Suggestions for Free Company changes and additions in 5.0

[amisuhzu]

I posted a thread on Reddit a week ago and asked people what changes and additions they would like to see to Free Companies in the future. Here is a summary of the suggestions.

- More uses for FC credits. Maybe items that FC-members can use daily, so credits are spent regularly.
- Make it so that you can't promote yourself to a higher rank than you already are.
- FC quests: say a user wants to craft an item. This item needs a lot of mats the user can't collect by themselves. User posts this request on a FC-board, and may offer something in return. FC-members can then complete this quest.
- Being able to change colours and on/off of the names of FC-members, like you can with party members and alliance members today.
- A Free Company housing ward/instance, so that personal housing isn't affected by FC housing. Someone also suggested apartments could be bought as a FC.
- FC banners and bardings, with the FC's crest and colours.
- A FC-calendar, which maybe could be synced with the companion app?
- Removal of 4 people needed to progress workshop projects, or in some way relate it to the size of the FC. The problem here seems to be the really small FC's struggling to find enough people.
- Being able to block FC invites.
- Some kind of weekly activity (turn in, quest etc) for Free Companies.
- FC-chest suggestions: /isearch in FC-chest. One more tab for storage (maybe for high rank/member FC's?).
- An option to remove FC-members ability to eat food in the house or harvest flowerpot flowers.
- A FC board out in the world where Free Companies can recruit members without using the /shout.
- Sorting FC-members by their rank (i.e. clicking "Rank A" will show me all members with that rank"), and maybe a member search option?

My reason for posting this here aswell is that I got a lot of really good suggestions, and I hope that it can reach the dev team. I realise that some things can not be changed for different reasons, but these are our suggestions and I hope some of them could be implemented one day.

While I'm here, I'd like to say that I think it's a great idea to have such high-demand minions like the Abroader Otter in submarines. At least in our FC, people got really excited about using submarines and some offered to help with building new parts.

[Insomniaq]

Those are some great suggestions. In another thread (posted below) i also suggested that there could be an alliance for FCs, as some smaller FC cant recruit members and they are unwilling to leave the FC for whatever reason. Maybe 4 FCs max per alliance with a cross FC chat? I have seen this in some MMO's before

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...free-companies

[Joven]

While this isn't directly FC related I want a public board in the main citystates where you can post FC recruitments, party finder notifications, etc.

[Veritas-Ancora]

The OP has great suggestions, but it all boils down to this:

Players have no incentives to play with their friends. Everything, including daily Roulettes, award playing with strangers and never with friends.

Psychologically, that defeats strengthened relationships.

[Windsun33]

The OP has great suggestions, but it all boils down to this:

Players have no incentives to play with their friends. Everything, including daily Roulettes, award playing with strangers and never with friends.

Psychologically, that defeats strengthened relationships.

And there you have the Company/Guild issue in a nutshell. In other games there are real advantages to belonging to one - in this game they don't offer much. I wish there was a better system, but realistically revising the system would involve a lot of programming time. In past games that I have played, some were totally massive - one EQ2 guild I was in had over 200 active members, and over 1000 on the roster. And is it just me, or do the company houses in FFXIV seem really tiny?