Mailing stuff to alts

[Anyan]

Oh, for all that is good in the world YES PLS!

I'm an altoholic, and always has been. I had eleven characters in WoW, top leveled and top geared. And that was just on one server. I like making many since I write full backstories for them. The variety is enjoyable to me.

I have never played a game that is so player unfriendly in this regard. You have to add your friends separately on every character for example.

I had no idea about this when I started playing. When I saw I could have eight characters on my account I thought that, great I can make at least three to play around with and have them be different classes. Then I realized how extremely inconvenient it is because I can't add friends through a real ID thing, not send stuff between my own characters even though I've done all the work, the story is so linear, and you have to go through so much tedious stuff like collecting aether currents on each and every one.


This is one of the things that makes me take breaks since its so annoying, and takes away much of the joys one can get from a game like this. I now play two characters only but might even go down to one.

Sure you can make your own FC to be able to get things from one character to another, but what about having a FC house or go on Diadem journeys? I want to and need to be in a big FC to be able to do this.

Let's not fool ourselves here, it's about money. Or it's at least what I think.

[Niwashi]

It's intended to inconvenience RMT. XI muling was heavily used to launder gil as for the longest time there wasn't much of a limit on what you could mail outside of RA/EX items, nor to who as you manually wrote the name of who you were mailing. Understandably, RMT abused the hell out of that, millions of gil just circulating around like it's nobody's business. In this game they are trying to curb that with the mail system.

I agree that completely unfettered Mail access would give RMT too much power. (Not only for moving items/gil around, but who wants their mailbox filled with RMT spam?) But we're not asking for unfettered Mail access to everybody, just for access to our own alts on the same account. Those are characters with far closer ties to our current character than anyone on out Friends list has. Moving gil or items around between unrelated characters is already allowed, just by Friending them. That's the part that RMT would use it for. So they're allowing the part that RMT would use while blocking the part that they wouldn't, but saying it's because of RMT.

SE just isn't making any sense on that. It's so nonsensical that I'm about convinced that in that Letter from the Producer Q&A quoted in the OP they must have misunderstood the question. It really sounds like they answered why we can't freely send mail to whomever we want (maybe thinking of alts on separate accounts) rather than why we can't send it to alts on the same account.

True and not true at same time, ... so yes if you pay monthly you pay more for a standard account as opposed to entry account but you don't pay per alt like in some games like XI did.

If you have to pay more or pay longer and the ONLY difference in what you get for that extra money is more alts, then I'd say we're definitely paying for extra alts. It's just that it's a single amount for alts 2 through 8 rather than paying one by one.

This would fix the inventory problem. They could make cash shop items(like fantasia) bound to a character and other items bound to account to avoid loop holes of creating an alt to get a free fantasia.

Fantasia is already bound so that it cannot be transferred through other means (like FC chest or trading through a friend). That would work for mail as well.

Or, you could mail your stuff to someone you trust (who has your alts in its friend list) to act as an intermediary for moving stuff over.

Yes, provided your friend is always online and never busy doing other stuff, or that you're in no hurry to get the items you transfer if they're not. And of course when you decide a friend is trustworthy enough, you'd better be right about that.

And yes, this is indeed one of the workarounds players use to make up for the lack of this basic feature, but it's enough worse from the requested access that it doesn't really make for much of a counterargument.

Sure you can make your own FC to be able to get things from one character to another, but what about having a FC house or go on Diadem journeys? I want to and need to be in a big FC to be able to do this.

And this is the problem with the other big workaround. If you want to use a private (or really small) FC so that you can transfer stuff, you have to give up on all the other purposes of having an FC.

right, but silence is tantamount to admitting it's about selling retainers at this point.

I don't think it has anything to do with selling retainers. This was frequently (sometimes rather vehemently) requested back when ARR first went live, and there were no retainer sales at that point, nor for a long time after. They didn't exist when that Letter quoted in the OP was written, for instance.

They won't let alts share/access retainers you bought under the same account either.

If they ever do, it had better be a separate feature not tied to those alts' own extra retainers. Right now if you have two or more alts and purchase an extra (3rd) retainer, all of your alts get a 3rd retainer. If you're genuinely playing each of them, they'll each have their own accumulation of items and will each need their own storage (and sell slots). Replacing that with a single 3rd retainer they all access would give you easy transfer, but at the cost of losing the ability to store and sell items for each character.

I'd like to see something like what LOTRO has, with Shared Storage that lets you share items with your alts as one feature and an upgrade-able Vault (per-character storage) as a separate feature, though they're accessed from the same place. Our Retainers would be the per-character version. Let us have another shared chest or other type of NPC lackey to act as the account wide shared version of retainers.

[Lexia]

If you have to pay more or pay longer and the ONLY difference in what you get for that extra money is more alts, then I'd say we're definitely paying for extra alts. It's just that it's a single amount for alts 2 through 8 rather than paying one by one.

You know if a person buys a time card it automatically sticks you in the standard sub and don't have a choice, so no you don't really pay extra for alts. In FFXI you paid for alts, you paid $11.95 just for your account (no characters) plus $1 for each extra character so you had to paid $12.95 just for the account and one character so if person had 8 extra character (which I sure people have here if not more and that can just be one server) they would of paid $20.95 so be glad it not on that system. Then it would be a valid argument that person paying for alts.

Here the link to official FFXI site where pulled details from since it been while since I played.
http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/envi/charge.html

[Colorful]

snip

Argue specifics all you want, but you are only getting extra alts out of that extra money. It's like buying a subscription to a theatre, with the silver package being movie tickets and the gold package being tickets + snacks. Buy purchasing the gold package you are purchasing the snacks, period. You're being charged extra, for the snacks, there's no arguing around it. It being $2 more than the silver package doesn't change the fact that you're paying for the snacks. You're not paying for one alt, no, but you are paying for the ability to use a group of alts.

The majority of players aren't even paying using time cards as if you're living in the States I hear most places don't hold them, and in Australia they're non existent.

[Lexia]

Argue specifics all you want, but you are only getting extra alts out of that extra money. It's like buying a subscription to a theatre, with the silver package being movie tickets and the gold package being tickets + snacks. Buy purchasing the gold package you are purchasing the snacks, period. You're being charged extra, for the snacks, there's no arguing around it. It being $2 more than the silver package doesn't change the fact that you're paying for the snacks. You're not paying for one alt, no, but you are paying for the ability to use a group of alts.

The majority of players aren't even paying using time cards as if you're living in the States I hear most places don't hold them, and in Australia they're non existent.

How many people actually use the entry level account and only play one character? Really that option might as well not even be there. Also be glad it not under 1.0 pricing cause I believe that was expensive and what I can find from archives doing google search is this.

You may choose whether you want to be billed every 30, 90, or 180 days. You must then choose the number of characters you wish to purchase for $3 each (up to 8).

Which I believe was $12.99 base plus the $3 for each character and only could have up to 8 which I'm assuming is per account not per server. 2.0 only charges $14.99 for standard sub and allows 8 per server up to 40 characters total

[Caelan]

[...] Balmung is one of the largest servers and I have ran into maybe 2 people that use entry. [...]

balmung might not be the best sample, since most of the rp population would opt for multiple chars i'd think. plus it's a legacy server so u have all the legacy folks runnin around with alt slots built in to their plan

[Lexia]

balmung might not be the best sample, since most of the rp population would opt for multiple chars i'd think. plus it's a legacy server so u have all the legacy folks runnin around with alt slots built in to their plan

Ok true, I'll edit that out.