[Suggestion] FFXIV Alt-Friendliness

[Toutatis]

I think I'd also personally want things like retainers/leves/housing plots/islands limited to one character per server or shared across all characters on a server.

In terms of glamours/minions/mounts etc. though, I don't care at all and think all of that should be account wide if they can find a way to make it work in the system which is probably the limiting factor here. Sketti.

Sharing retainers isn't a good idea. Low level and end game characters do not have the same needs in terms of inventory. The retainers of my baby alt just starting the game vs those of my character with all jobs at >90 have vastly different inventories. It's free storage space too, why ruin it? They could just make a chest like the fc chest for sharing between characters (swtor had that) for those that can't do it with an fc.

[Toutatis]

It's less about the storage space and more about preventing people from abusing ventures to farm high-level mats (and gil) across multiple retainers on all their high-level alts.

I take time to level up my character by playing MSQ as well as my retainers from lvl 1. Everyone can do so at no additional cost. If people don't want to put the time, it is their decision. It's fair and sending them on ventures is not abuse. You would just be encouraging people to purchase retainers (ptw).

[Toutatis]

It's fine if you want to put in hundreds of hours to do that in the current iteration of this system. If the game becomes more accessible for alts, I don't want it to be easy or encouraged to set up a big passive gil farm using multiple characters like it has been in other games I've played.

My comment still stands. You are encouraging ptw. Everyone can level up free retainers, gear them and for gatherers meld materia. It takes time and effort and it is fair. It's already possible to exchange mats btw. The RMTers would remain unaffected as they use separate accounts and pay. You'd just be screwing up the normal players who invested time and effort.

[TheRealDesastr]

It's a shame that so much can come down to 'spaghetti code'. No housing in WoW is due to that issue, and no alt-friendliness in XIV is due to that issue, too. I can only hope there's some way to work on that at least over a period of time so we get a little bit more than the abysmal system we have now.

[Isala]

It's a shame that so much can come down to 'spaghetti code'. No housing in WoW is due to that issue, and no alt-friendliness in XIV is due to that issue, too. I can only hope there's some way to work on that at least over a period of time so we get a little bit more than the abysmal system we have now.

I'm so damned tired of that excuse. "We can fix it because of the spaghetti code!" Cool. Does than mean you're going to let me pay less for your admittedly defective product, then? No? Then this isn't an excuse. Fix your damn game.

[Isala]

I understand it's hard to wrap your head around if you've never developed software or functioned as part of a team that supports a piece of software with a very old and expansive codebase, but it's really not as simple as "just fix it" with a product like FFXIV that's over a decade old and built off of the nightmare that was 1.0 let alone something like WoW that started development in the late 90s/very early 2000s and probably still has code dating back to that time.

"Spaghetti code" gets harder and harder to avoid when you have potentially dozens or hundreds of different programmers building on the same project for decades. Every change has to be carefully scrutinized before deployment to make sure it won't break 7 other things.

As someone with years of programming experience, that is still not my customer's problem to care about, nor should it ever be. That's like saying "Well, you know, it's really hard to build a car off of all these legacy design choices, so we can't actually make your vehicle work at full capacity, since Jimbob's design from 20 years ago isn't fully understood."

FIX. YOUR. DAMN. GAME.