Quote Originally Posted by ADVSS View Post
I think we've been asking for this since 2.0/launch. Not sure why chocobos have to count as a party member when they use very simple AI like a pet, except you cant control them or place them. Makes no sense besides some coding issue where you can only have 1 pet out at a time or something.
Baseless Speculation: It's probably one of two things or a combination of them.

Possible Reason #1
The game only has one player pet "Slot" to use that's pretty deeply embedded in some core part of the games code. When they introduced Chocobo companions they had a decision to make: Have them use the pet slot and make them mutually exclusive with ACN/SMN/SCH pets or make them a pseudo-character in a party to keep them compatible. In the interest of fairness and not causing any feature confusion they opted for the latter.

Possible Reason #2
The systems for using Pets/Minions relies on references to some kind of static game resource. The chocobos have talent trees, variable stats and equipment. It may mean that this can't fit cleanly into whatever the "Pet" data construct is and so the birds are just full on characters server-side that get pulled in and put in your party when you summon them. If this is so the hurdles associated with making them not full party members would be non-trivial and having a full "Character" swap in and out of your party while in the DF Queue probably wreaks havoc with their group building algorithm.


This is a pretty obvious QoL thing so I can't imagine it wasn't on their radar. It's definitely some kind of technical hurdle and I think something along the line of those two are most likely, but again it's rather baseless speculation.