Hello!

[Kanjien]

I am fairly new to FFXIV but not new to MMO's. I know that this game is built around not having to create new characters for each class, but how many people hold to that? I have always been kind of an "alt-aholic" and created many different characters to try out new areas and new classes and also just to try different races and appearances. Do FCs frown on that or does it really matter?
Anyway thanks in advance and when I finally settle on a permanent server I hope to see some of you there and say Hi!

[Rongway]

It doesn't really matter. Play a million alts if you want. Just be aware that you will have to do aaaaaalllll the quests again, and you'll have to collect exclusive gear/items again, and your characters that are purely DD jobs could take forever to progress because of queue times. You might even also experience longer queue times on your tanks and healers for certain less played content.

Doing everything on one character lets you avoid having to unlock everything repeatedly, and gives you options when your main job's queue times are longer than you'd care for. It also mitigates the forced long queue times on content gates by only requiring you to do them once, before you can move on to something else.

This one is all personal preference, really.


PS - In the future, if you use more meaningful thread titles, you'll probably get responses faster. People might be skipping over this because it could just be a self introduction post. Something like "To alt or not to alt" or "One char vs many alts" would get more people's attention.

[Niwashi]

Some people like to do everything on a single character, leveling up all jobs that they're interested in on that one. Others like to have multiple characters and spread things out a bit. There is no single "right" answer that applies to everyone. There are pros and cons to each, and it's up to you to decide which is more important to you. (In fact, things like the Main Scenario some people place in the "pro" category while other people place the same thing in the "con" category. If you want to replay it, alt characters are the way to do so. If you don't want to have to replay it, sticking with a single character means you don't need to.)

A few of the advantages to sticking with a single character:

• Your advancement through the main scenario, your Grand Company rank and squadron, your chocobo's level, and so on (everything that you need to advance but is not directly about leveling a class) only needs to be done once.
• Gear can be shared between similar jobs. And for gear that doesn't suit your current job, getting it as a dungeon drop can still be useful if you're also advancing the job that it is for.
• The armoury bonus adds a lot of extra XP for leveling all but one of your combat jobs.
• If you want to craft gear but only want to advance the crafting classes once, you don't need to deal with the hassle of trying to pass items back and forth between alts (which is possible but really awkward in this game).

A few of the advantages to having multiple alt characters:

• You can re-play the main scenario, getting to see it again, and keeping your leveling more story-driven. (It's not the fastest way to level additional jobs, but it's certainly a more interesting way to do so, at least for players who like the story in the first place.)
• Rewards that have daily or weekly limits can be earned separately for each character, letting you advance and gear up multiple jobs more quickly than if you have to divide a single character's allotment of rewards among multiple jobs.
• You get a chance to play with multiple races, genders, and appearances without fantasia's immersion jarring change to who your character is.

You'll have to decide for yourself which matters more to you. (And lots of people go with a hybrid answer, combining some jobs but not all of them, like one character for all the DoW jobs and another for all the DoM jobs, or some other split.)

[Iscah]

I also like making multiple characters, and there are some really nice designs you can come up with for all the different races.

I have one main character that I'm doing everything on - all the jobs, all the sidequests (that I'm interested in), reached the end of the MSQ-so-far.

Then I've got two alt characters (and may be starting a third), just replaying the MSQ at a slower pace and leveling a couple of jobs that I thought suited their personality, or if I wanted to replay the associated quests.

If you enjoy the story, it's definitely worthwhile to replay it and pick up on some things that you missed the first time around. Creating multiple characters also means you can go through the early quests of all three cities, which are unique to characters starting there. (The three plots merge at story level 15, when you first get to visit the other cities.)

It's also useful if you like to play around with costumes - some gear is locked to one gender, or looks different on male and female characters.


As for whether FCs would mind, I'm sure that's very much up to the individual people. My characters are all on different servers (since you have to pay extra to have multiple characters on a single server) so they can't be in the same FC anyway, but I know there are a couple of people with multiple characters in my main FC, and it's no big deal.

[Kaurhz]

As someone who is also an alt-a-holic. I can say that it's definitely nice fiddling with multiple characters and having multiple races. Staring at the same character for long periods of time does get very annoying and makes me want to fantasia over-and-over. With alts I can just swap between different characters and get a different feeling. Most FCs generally don't care. Some will have a rank specifically for alts, and some just keep you the same rank you have on your main. Never really seen an FC too bothered by it.

[Aurturia]

As an FC leader I can say that while I don't have any reason to not allow alts in, I might not be as willing to help with them either. I offer all my sprouts unsynced runs for castrum meridianum and pretorium because que times for them can be a road block to moving the story forward. But I don't think I'd repeat that too many times for a player. Crafting gear might be a thing too but that's less time consuming so maybe not.