Quote Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra View Post
How is that the better option. A friend got a corrupted file and had to redo all his hotbars and he's all 60's. I also just purchased a PC version of the game and am not looking forward to having to redo all my preferences, hotbars and more. I totally disagree with storing these locally.
If they weren't stored locally, the game would have to regularly check with the server to make sure your hotbars were current, which would drastically increase the server load. They're already concerned regarding the amount of character data that needs to be verified (which is the current thing delaying the solution for inventory problems), and this would only increase the amount.

I do wish they had the option to save the data server-side like FFXI had, so you could back them up before reinstalls and the like. (You can sort of do this if you're on PC by making a copy of your character data, but it's not exactly user friendly).