Ok, for all you FF noobs. If this is anything like the way it was implemented in FFXI, you can only maintain allegiance to one company (city in FFXI). This makes perfect sense. What company/military unit wants you if you are bolstering the strength of the competition. You guys have seen this before in WoW. As you gain favor with one faction, you can also lose favor/gain hatred from another. Can you not understand that? In FFXI, you could switch allegiance to access the other content, but not without losing your "Rank" in the other city states. I know many of you are too young to understand or have not worked enough to get the point, but when you work for a company, any time or benefits accrued do not carry over from one job to the next. Your 501K can be rolled over, but working 10 years for a company and switching to a new company does not mean you will enter that new company with 10 years of seniority. And staying dedicated to a company can give you rewards that you cannot get by jumping from company to company. This is about something bigger than you (I know many of you have a hard time understanding anything being bigger or greater than you, but it's time for a hard lesson in life).

As far as knowing beforehand, that is like knowing that you will or won't get a promotion or a job relocation before you accept the job. In life, you sometimes have to make a choice and deal with the consequences.

All of the whining taking place about things you can only conjecture truly is much the same thing as hiding in your house because a meteor might strike you, or you might be hit by a car, or you might catch the flu.

Why not let them show you before you tell them what it should be...There are a great many of us that liked FFXI that don't want your WoW to ruin our game. Some elements of WoW are cool and I realize that SE has to deal with the fact that WoW is hugely successful but if WoW was so perfect, why are you here? The fact you are here means that WoW isn't perfect. Since WoW isn't perfect, why should SE pattern the game after imperfection? Since WoW isn't perfect but seems to be more perfect in your eyes than FFXIV, why not go back to WoW and whine to the devs to make it more like FFXIV?