I sort of wish players could only choose one job.

[Lucke]

Remember finally beating that really hard quest? Or finishing that expansion? Well, imagine doing that over and over and over and over and over again for each and every character?

If there's a quest chain that takes me 2 weeks to finally get through, I wouldn't be too keen on doing that all over again when I wanna play another job.

That's not to say I won't help people do the quest when I'm done, but starting over again for each character? yeah...no.

[Punainen]

No. Just no. Multiple jobs are a must. I don't wanna have to keep making new characters for each job. When people can only pick one job, you tend to have a surplus of one job and not enough of another, making forming a decent party extremely difficult.

[ZakarnRosewood]

Remember finally beating that really hard quest? Or finishing that expansion? Well, imagine doing that over and over and over and over and over again for each and every character?

If there's a quest chain that takes me 2 weeks to finally get through, I wouldn't be too keen on doing that all over again when I wanna play another job.

That's not to say I won't help people do the quest when I'm done, but starting over again for each character? yeah...no.

I totally agree! That is one things that i think has led to the fear of "quest grinding" Its bad enough there are some cookie cutter quests but when you have to go through all the cookie cutters each and every time you want to try a new job/class, its no wonder people get exasperated with them. Probably also the reason people don't bother to even read the quests or involve themselves with the lore.

[Zumi]

I prefer the having 1 character playing 1 class but I doubt SE will change anything at this point.

[ZakarnRosewood]

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Why? I honestly can't think of any good reason for this outside of preference.

[Lucke]

I prefer the having 1 character playing 1 class but I doubt SE will change anything at this point.

Whatever Kweh's your chocobo. If you are legacy, you can always make a new character for each job.

[Kyri]

Honestly the whole one job to character is the biggest thing that makes me pick up these MMO's like TERA, WOW, GW2, Diablo III and only play for a week or so with no real ommph. Im always logging off to look at my character list and go "....... what the hell am I gonna play..." then I stand around do nothing... eventually pick a character and then reconsider remaking a different DPS and do nothing again.

In a way, I literally -hate- that system and it brings me no close feelings to my surroundings, or guilds. If anything because you can only have 1 alt in a guild/linkshell in these games I am completely uncommitted to any of them. I see them -if- I log on that particular character or I don't see them, nor do I tend to tell them my alts because they are usually in some other "potentially good guild" that if known would cause conflict, but in my case is just me trying to find a place that feels like home. When im constantly changing characters, I don't feel any sense of home and burn out in less then a month.

To top that off though in XI and XIV leveling my jobs was technically the same things, leves or choose from 3-4 different grind spots(my favorite way) the whole repeat the questline and zone change to each character to lv20 to decide which one I like the most felt so much more.. repetitive.. Not sure why, but it really did. By my third character hitting the third zone I was so turned off bothering to try, I usually found myself alt tabbing and forumsing somewhere for a hour instead.

One character to rule them all FF style was a godsend to me in the MMO market, and I thank them almost every time I log on for that fact.

[Enkidoh]

Exactly - being able to change your Job/class in FFXI and XIV is rather unique amongst MMOs, and is indeed a breath of fresh air from all the others which just channel Gary Gygax and lock you in one class/role for the entire game.

Having said that though, it's probably the reason why most MMOs which still use subscriptions only have you pay a flat monthly fee and then allow you to create as many characters as you like without extra charges, unlike as FFXI and XIV each extra character is an additional fee - it's to compensate for being locked into a class for the whole game.

In any event, I loved the Job system in the earlier FF titles (my favourite application of it was Tactics <3) and in fact, the Job system was the very reason I first started playing FFXI in the first place all those years ago. I admit though I was a little disappointed when information about the Armoury System was first announced before FFXIV 1.0 was released by not using traditional FF Jobs, but just new generic 'classes', but it has grown on me a lot (<3 GLA), and much later I squeed when I read about Jobs being added too.

So yeah, I'm glad FFXI and XIV have changeable Jobs/classes, and would not want SE to change it for anything.

[Aion]

so... /thread ?

[ChiyoKatsui]

Simplest and easiest answer, money.

A lot of MMOs charge for extra characters. Some give you 3 free slots or so, but you have to purchase additional character creation rights and pay for it monthly. FFXI is a prime example of this, albeit you were not hindered on jobs, more on storage.. I believe Ragnarok Online as P2P only had 3 slots as well, but could purchase additional slots up to 6? It's been a long time, Thief->Assassin was most popular then. It was before they added a lot of other classes.

At any rate, if you're like me and play a majority of the jobs just so you have at least basic skills with the class, then you should be able to see how much extra money you would spend just to level an extra job or two, let alone another 15. ARR is kind of exempt from this in a way. Youll understand if you review ARR service fees posted a while back during the legacy campaign posts.

so let's calculate that.

12.95 basic service fee (includes 1 char)
1.00 Additional Char slots (max 32 slots, including the one with your basic service fee)

so, lets say we have 28 different jobs (not counting crafts).

that's $27 extra a month just for characters, if you play all jobs. Thats $324 dollars a year you're paying, just to use every job that is in the game to begin with.

With ARR almost exempt from this, we can still look at money sadly.

If they locked each character to 1 job (or class with underlying jobs as seen in FFXIV(Gladiator -> Paladin)), this would mean you'd be forced to purchase the more expensive option to have all 8 character slots per world, just to check out a job and decide if you like it. Not very rational. Now think about that. 8 slots per world. As crafting classes are considered to be main classes in FFXIV (atleast in 1.0 they were), this would mean you still wouldn't be able to play all the jobs available. And should they increase the number the of character slots we have, we'll be back to square one, paying for extra slots.

It reduces the consumers hemorrhaging of money on the game itself after monthly fees, making it a much more plausible to harness long time subscribers.

Of course, this is just my opinion but, facts are in there as well. It's just a matter of perception.