Still a bit confused as to what Free Companies are

[JillyBean]

I never played any MMO with a guild system, so I don't know what it entails.

Purely out of curiousity, what MMOs have you played without a guild system of some sort? I'm trying to think of some but nothing comes to mind.

I've only played XI and XIV. Neither of them have this system (yet). So I'm guessing that's what he means. I have never played a game with a Guild system either.

[Allistar]

It is a player guild.

Linkshells used to serve this purpose as best they could, but they lacked many features a true guild has in many other games. Linkshells were always just chat channels, and only served as guilds because nothing else existed. Going forward, linkshells will be left as chat only because they no longer need to do anything else, Free Companies having taken all the guild functions.

You can join as many linkshells as you want, but can only join one FC/guild at a time.

All the talk of involving Grand Companies is just a way of explaining through lore that any player can join any guild, regardless of their city-state affiliations.

contrary to what some people believe LS served just fine like guilds from other games...it's in this game that they served no purpose...so Yoshi in his infinite wisdom decided that he would regulate LS to be just a chat channel instead of giving them the attention they rightly deserve...FC is just a fancy name for LS with all the right functions...which imo is stupid...the resources could have been spent to fix the problem with LS instead of creating a whole new entity that we did not need...

[Allistar]

[QUOTE=Zerosion;988048]I thought I would just post what info has been made available to us at the moment.

1. From an old FFXIV Zam interview with Yoshi-P, on free companies. http://ffxiv.zam.com/story.html?story=28045



2. From the LIve Letter to Producer III(3) http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...809-27-2012%29



Post by Okipuit on the lodestone forums. http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...l=1#post936842



All of this could have been done with LS...so much redundancy...

[Kagato]

Purely out of curiousity, what MMOs have you played without a guild system of some sort? I'm trying to think of some but nothing comes to mind.

I only played FFXI long enough for it to count. I only played Aion for a month and was in a guild for about 3 days. I played WoW for a week.

Played a little Ragnarok Online for a week and PristonTale for a month.

[LlenCoram]

I only played FFXI long enough for it to count. I only played Aion for a month and was in a guild for about 3 days. I played WoW for a week.

Played a little Ragnarok Online for a week and PristonTale for a month.

Ahh, I see. Fair enough.

[Myranda]

contrary to what some people believe LS served just fine like guilds from other games...it's in this game that they served no purpose...so Yoshi in his infinite wisdom decided that he would regulate LS to be just a chat channel instead of giving them the attention they rightly deserve...FC is just a fancy name for LS with all the right functions...which imo is stupid...the resources could have been spent to fix the problem with LS instead of creating a whole new entity that we did not need...

It could be done with a single entity, but I don't see any reason not to still include linkshells for chat and I actually see it as a plus. I for one will utilize it as I have a small number of real life friends that also play. Whether we're in the same guild or not for running content or general guild chat, it's still nice to have a second chat channel to talk just to them and not the rest of the guild without dealing with a tangled mess of /tell.

It allows the flexibility of keeping in touch with several distinct friends groups while still maintaining loyalty to a main group. If you don't plan on multiple groups, no harm done, you just don't have to carry extra linkshells then.

[Kagato]

It could be done with a single entity, but I don't see any reason not to still include linkshells for chat and I actually see it as a plus. I for one will utilize it as I have a small number of real life friends that also play. Whether we're in the same guild or not for running content or general guild chat, it's still nice to have a second chat channel to talk just to them and not the rest of the guild without dealing with a tangled mess of /tell.

It allows the flexibility of keeping in touch with several distinct friends groups while still maintaining loyalty to a main group. If you don't plan on multiple groups, no harm done, you just don't have to carry extra linkshells then.

It's also better to have a nice, clean-cut game-supported system rather than struggling with manually keeping tabs on things via text documents filling up your computer or re-editing forum posts every day.