady ventures. The only limitation is the players time.

You said it yourself. the limitation is player time. that is the point I have been making. optional retainers are only as useful as the time the player puts into them, they are not automatic gil dispensers.

Retainers have insane gil generating prowess if you gave the knowledge of what to tell 5 hem to go get for you.

So do players. A friend of mine purchased a medium house plot, and decorated using the profits from gathering at unspoiled nodes. No retainers needed.

[Nalien]

You said it yourself. the limitation is player time. that is the point I have been making. optional retainers are only as useful as the time the player puts into them, they are not automatic gil dispensers.

Two extra Retainers does not take up a great deal of player time, in fact the extra Venture cost is almost completely negligible depending on what you do in game.

I needed extra space so I had to fork over for additional Retainers, and I have not changed my play style in the slightest, if anything I've gotten lazier (not so much Duty Roulette) and the extra cost of four more Ventures a day still hasn't affected me in the slightest. It is a completely negligible extra cost to my time, but the benefits? Well, right off the bat an additional 10+ Allagan Pieces a day which is just outright Gil, then there's the minions. Doubled my chances of those, what are they worth on your server? I made 1m off a Retainer I payed real money for the other day.

The only time investment with Retainer Ventures is leveling the damn things up, everything outside that is absolutely trivial. Leveling them is an investment everyone has to pay though, except those who buy two additional ones get double the reward from. The fact that people who hardly play the game aren't going to benefit from them is utterly inconsequential. Bottom line is anyone with two extra Retainers has potential to make extra Gil those without simply cannot. Like I said, I made an additional 1m someone who didn't buy extra Retainers simply would not. Two people playing exactly the same, both sending Retainers off on Ventures daily, but one with two extra. The player with two extra is always going to benefit more than the other. That's a simple fact.

Some people being unable to get Ventures/gear them is utterly meaningless. Compared to anyone playing the game in a similar way to me, I have a payed advantage in those two extra Retainers.

[Kaaylryn]

My main concern is for the armory space. SE has already homogenized the gathering/crafting gear into one size fits all. And at this point, many gear sets are sharable between jobs with many of the secondary stats not optimal. If SE ever intends to provide separate gear sets according to job, they will need to address the Armory issue. With the advent of 3 new jobs in the expansion, this will be even more important.

This is one downfall of having ALL jobs available on one character and something that SE should have seen coming. In other MMOs I created an alt if I wanted a caster or healer or tank with each having their own storage. In this game cross class abilities are way to important to do that. I think SE has been very short-sighted in this aspect where Armory storage is concerned.