Quote Originally Posted by ElHeggunte View Post
Charging for a services is a common way to limit how many people use it, which is an exceedingly useful tactic when your service can only provide for so many customers at a time.

Fewer players with extra retainers directly translates to less data transfer, which is one source of server stress.
OK, now this is why I think you are misinformed. You say that retainer limit is because they can only provide for so many customers at a time. So you and I pay. Lets say that another million accounts pay (very generous). How many characters have been created and how many accounts do they brag about? That is way way over a million. So now you could say they don't keep that data. While SE kind of runs an MMO like a scrub. I do not believe they would move that data into storage or delete it with out an announcement. While this isn't exactly 11 they did warn about storing and deleting data for inactive accounts. When a few of us came back actually worked out to all our level 1 mules, but the few we had leveled past 20 they had kept even though we had been warned. So they have room for millions of non paying customers, but need to limit the data that paying customers have.

Next you mention data transfer. One of two things as it didn't come across or as I missed it. You think having extra retainers increases my data transfer. You can only interact with one retainer at a time so you would literally be using the same bandwidth if you had 1 or a million retainers. If you think that loading each retainer creates a large load (who knows this is SE), that is probably a quality of development question that would need to be addressed. Retainers are the perfect example of instanced housing. While they do require data storage. They only use data transfer one at a time and only when you are on.

Now do you see why some people believe it is a cash grab. Unless you have some sort of differing approach to the issue that would prove that SE has created an issue other games don't have.