Suggestion: Multiple Main Characters

[ItMe]

Could be neat, but it would cut into Fantasia sales so I doubt it'll happen : (

[selmon]

Could be neat, but it would cut into Fantasia sales so I doubt it'll happen : (

I don't even think it would, if it's implemented like I suggested: Sell a "Split Personality" item (or "Wandering Mind" or whatever you might want to call it to make sense) for 50 to 100 bucks that lets you sync your characters stats, inventory, jobs etc. to another character you have (so basically your second character only has the name, appearance and the stuff from the character creation screen like birthdate etc on his own but shares the rest with the "main" character). The reasons:

1. Fantasia is not a replacement for switchable characters - if I want to decide which character to play at a whim on a daily basis I would end up spending 60+ bucks a month - that's not feasible, so I can't go that route and I assume that others don't go that route either. My use case is to play different characters of different races and different "personalities" in my head. People that play longer have stated that they e.g. have alts to basically have a male and a female version of their persona (again this would be extremely costly with Fantasia and I doubt people do it). For me personally it would be important that my different characters have different names as well, so for that alone Fantasia wouldn't be an option.
2. Switchable characters are not a replacement for Fantasia either: You won't spend 50-100 bucks just to change your style once, you would still use Fantasia ON TOP of having synced characters, to e.g. alter the hairstyle or do small changes to one of your characters.
3. On top of that there is still the "2 or more characters on a server? --> pay more in subscription fees" mechanic in play - even if the price for that sync option were relatively low (say 20 bucks), you would still have to pay for standard subscription (= 2 bucks more every month unless you go for 3 or 6 month payments which of course too pays off for SE by binding players for a prolonged period of time) since you now have 2+ characters on a server. I would be completely fine with that.

From a programming standpoint I think this would be very easy to implement - it's basically only one character on the backend side for which you just have to save the currently selected appearance name and personal data (birth date..). It would fit very well into how FFXIV does and sell quality of life to players and would in contrast to job or story boosts not even break how the player experiences the game.

Though I would highly suggest to provide a different option for players with multiple characters to share things between them (e.g. giving standard subscribers a "shared vault" where they can share stuff between characters would be a non-breaking and very simple implementation) - that feature alone would incentivize people more to create multiple chars instead of feeling forced to play one and thus bringing more money via standard subscription update.

[selmon]

Though I would highly suggest to provide a different option for players with multiple characters to share things between them (e.g. giving standard subscribers a "shared vault" where they can share stuff between characters would be a non-breaking and very simple implementation) - that feature alone would incentivize people more to create multiple chars instead of feeling forced to play one and thus bringing more money via standard subscription update.

For completeness sake: I think this would be a great change for people who would not be happy with synced stats but want to have their characters be completely different individuals yet being able to share stuff and gil between them (I have read that many people create characters for RP reasons and I suspect that they would still want to invest the time to have characters with different jobs and being completely individual). And I frankly also don't see why this should not be possible or break the game in any way.