Crafting from Retainer INVENTORY?

[Vhailor]

No SE is not perfect - but they don't deserve the ridicule either when people make "cop-out excuses" in response to rational answers made by IT professionals.

Of course they deserve ridicule: their back-end is atrociously designed, and they routinely build mechanisms that butt heads with their known limitations.

One go-to example of this is Housing. They built an exceedingly complex system that, while great, was unsupportable by their servers for years. Housing availability issues still aren't completely resolved! The feature was arguably better-implemented in fucking FFXI, this game's predecessor. No technical arguments can excuse them from this, because they built the gods-damned system in the first place. They knew their server limitations, or should have, and they built the system anyway. That's inexcusable.

Another go-to example is Glamours. Not just WoW does Glamours better: so do most other MMOs. Fuck, so does FFXI, this game's predecessor. How is SE's shoddy implementation - one that, despite years of time, still isn't completely fixed - something worth excusing?

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I haven't played any other games before in which the developers routinely cited server limitations as reasons to not develop certain QoL features. I find it hard not to fault SE as a result, particularly when some of the things being held up by the oh-so-limited servers were done back in FFXI - and work better to boot. Learning from past experiences is about the lowest possible bar to set, and it appears XIV's team hasn't even consistently met this.

I'd also point out that FFXIV, by all appearances, aspires to dethrone WoW as the king of MMOs. It's clearly intended to be widely accessible; it's routine to encounter advertisements for the game; the development team behind ARR actively cited WoW as a founding influence. With that comes a certain burden of expectations: you can't be the new king until you beat the current one. Part of that means figuring out how to match Blizzard's clearly-superior QoL efforts, rather than making excuses for why doing so is hard. Or you can rest on your laurels, which is clearly what the content development teams are doing; maybe that's the long-term intent for FFXIV. It'll never topple WoW like that, and will likely see its subscriber numbers drop off a cliff at some point, but that's their choice to make. On the assumption that SE isn't intentionally resting on its laurels, though, they deserve to be challenged to do better, rather than complaining about how something is hard or requires significant technical work. Blizzard did it, so SE can too. Suck it up, get it done.

Edit / Addition:

That's incredibility subjective.
I could say the same of EVE Online (By CCP) who has a single shard universe and a game being far older than most.
WoW could learn a great deal from them.

But they are not the same are they?

EVE Online is quite unique. It is wholly distinct from WoW and FFXIV, but WoW and XIV are not wholly distinct from each other (they're close to siblings in many ways).

The single-shard universe is also not something that could be applied to XIV and WoW in their current states, regardless of technical limitations: Eorzea would simply become too crowded. EVE Online features procedurally generated content, which space lends itself well to. FFXIV and WoW do not. As a result, they have far smaller game worlds for people to inhabit, and are forced to limit population numbers. I seriously doubt that Blizzard wouldn't be able to replicate EVE Online's single-shard experience if they built a game around that, but WoW isn't it - and nor is FFXIV.

[Vhailor]

I think this could save a lot of time rummaging through your retainer inventories.

It could, but I think there's value in making it inconvenient to store large amounts of crafting materials. It provides an incentive for people to instead deposit these items on the MB, where they can then be purchased and put to use more rapidly.

I think it would also offer far too much value for having multiple additional Retainers. Personally, I resent the fact that extra paid Retainers are even permitted MB slots. If they could also be turned into on-demand crafting material storage, well... it continues to blur the P2W line. I'd be more open to the idea if it only worked for the stock two Retainers, but that realistically wouldn't be how this was implemented.

It would be a nice convenience feature, though.

[NephthysVasudan]

<Retainers with MB Access>

I wish they limit retainers MB access honestly.....it would piss people off...but it would put the market back into rational line of control instead of overkill flooding like many do.

*Don't like it? Take a flying leap....I don't care...won't argue with you and not going to bother giving you time of day....you guys have waaaay to much power over exploitation of market boards as it is...excluding legit business folks of course - would it hurt profits? yeah...but gil is too damn easy to make anyway.*

[Vhailor]

I wish they limit retainers MB access honestly.....it would piss people off...but it would put the market back into rational line of control instead of overkill flooding like many do.

*Don't like it? Take a flying leap....I don't care...won't argue with you and not going to bother giving you time of day....you guys have waaaay to much power over exploitation of market boards as it is...excluding legit business folks of course - would it hurt profits? yeah...but gil is too damn easy to make anyway.*

Wholeheartedly agree. It doesn't help either that there are only a relatively handful of any 'in-demand' items at any given time. It makes it a lot easier for omnicrafters with multiple paid Retainers to monopolize the centers of profit. Why they care about the Gil, I'm not sure - it's not like there's much to buy with it - but the principle still bothers me.

[Nerfworthy]

Sure would be nice........ I'd put my name on this to say "yes please"

It's the one thing GW2 does better than FFXIV.