Retainers and lootbox gambling

[Deveryn]

Specific issue comes up with items that can only be obtained via ventures. Like Young Water Lilies.
These can only be gathered by retainers.
The only way to get MORE retainers is spending real money.

Spending more IRL money, equals more 'rolls' on the venture lootbox, and a higher chance on getting an item you cannot get anywhere else.

Is this pretty much a lootbox scenario that other games get bashed for?

More rolls is just more rolls, not a higher chance. Without much context for the lootboxes, I'm going to say no it's not the same. There's nothing a player needs for progression.

[Packetdancer]

More rolls is just more rolls, not a higher chance. Without much context for the lootboxes, I'm going to say no it's not the same. There's nothing a player needs for progression.

While each roll is itself not an increased chance, the fact that you get to roll multiple times does (sort of) improve your overall chances. (I say "sort of" because statistics are weird.) I suspect that's what OP meant by "increased chance".

That said. I don't think it's quite the same. I do think it's a side effect -- and an unfortunate one -- of the fact that our 'personal storage bank' is the inventory of retainers, and that obtaining extra storage means obtaining extra retainers... and that obtaining extra retainers thus means extra venture slots.

But loot boxes in most games are designed to inspire FOMO as much as possible. "You want this shiny mount/outfit/whatever? Well, it's only in these loot boxes for three weeks!" And then you can spend X real-world currency for Y more 'pulls' (to use gacha terminology) on said loot boxes.

Retainer venture loot tables are neither time-limited, nor can you 'speed up' the venture. If things like retainer-venture minions were time-limited, or if you could spend real-world money to send the retainers out repeatedly very quickly (e.g. if there was no upper limit on how many 'chances' you could purchase) -- or especially if both were true -- I think it would be that same sort of problematic, yes.

But I'll point out that a standard subscription gives you 8 characters per world, and there's multiple worlds per data-center; if you really wanted to game the system, you could have your freebie retainers across a whole bunch of alts, all running the ventures to try to get the drops you wanted, and then funnel them back to your original character. (Yeah, it's a pain-in-the-butt, but if they belong to the same FC you could use the FC chest to transfer items, and otherwise you could ask a friend to hold on to things or mail them to your alt for you, or whatever.)

Arguably, that gives you more potential concurrent 'chances' at the thing than just buying more retainers does. And that's the main reason that, even if I think it's unfortunate that stuff works out this way, I do think the additional venture slots and thus additional shots at getting something you want from that loot table are more a side effect of the (admittedly irritating) way this game handles personal storage than an actual monetization strategy.

I mean, if it is a monetization strategy, it's a really bad one (and by "bad" I mean "honestly not likely to be that effective by the standards of horrible lootbox systems").