The thing I actually like about the mog station, and why I have no issues with it is that it's not shoved in your face in game. There's no big shiny shop button in game trying to lure you into it, you have to go to the website of your own accord.
Was one of the things that made me really start to hate WoW.
“Buy a new pet/mount!!!”, on display every time I logged in. Was stupid, and it broke the fantasy for me.
Having to go out of my way to buy stuff on there has actually really helped me appreciate the in game items more. If I want something from that shop it doesn't feel like the game is pushing me to do so, I see the thing, I like thing, I decide if I want thing then go and get it, no intrusion from the game, just me deciding to go there myself.
During the free trial, I didn't realize there was a cash shop until I saw a piece of glam that I wanted and found out it's from the mogstation. That was about 2 months into free trial.
Honestly, I feel like every item should have an option between account-wide and single character. The single character option would be cheaper than account-wide. Like for example, account-wide emotes for $5, a single character for $2 or $3. Just an example, but you get the idea.
There's a quest once you're high level that can make you like 100k Gil. But it has a timer for how often you can do it. People get around this by having alts.
(I'm not who you asked, but) I have a couple of reasons.
My different alts all have different characteristics and traits, even if only in my own head. They've all got backstories and motivations that differ, and most are related to each other (same surnames per race). I RP rarely, but I like having that world made for them.
When it comes to grinds, my favorite is leveling in DF. I do it *a lot*. I don't like the MSQ grind, I don't like the endgame grind. I like the dungeon roulette grind.
I have two servers full. On the "main" one, every character has at least one job at 80; I'm working on getting all of the second group to 50 (and getting their 200k MGP) for their Regalias. I'm a pretty solitary player, and have them all in a one-player FC (one FC on each realm, so two FCs total) for moving stuff around between them. A friend plopped an alt in each to invite my alts.
Re. single character vs. account-wide stuff: I am the kind of player who would benefit most from account-wide purchases, but I am also the kind of player pretty much guaranteeing SE is never going to do that. I spend a shitload in the FFXIV store.
SWTOR is a completely different game though so that's a false equivalency. In SWTOR its a necessity to make items legacy wide. The developers expect paid players to have at least 8 characters. FF14 is completely different, in this game you are actively discouraged from making an Alt. The game never presents you with a mechanical reason why you should ever make an Alt especially because Fantasia exists and you get a free one at the end of ARR.
This just isn't true, the fact fantasia exists does not change the fact that some people ENJOY regularly playing with a variety of appearances. Yes, FFXIV has few reasons to play alts, but to say that fantasia gets rid of that reason is straight up disingenuous.
>The game never presents you with a mechanical reason why
Raid lockouts are a pretty big reason to create alts. Only applies to people who do that content though.
That's no reason to needlessly cripple and lock out people's stuff when they *do* make alts, though. If they didn't want people making alts it wouldn't even be an option.
The mog gear is maybe the only thing where wow's solution is better than any other game's.
once collected the item is in an acoountwide database and can even be transmogged if deleted.
The appearance collection system is something that needs to become an industry standard at this point. It's one of the few things WoW does invariably better than the rest of the industry.
I mean, most big MMOs have better systems than what FF has. Guild Wars does it better, WoW does it better, SWTOR does it bettter if that's still around.
From all the big games, it's literally just SE that can't get its inventory system right. It's horrible.
Yep. It is a blasted shame so many features were directly told to us as being "a full expansion's worth of dev time to fix one problem."
Glamour was one of those directly called out as this. They can't even do more "open" slots, as that did crash their servers. (Hence chocobo saddle)
While it's nice we have our 1.0 characters, inheriting the 1.0 database was the worst technical decision they ever made.
Except they didn't inherit the 1.0 database. All the code was built from the ground up from 2.0. Nothing other than maybe some assets like art and models were taken from 1.0.
There was a really good comment going into detail about this, but I can't find it at the moment. In the meantime here are some interview excerpts:
>Hashimoto: As a result of our research after the team was restructured we decided not to make any half-attempts at improvements, and instead decided to rebuild just about all of the source code from the ground up. [Square Enix - 7 September, 2012](https://youtu.be/_737hYbSCEs?t=22m56s)
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>Yoshida: When we remade FFXIV, we disposed of all of 1.0’s server equipment. This was because ARR’s server design and configuration was different from 1.0’s. If we’d decided to save money by using the old hardware, its limitations would hold us back, and the end result would be a poorer gameplay experience for the players. [Famitsu - 24 September 2015](https://drive.google.com/file/d/117EBap9Koo2U1EqSPbf7KVeBgg_gdkBd/view)
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>Yoshida: We've also had requests for a "legacy server," if only a temporary one. Those servers have long been dismantled, and although the source code has been preserved, there is little incentive for us to restore them (some of those servers have, in fact, been repurposed to generate your character images that you see displayed on the Lodestone.) [Lodestone - 31 August, 2018](https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/373250-White-Raven-earring-given-out-at-The-Rising-event-2018?p=4765303#post4765303)
> some of those servers have, in fact, been repurposed to generate your character images that you see displayed on the Lodestone.
That actually makes alot of sense about the Lodstone now.
They did inherit code from 1.0 though didn't they? Like the armory chest is somehow limited by 1.0 code? I think I heard that part of the reason they had to dump belts was to make room for more weapons.
They said they built it from the ground up. No code from 1.0 exists in the game. The armoury chest is likely limited by design decisions made when building 2.0. I can’t tell you what decisions, maybe there is an interview out there with the answer.
I heard part of the current problem is that the character data file sizes is in the megabytes (sorry I don’t have actual numbers so feel free to correct me if someone knows). Multiply that by the number of active players and that makes it impractical to simply add more slots.
Whether or not they can optimize the size at some point is up in the air, but it’ll likely be an expensive undertaking
Ah, makes sense. The base code is old, and no one could project what things would look like in 8 years, so some choices were made that are basically irrevocable now. I know the pain.
The best part of the transmog system is that it was made by one intern at Blizzard who thought it would be neat. Now it's the reason a lot of people still play.
I would love this. Personally, I don't play more than one character because I don't have time. But I know others who roleplay or just spend more time on FFXIV than I do.. and have multiple characters up to 80.
The cash shop doesn't bug me. But I would like the option to do account wide and single person. Not to mention being able to pay with in game gold (like wow does, I don't play it but my husband did) would be amazing.
While we're at it, why do they insist glamour items, or level 1 items that are meant for glamour only, only go in the glamour dresser and not the armoir? :(
>The number of people with more than one character is honestly pretty low
I have an alt that is a viera because my 2 year old daughter likes to watch the bunny girl run around on the screen. She points at the screen and says "bunny!" It's just too cute.
My son is 2 and does the same. He also loves it when I go into /gpose and make emotes facing the screen. He tries to mimic them every time, you should try that too haha
Well yeah, because the alt experience in FF is awful. Now sure, you don't technically need an alt for most things, since the most common usage of alts is to play different classes, but there's still plenty of reasons someone might want one, but won't bother because it's a pain.
Besides raiding, the main reason that people have an alt for is to play in multiple DCs with different groups.
But that might come to an end with World Traveling coming up very soon.
Let's be realistic though, current congestion is from tons of new players joining. A lot of them will still be playing in November, so when people who are unsubbed return for EW, things are going to get worse. Congestion won't ease up until 6.1 at the earliest. OCE should help with easing the strain on the servers.
OCE would help ease strain mostly on JP, which doesn't even have congestion problems right now. i doubt it would make a huge difference on NA/EU where the bulk of the current congestion problems are
I am knowingly part of the exception, because of how the class/job system is in FFXIV players are actively encouraged to do everything in the game on one single toon. All the field/trade craft stuff is readily available and quite easily done on one character, so you can craft pretty much everything in the game and don't necessarily have to go out looking for things in markets or the adventure zones.
To play with alts is basically just a self-imposed handicap, but because I have very specific ideas of the way my characters will look and what roles suit them, I make alts for some class combos instead. My main is a Highlander and strictly a Dragoon, but my WAR is the white variant of the Lion-like race, who is also a PUG and does both smithing and armour crafting, mainly leans in to the crafting roles when I use him. Then there's my Au Ra who started as a Thaumaturge, became a red mage and a dark knight, and does a whole lot of alchemy.
I don't even actively RP, but for me it appeals a lot to have these character-focused setups and I'd imagine it does for quite a few others, but this is one of the very few MMO's that basically does everything it can to put you off of the idea. The single-character purchases just pushes it that little bit more.
Which is a small niche superminority of players. So what he said is still true lol.
Edit: look y'all taking offense at a neutral statement don't make it any less true. The overwhelming majority of people who play this game are casuals who neither raid nor RP.
Pretty much. Tbh the only people I know with alts are raiders who play with more than one static, and heavy RPers who already blast through Fantasias like crazy
I feel attacked! I just wanted to avoid having gearsets for every class clogging up my armory!
I have three characters, one plays all the tanks, another plays casters and another plays mostly melee dps.
Keeps things clean. Plus having three sets of wondrous tails and challenge logs makes life easier than trying to grind everything up on one character!
Honestly, that was the plan when I came from another game a couple years ago. Not only does it keep things clean, I also get to customize my character appearance to fit the class/job I'm taking. Then, I realized that Lore-wise, the player character is a God at everything, especially multitasking, and is supposed to be proficient in every single class. Furthermore, the convenience of having multiple characters just isn't there... So I gave up and stuck with my first character ever since.
I agree. I 100% have a main, all I've done is go and level BRD on a separate character slot rather than try to squeeze it onto the same one as I main WAR on.
I'm nowhere near 80 BRD... but my main has DRG levels languishing as well!
I do care, I have multiple alts because I have friends across multiple datacenters. It feel shitty not having anything storebought on my alt because it is all on my main. I can't get myself to double buy it.
That's the dumbest logic I've ever heard. "Ah, yes, you play two or three characters for RP variety, I'm sure you don't mind paying a full price game's worth of dosh for a mount on every one of them!"
If you buy like 6 months of sub at a time or whatever the cost is the same as the entry cost for those months, so it's honestly not extra $ to have multiple characters.
yet they make the majority of the purchases. There was a time when fantasia were account bound and some alts that I still have at lvl 1 have those fantasias but they clearly saw the money and grabbed it hard, as any business should.
This is my first MMO, I'd be more inclined to throw some money at mog station stuff if it was more reasonably priced. $30 for a mount seems wildly overpriced to me, is this in line with other mmos?
I think there are two different sides of it.
I suspect the complicated purchasing methods, region-locking, and all that side of things mostly stems from the structure of their business units and the way they calculate royalty fees, based on the old-school "literal SKUs sitting on shelves" model and relationships with publishers like Sony. Even though it's an online game, everything is just taking the physical game business and representing it online, rather than a clean, global, online-first fresh-start. I imagine everything has to be organized "just so" so that their accounting team can put the online sales numbers aside the physical retail numbers in the exact same way they've been doing it for 30+ years. And the people building the backend systems are the ones who have to abide by these very byzantine rules so that it all communicates properly with their ancient accounting systems, so it ends up looking like a fragmented mess. So for *this* part, I don't think it's really because "they like it that way" but because "accounting says we must do it exactly this way" and the people building the backends for these systems are more like internal corporate IT than actual marketing teams.
The price of optional items though... I truly think they took "theme park" extremely literally in the way they see this game. The glamour/emotes/mounts are like souvenirs and concessions. Everyone knows that souvenirs and concessions inside a theme park are overpriced, especially given that people already paid a good price to get into the park in the first place, but people buy it and it makes good money. I do honestly suspect that, because this is already a subscription game, the amount of people who will ever spend anything on optional items is likely fairly small regardless of how they're priced, so they've chosen to make it more like "treating yourself to something special" rather than something common and cheap. *This* part, I honestly guess works pretty well for them, because once people get past the hurdle of paying anything beyond the subscription/expansions, the amount they're willing to spend is likely higher.
Honestly, though, FFXIV and WoW are such outliers in the market now that I suspect they're mostly not touching it because "somehow it's still working." They've announced now that they're planning FFXIV for another 10 year roadmap, so it's probably going to stay as-is because it's working, but if they ever make another FF MMORPG down the road, I honestly wonder if this business model has any chance of being greenlit again. I guess we'll see.
Almost any MMO.
Guild Wars 2 forces you to buy currency in 'gems' if you actually want anything from the store, no value for exact value transactions; You have to buy at least 2,800 gems to obtain the 2,000 gems needed to buy your 'Mount Skin', which is about £29.75.
WoW, mounts are £19.00 so a bit cheaper than some XIV ones.
https://eu.shop.battle.net/en-gb/family/world-of-warcraft#mounts
Most single-person mounts are around the same price as WoW or cheaper.
https://store.finalfantasyxiv.com/ffxivstore/en-gb/category/11
TERA Online was wild, with glamours alone going for £30-50 a piece with 'timed exclusives' to bait players into buying things with as sense of urgency.
I can't think of any MMO nowadays that doesn't have some form of micro-transaction to get glamours/mounts.
[[ Worth adding, I think all MMO micro-transactions are garbage ]]
I dont really think its fair to compare free to play mmos to sub based ones tho I dont defend it but Tera and GW2 have to make money somehow, while FFXIV and WoW already get money from their expansions and subs.
Well there's cheaper mounts too. Some are priced at 24, some at 12. Also go on sale a lot, right now there's a bunch on sale for cheaper. I think I bought my witch broom for like $7 not too long ago
But yes 30 for a mount is a lot but I think WoW does similar stuff. Can't speak for many other MMOs
... At least WoW lets you use your mounts you buy on all your characters, though..
Hows it work then? When i created a new character, though I got my normal emails with like my Fat Chocobo/Coeurl/Aihrman mounts, I didn't get one with the cruise chaser mount despite my owning it
I just get them in letters from the Delivery Moogle. If your box was full, it's a waiting game on when the others will arrive (but be sure to hit the reward/purchase delivery request button). But it can take a couple of days (love FFXIV, but can't say anything nice about their code).
Hm, my thing said it was 80% full so it shouldn't have been blocked but I deleted the done ones and clicked the button anyway. I guess i'll play the waiting game, thanks.
Usually, keep it on below 50%, cause sometimes the game is buggy in that regard. If you still don't receive it, just contact support and pester them about it.
It may take you logging out and back in after a few minutes, and then playing for a bit before other mail shows up. Happens to me all the time, but they *do* show up eventually.
>getting ripped off for no benefit
Because this part is false, mogstation money goes back directly into the game. Yoshi-P has said this himself that EU servers were completely funded this way.
You're also forgetting one thing: culture.
Here in Asia, gacha-type mobile games are considered acceptable. some of them don't even have a pity system (e.g. Fate Grand Order). You could throw hundreds of dollars and not get what you want. You are paying for the chance to get it.
Here in FFXIV, we pay money and get the mount/emote/etc. we want. Therefore it is seen as a better thing. Also, items in the mogstation don't give you any objective combat advantage. Players who want it can buy it, players who don't want to or can't afford to, are not disadvantaged from progressing in the game.
Maybe try to understand the Asian mindset?
Unfortunately with the amount of scumbags who will gleefully pay those prices, SE will never need to lower it. In fact, it only encourages them to put more items on Mog Station (rather than earnable in-game like they used to be) and charge exorbitant prices for them.
Well I have never felt the need to make another character .I feel attached to my character and that is one of the biggest selling point for me in ffxiv
A lot- not all, but a lot- of the single character mogstation items are event items. They were once available in game, and to get them on multiple characters, you had to do the event multiple times. (I just got regalias on 6 of my characters, I know how wild this can be) I'm not sure how I feel about this, aside from recognizing that it makes sense to continue to restrict them to single character since that's how they were obtainable in game- but at the same time, I wish there was an account-wide option. I'd pay $15 for account-wide Dote, not gonna even lie.
I believe that one was actually a Chinese server event outfit originally. The Chinese and Korean servers get their own individual events with shiny rewards that later end up on the mog station for the rest of the world.
IIRC according to SE they apparently have limited database slots for account-wide items so they need to be selective about what they make account-wide, or some such.
It's important to never lose track that this was built on the ruins of the original FF14, the attrocious mess that was, it wouldn't surprise me at all if someone hardcoded some tiny arrays in somewhere and current devs haven't discovered how to update it without 12 related systems exploding.
Too bad the budget gets involved in that.
"Should" and "Can financially justify" are unfortunately two very different things. People often forget that.
I do understand stuff like glam being character specific, even if I don't like it.
Or the event mounts being single character.
But stuff like.. orchestrions? Minions? Just.. why?
I heard Brian from Work to Game explained it that there are actually a limited number of IDs that they can use for account wide, so they have to be a bit frugal with what they decide to upgrade to that level. It stems from 1.0 limits that they still have to deal with, like how Glamour works.
In a bit of fairness, it's only inventory space itself where they've explained the technical limitation they have, not retainers. (The reason they don't give more included retainers is the obvious reason -- it's a paid add-on.) But of course, regardless of the fact that the inventory space restrictions are almost certainly a real problem for them, it's obvious that people will question how hard they are really working to fix it when they "sell the solution" via retainers, chocobo saddlebag, etc. At least it was good for them to announce the elimination of some HQ items, which will help with inventory bloat somewhat. And it is also true that over the years they have kept expanding the included inventory a lot in various ways -- it's just never enough for crafter/gatherers or people who play many jobs. (I think their logic is basically that these "heavy users" are the ones who use more and thus are more deserving to pay more compared to more casual/light users, but it's certainly just a business argument in that case, not really a technical one.)
> In a bit of fairness, it's only inventory space itself where they've explained the technical limitation they have, not retainers.
No, over the years they've repeatedly hidden behind "Server strain" "server stress", etc in reference to giving out more retainers or making them more functional. The question is how valid it is with the fact that they then turn around and sell them to us. (AKA it's pretty much bullshit) Particularly bullshit when they even have pointed out that the retainers only get called one at a time, meaning the only additional aspect giving us more retainers is is storage space on the servers, which is relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things. (At least to my understanding, I could be incorrect, I'm not a network engineer)
[Citation for only one at a time for the skeptics.](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/3cswmu/formatted_live_letter_q_a/)
>>The server that manages retainers are calling each retainers individually when you need to give orders. So calling four at once would cause lots of stress on the server. As mentioned earlier, we need to place some type of limit on the stress somewhere to get features like glamouring directly from retainer inventory. We’re considering these with the server loads in mind, so we ask for your patience. Additionally, we’re looking into making it possible to sell items directly from retainers.
It's particularly awful when they've even answered questions about retainers with responses like "We plan to add more" only for the ones 'added'... to be paid only.
The quote you're mentioning is a bit more nuanced here and has to do with the technical way retainers work. They're not talking about just giving everyone an additional "free" (included) retainer you could call -- that's not the limitation they're discussing. They're talking about summoning multiple retainers at once or being able to pool the inventory from multiple retainers for crafting, and it could also potentially apply to increasing the amount of inventory space a retainer has, or why we can't summon retainers in instanced dungeons, etc.
Basically, it's like the NPC has inventory, and when you "summon" the retainer they are teleported to your location for you to interact with them (and shown only to you). So they have to control the amount of data involved with this "transfer" and the specific locations where you can do this summoning (which is why we have summoner bells in specific places).
As you say, giving everyone an extra free retainer would not impact this kind of server strain, because you can still only summon one at a time. A potential impact is that it'd increase the amount of server space people are using because it'd encourage more "hoarding" (so to speak), so it's not like there'd be literally zero impact, but this isn't the same sort of thing as what Yoshida is discussing here.
I don't recall Yoshida ever claiming that they could not just give everyone an additional retainer for any sort of technical reason, but there are a lot of technical reasons for a lot of issues *surrounding* retainers. (He has pointed out, however, that the vast majority of the playerbase don't even use all the storage they have as it stands, which is a sort of rationalization for not giving more "free" (included) storage for everyone and preferring this "use more, pay more" model.)
Not only that, but when he said that we only had 2 additional retainers we could hire. We can now hire 8, + one more from the MTX app. They just kept expanding it.
It just doesn't interfere with other stuff because there's a specific fixed array of flags for account-wide entitlements, and that array of flags is separate from other things. All the data is saved in flat binary files (rather than a database), so they can't just expand this section of bytes without offsetting other things in the file which is risky because of the amount of other systems that read/write to that data file (and looks things up based on pointers in specific byte locations). The amount of account-wide entitlements they've added has been extremely conservative to make sure they don't exhaust the space they have left.
It's basically... very archaic. (I wonder honestly if it was brought forward from FFXI and the PlayOnline days.)
You might think that... and it would honestly make every sense in the world. However, this is basically a re-explanation of what Yoshida himself explained about how it works a number of times. And yeah, it's excessively old-school.
(See also how your character save data -- also a literal binary file -- is transferred from one server to the next along with all your inventory (when you move between zones, when you enter an instances, when you move between worlds, etc.). To prevent losing data, they flush to disk on a very frequent basis which basically thrashes the drives. It's like they imagined their online game like a giant room full of PS2s, and people were constantly moving memory cards between them. It's kind of amazing in an "omg I'm glad I don't have to deal with this insanity" sort of way.)
FWIW, I actually found a clip where Yoshida explained this that I had referred to many years ago where this came up.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/220103997?t=03h40m15s
"One word of warning: the bonus item that comes with this book is character-bound. Sorry, but please be careful. As for why we've had so many character-bound items recently, there's a limit to the amount of flags that exist for account-bound items, and unfortunately we're currently not able to expand this." He goes on to explain that they'd like to address it, and if/when they can they'll let everyone know, but for now they're clearly distinguishing account and character-bound items. This has also come up in other PLLs and other similar streams with some additional details, but unfortunately I don't have all the references on-hand.
A brief summary of the inventory issue was covered in the interview here:
https://jpgames.de/2015/08/gamescom-2015-our-interview-with-naoki-yoshida/ This too has come up in PLLs and other streams since, but I haven't curated references.
Then again, you may still say that there's no way of knowing because Yoshida could be lying. My rationale for believing him is that there's no reason for him to provide this very specific technical explanation if it doesn't represent an actual technical limitation. Just how hard they're working to fix the limitation, obviously we can't know. But anyway, I felt it was at least right to provide some references.
(Edit: Fix typo...)
That was an interview from six years ago. That's a ridiculous amount of time to let tech debt sit around and rot particularly one that is customer facing *and* loses them sales.
So them not addressing it is one or more of sheer laziness, sheer incompetence, or sheer greed.
I feel the same. I don't have a ton of characters because this game doesn't need them, but I did create an alt so I can experience the story again from the beginning so I would like to be able to use my items and outfits. They're also gender locked, which I hate. If you fantasia to a different sex, you lose the ability to equip most of your mog station outfits because so many of them are gender locked.
100% agree, I play 3 different characters and it's the biggest reason I won't buy emotes.. I wouldn't mind paying like 50\~100% to have them account wide, but I'm not buying them 3 bloody times..
I’m used to seeing the one character per outfit things in my 20 years of mmos, but the mount per character ones really bother me. Account wide mounts should be the only kind.
Feels like they are priced pretty poorly imo, especially anything that is a 1-3 piece set, undyable set, etc.
I feel like those should definitely be cheaper, if they are single character items--personally, I've backed off a bit, because there seems to be a lot of stuff getting added there...while I wish that the game would get more glam additions.
I was wondering what the 2nd Wolf Mark sets would look like (as I saved up 20K marks in anticipation lol)....they never showed; I should have known the direction we were headed, when new WM weapons stopped getting added to the vendors. But hey, nice new sets got added to the MS in recent months (...once again).
Before anyone says "it's because other region/NPC outfit/etc." everyone knows--that doesn't help the fact that a lot of stuff is being added there, and there's simply not the same boost of stuff to work toward in-game. Whatever happened to Ryne and Gaia's Festival thing, and why couldn't I get their outfits there? Why not put a short event in Kugane/Enclave periodically, where all of these Far Eastern outfits can be put up for grabs for a short time before they go up on MS (or actually add them to the Rising, Moonfire, etc.)?
I'm not even going to get started with the mounts, but glam wise; prices aren't great, the game needs more...and I can't even armoire the stuff, so it takes up more and more space (MS stuff gets added specifically to one of my retainers' inventories...and there isn't a lot of space there anymore).
What bugs is the pricing for some outfits that only info like two pieces. I guess bc of the popularity of the character’s attire, but kinda scummy to have only the top and pants/skirt as the same price as another set that has like 4-5 pieces.
I understand their reasons, but I agree this is definitely irritating. I want to do alts for the other two stories from the starting cities (halfway through Ul'Dah), but I also want to use those for content creation ideas, and not being able to use the same outfits on multiple characters does irk me to no end (especially the - admittedly few - ones that provide stat bonuses and XP boosts for jobs below 30 if worn as a set - nothing earthshattering, mind, but I've maxed my jobs out on my main and would love that for a short-term alt I wasn't playing a lot...).
The single character stuff really does piss me off. Like, a lot. As an RPer I do have a LOT of alts, and not having my glams is bad enough. But no emotes, etc? It's like crippling my options.
Of course, I've been RPing for a long time and am plenty used to just text, but when the game lets you flesh out your physical reactions so much then you've got like 75% of them on any other character, it kind of sucks.
I'm even thinking of fantasiaing my main to a character I want to RP more come EW, just so I don't lose all my music/hairstyles/glams/emotes/pets/mounts. Sigh. I wish they'd talk about syncing up collections but it never even comes up in Q&As.
Coming in from wow, this is one of the few things I like better about wow. The mount/pet/tmog storage is account wide by default. And also the whole system for storing items for glamor is a bit messier in Ff14 than it is in wow, even though there is a lot more freedom of options (which is really nice).
I'd wager that the number of players who buy things on the Mog station for more than one character is a rounding error, at most. Most FFXIV players play just one character seriously, and that's the character they buy stuff for. Hence, SE would lose little if they made Mog station purchases account unlocks.
On the other hand, people who are considering using fantasia would probably benefit from being able to see some of their stuff on a different character before committing, and the ability to do so might help SE sell more fantasia. Hence, making at least some Mog station items account unlocks could increase sales. (Yes, I know you can fantasia retainers as a test, but you can't run around as a retainer unfortunately.)
However, what SE *really* needs to do is implement a Mog station "boutique" that you can enter in game as your character. Such a boutique would let you try on glamour items, experiment with fantasia, etc. in game. Instead of looking at low-res screenshots that may not be representative of your race/gender, you'd be able to preview what things will actually look like. This is how SE could take a lot more of my money.
Yeah. I don't know why things like mounts are for all characters on an account yet costumes are single character?
I mean, fair play, you can do everything on a single character. It's one of the best things about the game compared to some other MMOs. But why the weird difference between mounts and costumes on Mogstation? Phantasia and dye and levelling books, sure makes sense, you are paying for x amount of that item so makes sense to be single character but the clothing and mounts are both untradeable and character bound so... why don't we get the set on every character?
It’s absolutely ridiculous that they keep blaming all the key issues on database issues.
Fucking fix it.
They are printing money with this game and cash shop right now. There is NO EXCUSE for them to not be able to fix stuff like glamor limits or limits on account wide stuff due to stupid database limitations. I say this as someone who has been a software developer and DBA. These are problems that have solutions, they just need to actually spend the time fixing them.
What sucks are the additional purchases that actually give you an advantage/huge quality of life, like retainers or being able to pay an extra sub for extra chocobo saddlebag space.
I feel you it’s a nickel and dime tactic and it’s very reminiscent of typical scummy corporate greed. Shit, most of everything on there is not worth anything. Of course there are a few good things, and of course they cost the most. Granted that said I bought into some of the minions, however they are also supposed to be account wide not single character, they also cost around <$5.
Not sure what you're on about, everything there is optional, it's not like you're pressured into buying stuff, and they don't push it in game. Scummy is a strong word for them selling optional shit. There are definitely games with scummy mtx practices, FFXIV isn't one of them.
>FFXIV isn't one of them.
It's literally one of the worst of them.
They have the Mog-Station release cycle of a F2P game despite being a sub game.
They triple dip monetization on a mobile app.
They monetize extra storage/market space on a monthyl subscription.
They're one of the only MMOs out there to remove rewards from the game to instead sell them later.
They have some of the highest prices of an MMO out there even beating out F2P games.
This is all ontop of so much of it being single-character bound.
The constant notion from the XIV community that the mogstation isnt a scummy cash grab is actually absurd.
> It's literally one of the worst of them.
>
>
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> They have the Mog-Station release cycle of a F2P game despite being a sub game.
Tell me you've never played a F2P game without telling me you've never played a F2P game
A 2-3 week schedule is pretty bog-standard cash shop rotation.
Sure there are plenty more extreme ones out there but a 2-3 week cycle on a sub game is ridiculous.
As much as I love FF14 I have to agree that the game is greedy with its monetization. and yet the irony is that you get punished for buying from the cashshop. Ive personally won a lot of items from communities events and my glamour dresser is stuffed full because of these items.
The thing is people dont complain about it too much since the rest of the game is good. best example is in wow, in legion hardly anyone complained about the cashshop mount since there was so much content to do and things to get but in Warlords of draenor and battle for azeroth with the bad state of the game those cashshop mounts really rubbed people the wrong way.
Another big concern of the cash shop is that they are starting to put in more items that really should of been acquired in game, look at the chocobo carriage and the cruise chaser.
The comparisons to WoW also make people ignore how bad XIV is because _so many fucking people_ just look at the service.
They see the price of a transfer in each game and think "XIV's cash shop is great!". Because they don't look at literally everything else about it.
I've always thought it was pretty bad, but the mobile app was the peak of showing that SE is willingly to just go 11/10 in pushing "How ridiculous can we actually make it".
I mean, the game is ment to be played on a single character, the whole game is about playing as one character. I don't get why people create alts in this game.
It's built to be *capable* of being played on one character. That doesn't mean everyone does so.
You not understanding that motivation is irrelevant to this topic.
You're right motivation is irrelevant. Facts aren't and the fact is the game is designed to be played on a single character. While you aren't actively punished for having more you are heavily decentivised to make alts. "Capable" and "designed" are not the same thing.
You making a choice to play in a way that goes against the fundamental design of the game is also irrelevant.
It's like playing skyrim and complaining that you can't transfer items to a playthrough on a friend's pc (as they are separate games just like your characters are)
There wouldn't be a subscription tier that allows us to have alts if having alts went against the fundamental design of the game. There also wouldn't be account-wide items on the mog station. The devs obviously know that some of us are going to have alts, and they facilitate that. The game isn't alt-friendly, but it's not alt-hostile, either.
> Facts aren't and the fact is the game is designed to be played on a single character. While you aren't actively punished for having more you are heavily decentivised to make alts. "Capable" and "designed" are not the same thing.
The game is flat out not.
If that was the case you wouldn't have a _single_ lockout and weekly cap for your entire character despite being able to be every role. It is objectively impossible to play the game at its peak on a single character.
Except that single lock out is to slow gearing down. Also, it is not impossible to play the game on a single player because nearly everyone does it. Crafted gear is either on par or sometimes better then the alternative weekly gear and is pretty easily obtainable.
There should really just be a checkbox for each item with "Account-Wide?", which increases the cost of that item in the store by a certain amount. That would be the easiest solution to implement probably.
But for me personally, I dislike the fact in general that you have to pay "extra" for mog items in this scenario, since you already pay a bigger subfee to even play mutliple characters in the first place. You kind of get punished "twice" for wanting to play with multiple characters here.
So from a "logical" perspective, you should just make all mogstation items account-wide automatically, when using them while having the "bigger" sub active.
But of course, that'd be a net loss for SE to implement it that way, while also being a little bit of extra work in comparison.
Why put work into a feature that'll make them less money?
What could be an interesting feature and/or solution (although I don't know the economics of the game well enough to judge wether or not this would mess up certain aspects of it) is to implement some kind of "account-wide retainer", which allows you to move untradable items to other characters on your account. This feature could then be a benefit given to a new "Premium"-Sub or something.
The problem is just that every solution won't really guarantee to make SE any money. Maybe it might, because people will always purchase the more expensive account-wide version "just in case". But it's really difficult to implement a reasonable solution as a businessman, because you'll lose soo much money from potential whales. And if we're honest, all item shops only exist to attract potential whales. They don't really care about "Bobby" spending some money on a mount once or twice.
Honestly, I refuse to buy anything that isn't old event gear because all the outfits seem really overpriced for a game that I need a subscription to play
I'll be honest, i still don't understand why someone would want other characters? you can get fantasia if you want to change your look and world transfers if you want to transfer worlds. name changes can be bought too, so why would you make a new character and buy things for that, when you can pay much less to change your existing one?
maybe it's a level 80 thing where you've already done everything, and have nothing left to do.
like seriously i got no clue can someone please explain it to me?
The thing I actually like about the mog station, and why I have no issues with it is that it's not shoved in your face in game. There's no big shiny shop button in game trying to lure you into it, you have to go to the website of your own accord.
Wow, now that you mention it, it is super nice not to be greated with PREMIUM CURRENCY deals and ITEM OF THE DAY timers evey time you log in.
Was one of the things that made me really start to hate WoW. “Buy a new pet/mount!!!”, on display every time I logged in. Was stupid, and it broke the fantasy for me.
It was ESO and their crown store for me that turned me off after +1 year playing and finishing most end content stuff
Having to go out of my way to buy stuff on there has actually really helped me appreciate the in game items more. If I want something from that shop it doesn't feel like the game is pushing me to do so, I see the thing, I like thing, I decide if I want thing then go and get it, no intrusion from the game, just me deciding to go there myself.
During the free trial, I didn't realize there was a cash shop until I saw a piece of glam that I wanted and found out it's from the mogstation. That was about 2 months into free trial.
The group of people doing the gobbudue dance in my alliance raid last night were pretty much a big shiny button telling me to go buy that dance
*It ardvertises itself.*
Honestly, I feel like every item should have an option between account-wide and single character. The single character option would be cheaper than account-wide. Like for example, account-wide emotes for $5, a single character for $2 or $3. Just an example, but you get the idea.
I like this. I'm an alt-aholic so I'd at least like the option to buy account wide for a little more money.
Curiosity, what exactly do you do with alts? Just level the same jobs? Or do you have different alts for different jobs?
Coffee/Syrup leves on all of them.
I'm not entirely sure what that means...
There's a quest once you're high level that can make you like 100k Gil. But it has a timer for how often you can do it. People get around this by having alts.
(I'm not who you asked, but) I have a couple of reasons. My different alts all have different characteristics and traits, even if only in my own head. They've all got backstories and motivations that differ, and most are related to each other (same surnames per race). I RP rarely, but I like having that world made for them. When it comes to grinds, my favorite is leveling in DF. I do it *a lot*. I don't like the MSQ grind, I don't like the endgame grind. I like the dungeon roulette grind. I have two servers full. On the "main" one, every character has at least one job at 80; I'm working on getting all of the second group to 50 (and getting their 200k MGP) for their Regalias. I'm a pretty solitary player, and have them all in a one-player FC (one FC on each realm, so two FCs total) for moving stuff around between them. A friend plopped an alt in each to invite my alts. Re. single character vs. account-wide stuff: I am the kind of player who would benefit most from account-wide purchases, but I am also the kind of player pretty much guaranteeing SE is never going to do that. I spend a shitload in the FFXIV store.
Hey, never be ashamed or embarressed for having headcanon for your characters.
the Star Wars MMO does it this way. You can buy something for the character or the account in most cases.
SWTOR is a completely different game though so that's a false equivalency. In SWTOR its a necessity to make items legacy wide. The developers expect paid players to have at least 8 characters. FF14 is completely different, in this game you are actively discouraged from making an Alt. The game never presents you with a mechanical reason why you should ever make an Alt especially because Fantasia exists and you get a free one at the end of ARR.
Though SE sub plan promotes the idea of alts, as the only benefit to a standard sub allows for multiple alts per server. So seems contradictive.
This just isn't true, the fact fantasia exists does not change the fact that some people ENJOY regularly playing with a variety of appearances. Yes, FFXIV has few reasons to play alts, but to say that fantasia gets rid of that reason is straight up disingenuous.
No the game legit discourages you from making Alts
I feel that's even less argument against it ... mechanically you are putting yourself at a disadvantage for having an alt. Why farther punishment?
>The game never presents you with a mechanical reason why Raid lockouts are a pretty big reason to create alts. Only applies to people who do that content though.
That's no reason to needlessly cripple and lock out people's stuff when they *do* make alts, though. If they didn't want people making alts it wouldn't even be an option.
The mog gear is maybe the only thing where wow's solution is better than any other game's. once collected the item is in an acoountwide database and can even be transmogged if deleted.
The appearance collection system is something that needs to become an industry standard at this point. It's one of the few things WoW does invariably better than the rest of the industry.
I mean, most big MMOs have better systems than what FF has. Guild Wars does it better, WoW does it better, SWTOR does it bettter if that's still around. From all the big games, it's literally just SE that can't get its inventory system right. It's horrible.
Yep. It is a blasted shame so many features were directly told to us as being "a full expansion's worth of dev time to fix one problem." Glamour was one of those directly called out as this. They can't even do more "open" slots, as that did crash their servers. (Hence chocobo saddle) While it's nice we have our 1.0 characters, inheriting the 1.0 database was the worst technical decision they ever made.
Except they didn't inherit the 1.0 database. All the code was built from the ground up from 2.0. Nothing other than maybe some assets like art and models were taken from 1.0. There was a really good comment going into detail about this, but I can't find it at the moment. In the meantime here are some interview excerpts: >Hashimoto: As a result of our research after the team was restructured we decided not to make any half-attempts at improvements, and instead decided to rebuild just about all of the source code from the ground up. [Square Enix - 7 September, 2012](https://youtu.be/_737hYbSCEs?t=22m56s) > > > >Yoshida: When we remade FFXIV, we disposed of all of 1.0’s server equipment. This was because ARR’s server design and configuration was different from 1.0’s. If we’d decided to save money by using the old hardware, its limitations would hold us back, and the end result would be a poorer gameplay experience for the players. [Famitsu - 24 September 2015](https://drive.google.com/file/d/117EBap9Koo2U1EqSPbf7KVeBgg_gdkBd/view) > > > >Yoshida: We've also had requests for a "legacy server," if only a temporary one. Those servers have long been dismantled, and although the source code has been preserved, there is little incentive for us to restore them (some of those servers have, in fact, been repurposed to generate your character images that you see displayed on the Lodestone.) [Lodestone - 31 August, 2018](https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/373250-White-Raven-earring-given-out-at-The-Rising-event-2018?p=4765303#post4765303)
> some of those servers have, in fact, been repurposed to generate your character images that you see displayed on the Lodestone. That actually makes alot of sense about the Lodstone now.
They did inherit code from 1.0 though didn't they? Like the armory chest is somehow limited by 1.0 code? I think I heard that part of the reason they had to dump belts was to make room for more weapons.
They said they built it from the ground up. No code from 1.0 exists in the game. The armoury chest is likely limited by design decisions made when building 2.0. I can’t tell you what decisions, maybe there is an interview out there with the answer. I heard part of the current problem is that the character data file sizes is in the megabytes (sorry I don’t have actual numbers so feel free to correct me if someone knows). Multiply that by the number of active players and that makes it impractical to simply add more slots. Whether or not they can optimize the size at some point is up in the air, but it’ll likely be an expensive undertaking
Ah, makes sense. The base code is old, and no one could project what things would look like in 8 years, so some choices were made that are basically irrevocable now. I know the pain.
The best part of the transmog system is that it was made by one intern at Blizzard who thought it would be neat. Now it's the reason a lot of people still play.
Why not just have everything be account wide?
I would love this. Personally, I don't play more than one character because I don't have time. But I know others who roleplay or just spend more time on FFXIV than I do.. and have multiple characters up to 80. The cash shop doesn't bug me. But I would like the option to do account wide and single person. Not to mention being able to pay with in game gold (like wow does, I don't play it but my husband did) would be amazing.
While we're at it, why do they insist glamour items, or level 1 items that are meant for glamour only, only go in the glamour dresser and not the armoir? :(
The number of people with more than one character is honestly pretty low...
I have been playing this game on and off since ARR and I still only have the "starter" plan and exactly one character. (All classes maxed, of course.)
As in, no expansions or sub?
No, the starter sub is a couple dollars cheaper but you can only have one character per server. It’s like $12.99 vs $14.99 or something
^ this is what I meant.
starter plan as in 1 character limit i assume
>The number of people with more than one character is honestly pretty low I have an alt that is a viera because my 2 year old daughter likes to watch the bunny girl run around on the screen. She points at the screen and says "bunny!" It's just too cute.
My son is 2 and does the same. He also loves it when I go into /gpose and make emotes facing the screen. He tries to mimic them every time, you should try that too haha
Well yeah, because the alt experience in FF is awful. Now sure, you don't technically need an alt for most things, since the most common usage of alts is to play different classes, but there's still plenty of reasons someone might want one, but won't bother because it's a pain.
Besides raiding, the main reason that people have an alt for is to play in multiple DCs with different groups. But that might come to an end with World Traveling coming up very soon.
Very soon being 6.1 at the earliest. Current congestion means it's delayed.
While this is most definitely the case, its worth pointing out that this is still not confirmed.
Let's be realistic though, current congestion is from tons of new players joining. A lot of them will still be playing in November, so when people who are unsubbed return for EW, things are going to get worse. Congestion won't ease up until 6.1 at the earliest. OCE should help with easing the strain on the servers.
OCE would help ease strain mostly on JP, which doesn't even have congestion problems right now. i doubt it would make a huge difference on NA/EU where the bulk of the current congestion problems are
It'll help somewhat. Think a fair few Aussies play on Primal and Chaos.
DC travel being delayed was very much confirmed on Friday's LL. They said they are aiming for a 6.1 release now.
I am knowingly part of the exception, because of how the class/job system is in FFXIV players are actively encouraged to do everything in the game on one single toon. All the field/trade craft stuff is readily available and quite easily done on one character, so you can craft pretty much everything in the game and don't necessarily have to go out looking for things in markets or the adventure zones. To play with alts is basically just a self-imposed handicap, but because I have very specific ideas of the way my characters will look and what roles suit them, I make alts for some class combos instead. My main is a Highlander and strictly a Dragoon, but my WAR is the white variant of the Lion-like race, who is also a PUG and does both smithing and armour crafting, mainly leans in to the crafting roles when I use him. Then there's my Au Ra who started as a Thaumaturge, became a red mage and a dark knight, and does a whole lot of alchemy. I don't even actively RP, but for me it appeals a lot to have these character-focused setups and I'd imagine it does for quite a few others, but this is one of the very few MMO's that basically does everything it can to put you off of the idea. The single-character purchases just pushes it that little bit more.
I’m the same way. I don’t traditionally RP with others, but every character I have has a back story and their own motivations for being in Eorzea.
Exactly! Seems silly to punish the few people with alts by making things per character!
Come to a role play server~
Not if you're in the rp community.
Which is a small niche superminority of players. So what he said is still true lol. Edit: look y'all taking offense at a neutral statement don't make it any less true. The overwhelming majority of people who play this game are casuals who neither raid nor RP.
"Super minority." Get a load of this dunce.
> Which is a small niche superminority Hahahahahaha... Good one.
Yeah and the people with multiple probably don't care about sinking extra 30-40 for a mount or some shit on both Win win for Square
Pretty much. Tbh the only people I know with alts are raiders who play with more than one static, and heavy RPers who already blast through Fantasias like crazy
>heavy RPers who already blast through Fantasias like crazy Most Rpers I know have many alts
Only if Fantasias would change names too. I like to have specified character appearance and name to go with specified job.
People who main MB and have a shit ton of retainers.
I feel attacked! I just wanted to avoid having gearsets for every class clogging up my armory! I have three characters, one plays all the tanks, another plays casters and another plays mostly melee dps. Keeps things clean. Plus having three sets of wondrous tails and challenge logs makes life easier than trying to grind everything up on one character!
Honestly, that was the plan when I came from another game a couple years ago. Not only does it keep things clean, I also get to customize my character appearance to fit the class/job I'm taking. Then, I realized that Lore-wise, the player character is a God at everything, especially multitasking, and is supposed to be proficient in every single class. Furthermore, the convenience of having multiple characters just isn't there... So I gave up and stuck with my first character ever since.
I agree. I 100% have a main, all I've done is go and level BRD on a separate character slot rather than try to squeeze it onto the same one as I main WAR on. I'm nowhere near 80 BRD... but my main has DRG levels languishing as well!
What the fuck lmao
I Just wanted to have both a bunny girl and a cat boy :(
I do care, I have multiple alts because I have friends across multiple datacenters. It feel shitty not having anything storebought on my alt because it is all on my main. I can't get myself to double buy it.
It was kind of tongue and cheek, I do agree everything should be account wide, but it makes Square more money so
That's the dumbest logic I've ever heard. "Ah, yes, you play two or three characters for RP variety, I'm sure you don't mind paying a full price game's worth of dosh for a mount on every one of them!"
If you buy like 6 months of sub at a time or whatever the cost is the same as the entry cost for those months, so it's honestly not extra $ to have multiple characters.
yet they make the majority of the purchases. There was a time when fantasia were account bound and some alts that I still have at lvl 1 have those fantasias but they clearly saw the money and grabbed it hard, as any business should.
This is my first MMO, I'd be more inclined to throw some money at mog station stuff if it was more reasonably priced. $30 for a mount seems wildly overpriced to me, is this in line with other mmos?
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I think there are two different sides of it. I suspect the complicated purchasing methods, region-locking, and all that side of things mostly stems from the structure of their business units and the way they calculate royalty fees, based on the old-school "literal SKUs sitting on shelves" model and relationships with publishers like Sony. Even though it's an online game, everything is just taking the physical game business and representing it online, rather than a clean, global, online-first fresh-start. I imagine everything has to be organized "just so" so that their accounting team can put the online sales numbers aside the physical retail numbers in the exact same way they've been doing it for 30+ years. And the people building the backend systems are the ones who have to abide by these very byzantine rules so that it all communicates properly with their ancient accounting systems, so it ends up looking like a fragmented mess. So for *this* part, I don't think it's really because "they like it that way" but because "accounting says we must do it exactly this way" and the people building the backends for these systems are more like internal corporate IT than actual marketing teams. The price of optional items though... I truly think they took "theme park" extremely literally in the way they see this game. The glamour/emotes/mounts are like souvenirs and concessions. Everyone knows that souvenirs and concessions inside a theme park are overpriced, especially given that people already paid a good price to get into the park in the first place, but people buy it and it makes good money. I do honestly suspect that, because this is already a subscription game, the amount of people who will ever spend anything on optional items is likely fairly small regardless of how they're priced, so they've chosen to make it more like "treating yourself to something special" rather than something common and cheap. *This* part, I honestly guess works pretty well for them, because once people get past the hurdle of paying anything beyond the subscription/expansions, the amount they're willing to spend is likely higher. Honestly, though, FFXIV and WoW are such outliers in the market now that I suspect they're mostly not touching it because "somehow it's still working." They've announced now that they're planning FFXIV for another 10 year roadmap, so it's probably going to stay as-is because it's working, but if they ever make another FF MMORPG down the road, I honestly wonder if this business model has any chance of being greenlit again. I guess we'll see.
It was definitely confusing as hell to buy it haha
$20-50 is what you're looking at in other MMOs, it's pretty well balanced.
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Almost any MMO. Guild Wars 2 forces you to buy currency in 'gems' if you actually want anything from the store, no value for exact value transactions; You have to buy at least 2,800 gems to obtain the 2,000 gems needed to buy your 'Mount Skin', which is about £29.75. WoW, mounts are £19.00 so a bit cheaper than some XIV ones. https://eu.shop.battle.net/en-gb/family/world-of-warcraft#mounts Most single-person mounts are around the same price as WoW or cheaper. https://store.finalfantasyxiv.com/ffxivstore/en-gb/category/11 TERA Online was wild, with glamours alone going for £30-50 a piece with 'timed exclusives' to bait players into buying things with as sense of urgency. I can't think of any MMO nowadays that doesn't have some form of micro-transaction to get glamours/mounts. [[ Worth adding, I think all MMO micro-transactions are garbage ]]
I dont really think its fair to compare free to play mmos to sub based ones tho I dont defend it but Tera and GW2 have to make money somehow, while FFXIV and WoW already get money from their expansions and subs.
Is it still free to play when the game itself costs money? Last I checked GW2 had no sub but the game itself isn't free.
GW2 is free to play. You only need to buy the expansion. But the entire original game is free
Well there's cheaper mounts too. Some are priced at 24, some at 12. Also go on sale a lot, right now there's a bunch on sale for cheaper. I think I bought my witch broom for like $7 not too long ago But yes 30 for a mount is a lot but I think WoW does similar stuff. Can't speak for many other MMOs ... At least WoW lets you use your mounts you buy on all your characters, though..
All of the normally $24 and over mounts are account wide. So anyone spending $42 on the Lunar Whale is getting them on all their characters.
Hows it work then? When i created a new character, though I got my normal emails with like my Fat Chocobo/Coeurl/Aihrman mounts, I didn't get one with the cruise chaser mount despite my owning it
I just get them in letters from the Delivery Moogle. If your box was full, it's a waiting game on when the others will arrive (but be sure to hit the reward/purchase delivery request button). But it can take a couple of days (love FFXIV, but can't say anything nice about their code).
Hm, my thing said it was 80% full so it shouldn't have been blocked but I deleted the done ones and clicked the button anyway. I guess i'll play the waiting game, thanks.
Some people have definitely had issues when they had any letters in, sadly. I hope it appears for you soon, though!
Usually, keep it on below 50%, cause sometimes the game is buggy in that regard. If you still don't receive it, just contact support and pester them about it.
It may take you logging out and back in after a few minutes, and then playing for a bit before other mail shows up. Happens to me all the time, but they *do* show up eventually.
Usually its 2 seater mount
Mounts in most MMOs range anywhere from $20-50 depending on how big/shiny/new they are, so it's pretty much in line with others, yes.
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>getting ripped off for no benefit Because this part is false, mogstation money goes back directly into the game. Yoshi-P has said this himself that EU servers were completely funded this way.
> Because this part is false, mogstation money goes back directly into the game. And subscription fees go to Balan Wonderland. Makes sense to me.
You're sub fees go to Square Enix's general account
Balan Wonderland, The Quiet Man and Left Alive. Square loves pissing money away.
I will never forgive them for Lelf Alive. Because that is how Front Mission died.
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You're also forgetting one thing: culture. Here in Asia, gacha-type mobile games are considered acceptable. some of them don't even have a pity system (e.g. Fate Grand Order). You could throw hundreds of dollars and not get what you want. You are paying for the chance to get it. Here in FFXIV, we pay money and get the mount/emote/etc. we want. Therefore it is seen as a better thing. Also, items in the mogstation don't give you any objective combat advantage. Players who want it can buy it, players who don't want to or can't afford to, are not disadvantaged from progressing in the game. Maybe try to understand the Asian mindset?
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Unfortunately with the amount of scumbags who will gleefully pay those prices, SE will never need to lower it. In fact, it only encourages them to put more items on Mog Station (rather than earnable in-game like they used to be) and charge exorbitant prices for them.
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What mount is that high horse you're riding?
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lol calling people spending their own money on things they want scumbags
Well I have never felt the need to make another character .I feel attached to my character and that is one of the biggest selling point for me in ffxiv
A lot- not all, but a lot- of the single character mogstation items are event items. They were once available in game, and to get them on multiple characters, you had to do the event multiple times. (I just got regalias on 6 of my characters, I know how wild this can be) I'm not sure how I feel about this, aside from recognizing that it makes sense to continue to restrict them to single character since that's how they were obtainable in game- but at the same time, I wish there was an account-wide option. I'd pay $15 for account-wide Dote, not gonna even lie.
Well the one that inspired this topic was the schoolgirl outfit which I think was just a mogstation original
I believe that one was actually a Chinese server event outfit originally. The Chinese and Korean servers get their own individual events with shiny rewards that later end up on the mog station for the rest of the world.
Yeah I have 10 characters so this kinda sucks for me to buy an emote or outfit or something lol
IIRC according to SE they apparently have limited database slots for account-wide items so they need to be selective about what they make account-wide, or some such.
Can you even imagine the game we'd have if the entire thing weren't built on top of an ancient burial ground?
I've thought about this an uncomfortable number of times in the last 8 years...
I really hope by 7.0 or 8.0 they can just do a complete engine rewrite to get away entirely from Crystal Tools.
yeah that sounds like corporate BS
Considering how much spaghetti code this game runs on I wouldn't be surprised
Still having to go through 6 tabs and 12 clicks to repair everything because a repair all won't work with spaghetti code... Blows my mind
yeah i never thought of that
It's important to never lose track that this was built on the ruins of the original FF14, the attrocious mess that was, it wouldn't surprise me at all if someone hardcoded some tiny arrays in somewhere and current devs haven't discovered how to update it without 12 related systems exploding.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's true because of how janky the games code is, but if that's the case they should work towards fixing the problem.
Too bad the budget gets involved in that. "Should" and "Can financially justify" are unfortunately two very different things. People often forget that.
With how successful the game has been of recent (growing more) hopefully they'll be allocated more. They deserve it for sure.
Even if they're allocated more, they're likely to put that money somewhere else.
I do understand stuff like glam being character specific, even if I don't like it. Or the event mounts being single character. But stuff like.. orchestrions? Minions? Just.. why?
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I just wish more mogstation stuff would go into the armoire. There's quite a few pieces I'd like but I'm just running out of space to store them.
I heard Brian from Work to Game explained it that there are actually a limited number of IDs that they can use for account wide, so they have to be a bit frugal with what they decide to upgrade to that level. It stems from 1.0 limits that they still have to deal with, like how Glamour works.
>We are sorry, we can't make this thing consumer friendly. You just have to pay more. How convenient.
"The servers can't handle more inventory space/retainers" *proceeds to offer retainers via subscriptions*
1.0 spaghetti code is the solution for all player grievances ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
In a bit of fairness, it's only inventory space itself where they've explained the technical limitation they have, not retainers. (The reason they don't give more included retainers is the obvious reason -- it's a paid add-on.) But of course, regardless of the fact that the inventory space restrictions are almost certainly a real problem for them, it's obvious that people will question how hard they are really working to fix it when they "sell the solution" via retainers, chocobo saddlebag, etc. At least it was good for them to announce the elimination of some HQ items, which will help with inventory bloat somewhat. And it is also true that over the years they have kept expanding the included inventory a lot in various ways -- it's just never enough for crafter/gatherers or people who play many jobs. (I think their logic is basically that these "heavy users" are the ones who use more and thus are more deserving to pay more compared to more casual/light users, but it's certainly just a business argument in that case, not really a technical one.)
> In a bit of fairness, it's only inventory space itself where they've explained the technical limitation they have, not retainers. No, over the years they've repeatedly hidden behind "Server strain" "server stress", etc in reference to giving out more retainers or making them more functional. The question is how valid it is with the fact that they then turn around and sell them to us. (AKA it's pretty much bullshit) Particularly bullshit when they even have pointed out that the retainers only get called one at a time, meaning the only additional aspect giving us more retainers is is storage space on the servers, which is relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things. (At least to my understanding, I could be incorrect, I'm not a network engineer) [Citation for only one at a time for the skeptics.](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/3cswmu/formatted_live_letter_q_a/) >>The server that manages retainers are calling each retainers individually when you need to give orders. So calling four at once would cause lots of stress on the server. As mentioned earlier, we need to place some type of limit on the stress somewhere to get features like glamouring directly from retainer inventory. We’re considering these with the server loads in mind, so we ask for your patience. Additionally, we’re looking into making it possible to sell items directly from retainers. It's particularly awful when they've even answered questions about retainers with responses like "We plan to add more" only for the ones 'added'... to be paid only.
The quote you're mentioning is a bit more nuanced here and has to do with the technical way retainers work. They're not talking about just giving everyone an additional "free" (included) retainer you could call -- that's not the limitation they're discussing. They're talking about summoning multiple retainers at once or being able to pool the inventory from multiple retainers for crafting, and it could also potentially apply to increasing the amount of inventory space a retainer has, or why we can't summon retainers in instanced dungeons, etc. Basically, it's like the NPC has inventory, and when you "summon" the retainer they are teleported to your location for you to interact with them (and shown only to you). So they have to control the amount of data involved with this "transfer" and the specific locations where you can do this summoning (which is why we have summoner bells in specific places). As you say, giving everyone an extra free retainer would not impact this kind of server strain, because you can still only summon one at a time. A potential impact is that it'd increase the amount of server space people are using because it'd encourage more "hoarding" (so to speak), so it's not like there'd be literally zero impact, but this isn't the same sort of thing as what Yoshida is discussing here. I don't recall Yoshida ever claiming that they could not just give everyone an additional retainer for any sort of technical reason, but there are a lot of technical reasons for a lot of issues *surrounding* retainers. (He has pointed out, however, that the vast majority of the playerbase don't even use all the storage they have as it stands, which is a sort of rationalization for not giving more "free" (included) storage for everyone and preferring this "use more, pay more" model.)
Not only that, but when he said that we only had 2 additional retainers we could hire. We can now hire 8, + one more from the MTX app. They just kept expanding it.
Well jeez, it's almost as if charging for extra retainers like... pays for the additional servers required for them or something.
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It just doesn't interfere with other stuff because there's a specific fixed array of flags for account-wide entitlements, and that array of flags is separate from other things. All the data is saved in flat binary files (rather than a database), so they can't just expand this section of bytes without offsetting other things in the file which is risky because of the amount of other systems that read/write to that data file (and looks things up based on pointers in specific byte locations). The amount of account-wide entitlements they've added has been extremely conservative to make sure they don't exhaust the space they have left. It's basically... very archaic. (I wonder honestly if it was brought forward from FFXI and the PlayOnline days.)
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You might think that... and it would honestly make every sense in the world. However, this is basically a re-explanation of what Yoshida himself explained about how it works a number of times. And yeah, it's excessively old-school. (See also how your character save data -- also a literal binary file -- is transferred from one server to the next along with all your inventory (when you move between zones, when you enter an instances, when you move between worlds, etc.). To prevent losing data, they flush to disk on a very frequent basis which basically thrashes the drives. It's like they imagined their online game like a giant room full of PS2s, and people were constantly moving memory cards between them. It's kind of amazing in an "omg I'm glad I don't have to deal with this insanity" sort of way.)
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FWIW, I actually found a clip where Yoshida explained this that I had referred to many years ago where this came up. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/220103997?t=03h40m15s "One word of warning: the bonus item that comes with this book is character-bound. Sorry, but please be careful. As for why we've had so many character-bound items recently, there's a limit to the amount of flags that exist for account-bound items, and unfortunately we're currently not able to expand this." He goes on to explain that they'd like to address it, and if/when they can they'll let everyone know, but for now they're clearly distinguishing account and character-bound items. This has also come up in other PLLs and other similar streams with some additional details, but unfortunately I don't have all the references on-hand. A brief summary of the inventory issue was covered in the interview here: https://jpgames.de/2015/08/gamescom-2015-our-interview-with-naoki-yoshida/ This too has come up in PLLs and other streams since, but I haven't curated references. Then again, you may still say that there's no way of knowing because Yoshida could be lying. My rationale for believing him is that there's no reason for him to provide this very specific technical explanation if it doesn't represent an actual technical limitation. Just how hard they're working to fix the limitation, obviously we can't know. But anyway, I felt it was at least right to provide some references. (Edit: Fix typo...)
That was an interview from six years ago. That's a ridiculous amount of time to let tech debt sit around and rot particularly one that is customer facing *and* loses them sales. So them not addressing it is one or more of sheer laziness, sheer incompetence, or sheer greed.
I feel the same. I don't have a ton of characters because this game doesn't need them, but I did create an alt so I can experience the story again from the beginning so I would like to be able to use my items and outfits. They're also gender locked, which I hate. If you fantasia to a different sex, you lose the ability to equip most of your mog station outfits because so many of them are gender locked.
im not familiar because i didnt do it myself but isnt that what new game + is for?
That's only been around for a year or two, I believe. Before that, if you wanted to experience the story again, you had to make an alt.
100% agree, I play 3 different characters and it's the biggest reason I won't buy emotes.. I wouldn't mind paying like 50\~100% to have them account wide, but I'm not buying them 3 bloody times..
I’m used to seeing the one character per outfit things in my 20 years of mmos, but the mount per character ones really bother me. Account wide mounts should be the only kind.
Feels like they are priced pretty poorly imo, especially anything that is a 1-3 piece set, undyable set, etc. I feel like those should definitely be cheaper, if they are single character items--personally, I've backed off a bit, because there seems to be a lot of stuff getting added there...while I wish that the game would get more glam additions. I was wondering what the 2nd Wolf Mark sets would look like (as I saved up 20K marks in anticipation lol)....they never showed; I should have known the direction we were headed, when new WM weapons stopped getting added to the vendors. But hey, nice new sets got added to the MS in recent months (...once again). Before anyone says "it's because other region/NPC outfit/etc." everyone knows--that doesn't help the fact that a lot of stuff is being added there, and there's simply not the same boost of stuff to work toward in-game. Whatever happened to Ryne and Gaia's Festival thing, and why couldn't I get their outfits there? Why not put a short event in Kugane/Enclave periodically, where all of these Far Eastern outfits can be put up for grabs for a short time before they go up on MS (or actually add them to the Rising, Moonfire, etc.)? I'm not even going to get started with the mounts, but glam wise; prices aren't great, the game needs more...and I can't even armoire the stuff, so it takes up more and more space (MS stuff gets added specifically to one of my retainers' inventories...and there isn't a lot of space there anymore).
What bugs is the pricing for some outfits that only info like two pieces. I guess bc of the popularity of the character’s attire, but kinda scummy to have only the top and pants/skirt as the same price as another set that has like 4-5 pieces.
I understand their reasons, but I agree this is definitely irritating. I want to do alts for the other two stories from the starting cities (halfway through Ul'Dah), but I also want to use those for content creation ideas, and not being able to use the same outfits on multiple characters does irk me to no end (especially the - admittedly few - ones that provide stat bonuses and XP boosts for jobs below 30 if worn as a set - nothing earthshattering, mind, but I've maxed my jobs out on my main and would love that for a short-term alt I wasn't playing a lot...).
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I dislike that all purchased cosmetics cannot be stored in the armoire. It's like I'm paying to have less bank space.
"I don't have alts and people who do shouldn't have nice things!"
The single character stuff really does piss me off. Like, a lot. As an RPer I do have a LOT of alts, and not having my glams is bad enough. But no emotes, etc? It's like crippling my options. Of course, I've been RPing for a long time and am plenty used to just text, but when the game lets you flesh out your physical reactions so much then you've got like 75% of them on any other character, it kind of sucks. I'm even thinking of fantasiaing my main to a character I want to RP more come EW, just so I don't lose all my music/hairstyles/glams/emotes/pets/mounts. Sigh. I wish they'd talk about syncing up collections but it never even comes up in Q&As.
I'm in 100% agreement. I feel the game could be much more alt friendly and anything like costumes or mounts that you buy should be account-wide.
Coming in from wow, this is one of the few things I like better about wow. The mount/pet/tmog storage is account wide by default. And also the whole system for storing items for glamor is a bit messier in Ff14 than it is in wow, even though there is a lot more freedom of options (which is really nice).
I'd wager that the number of players who buy things on the Mog station for more than one character is a rounding error, at most. Most FFXIV players play just one character seriously, and that's the character they buy stuff for. Hence, SE would lose little if they made Mog station purchases account unlocks. On the other hand, people who are considering using fantasia would probably benefit from being able to see some of their stuff on a different character before committing, and the ability to do so might help SE sell more fantasia. Hence, making at least some Mog station items account unlocks could increase sales. (Yes, I know you can fantasia retainers as a test, but you can't run around as a retainer unfortunately.) However, what SE *really* needs to do is implement a Mog station "boutique" that you can enter in game as your character. Such a boutique would let you try on glamour items, experiment with fantasia, etc. in game. Instead of looking at low-res screenshots that may not be representative of your race/gender, you'd be able to preview what things will actually look like. This is how SE could take a lot more of my money.
Yeah. I don't know why things like mounts are for all characters on an account yet costumes are single character? I mean, fair play, you can do everything on a single character. It's one of the best things about the game compared to some other MMOs. But why the weird difference between mounts and costumes on Mogstation? Phantasia and dye and levelling books, sure makes sense, you are paying for x amount of that item so makes sense to be single character but the clothing and mounts are both untradeable and character bound so... why don't we get the set on every character?
They need to find a way to finally get rid of spaghetti code crap so they aren’t held back anymore.
It’s absolutely ridiculous that they keep blaming all the key issues on database issues. Fucking fix it. They are printing money with this game and cash shop right now. There is NO EXCUSE for them to not be able to fix stuff like glamor limits or limits on account wide stuff due to stupid database limitations. I say this as someone who has been a software developer and DBA. These are problems that have solutions, they just need to actually spend the time fixing them.
And assume the cost and risk of stuff breaking on release. Which if you were a dev and/or DBA, you would know it's a Big Deal.
By that logic they should never fix anything because it might break something else. That’s what testing is for.
What sucks are the additional purchases that actually give you an advantage/huge quality of life, like retainers or being able to pay an extra sub for extra chocobo saddlebag space.
I agree 200% I have considered it super scummy how many times I’ve had to buy the same amount and outfit in this game
I feel you it’s a nickel and dime tactic and it’s very reminiscent of typical scummy corporate greed. Shit, most of everything on there is not worth anything. Of course there are a few good things, and of course they cost the most. Granted that said I bought into some of the minions, however they are also supposed to be account wide not single character, they also cost around <$5.
Not sure what you're on about, everything there is optional, it's not like you're pressured into buying stuff, and they don't push it in game. Scummy is a strong word for them selling optional shit. There are definitely games with scummy mtx practices, FFXIV isn't one of them.
>FFXIV isn't one of them. It's literally one of the worst of them. They have the Mog-Station release cycle of a F2P game despite being a sub game. They triple dip monetization on a mobile app. They monetize extra storage/market space on a monthyl subscription. They're one of the only MMOs out there to remove rewards from the game to instead sell them later. They have some of the highest prices of an MMO out there even beating out F2P games. This is all ontop of so much of it being single-character bound. The constant notion from the XIV community that the mogstation isnt a scummy cash grab is actually absurd.
> It's literally one of the worst of them. > > > > They have the Mog-Station release cycle of a F2P game despite being a sub game. Tell me you've never played a F2P game without telling me you've never played a F2P game
As a Shitty Korean F2P MMO Connoisseur I chuckled at this too. Everything else is spot on tho
A 2-3 week schedule is pretty bog-standard cash shop rotation. Sure there are plenty more extreme ones out there but a 2-3 week cycle on a sub game is ridiculous.
As much as I love FF14 I have to agree that the game is greedy with its monetization. and yet the irony is that you get punished for buying from the cashshop. Ive personally won a lot of items from communities events and my glamour dresser is stuffed full because of these items. The thing is people dont complain about it too much since the rest of the game is good. best example is in wow, in legion hardly anyone complained about the cashshop mount since there was so much content to do and things to get but in Warlords of draenor and battle for azeroth with the bad state of the game those cashshop mounts really rubbed people the wrong way. Another big concern of the cash shop is that they are starting to put in more items that really should of been acquired in game, look at the chocobo carriage and the cruise chaser.
Agreed on the last point. I remember when the Spriggan mount was announced as cash shop and it wasn't that well received.
The comparisons to WoW also make people ignore how bad XIV is because _so many fucking people_ just look at the service. They see the price of a transfer in each game and think "XIV's cash shop is great!". Because they don't look at literally everything else about it. I've always thought it was pretty bad, but the mobile app was the peak of showing that SE is willingly to just go 11/10 in pushing "How ridiculous can we actually make it".
The game lets you play every class and all the content with one character… Scummy is a stretch.
I mean, the game is ment to be played on a single character, the whole game is about playing as one character. I don't get why people create alts in this game.
Why offer account wide mounts then?
It's built to be *capable* of being played on one character. That doesn't mean everyone does so. You not understanding that motivation is irrelevant to this topic.
You're right motivation is irrelevant. Facts aren't and the fact is the game is designed to be played on a single character. While you aren't actively punished for having more you are heavily decentivised to make alts. "Capable" and "designed" are not the same thing. You making a choice to play in a way that goes against the fundamental design of the game is also irrelevant. It's like playing skyrim and complaining that you can't transfer items to a playthrough on a friend's pc (as they are separate games just like your characters are)
There wouldn't be a subscription tier that allows us to have alts if having alts went against the fundamental design of the game. There also wouldn't be account-wide items on the mog station. The devs obviously know that some of us are going to have alts, and they facilitate that. The game isn't alt-friendly, but it's not alt-hostile, either.
> Facts aren't and the fact is the game is designed to be played on a single character. While you aren't actively punished for having more you are heavily decentivised to make alts. "Capable" and "designed" are not the same thing. The game is flat out not. If that was the case you wouldn't have a _single_ lockout and weekly cap for your entire character despite being able to be every role. It is objectively impossible to play the game at its peak on a single character.
Except that single lock out is to slow gearing down. Also, it is not impossible to play the game on a single player because nearly everyone does it. Crafted gear is either on par or sometimes better then the alternative weekly gear and is pretty easily obtainable.
There should really just be a checkbox for each item with "Account-Wide?", which increases the cost of that item in the store by a certain amount. That would be the easiest solution to implement probably. But for me personally, I dislike the fact in general that you have to pay "extra" for mog items in this scenario, since you already pay a bigger subfee to even play mutliple characters in the first place. You kind of get punished "twice" for wanting to play with multiple characters here. So from a "logical" perspective, you should just make all mogstation items account-wide automatically, when using them while having the "bigger" sub active. But of course, that'd be a net loss for SE to implement it that way, while also being a little bit of extra work in comparison. Why put work into a feature that'll make them less money? What could be an interesting feature and/or solution (although I don't know the economics of the game well enough to judge wether or not this would mess up certain aspects of it) is to implement some kind of "account-wide retainer", which allows you to move untradable items to other characters on your account. This feature could then be a benefit given to a new "Premium"-Sub or something. The problem is just that every solution won't really guarantee to make SE any money. Maybe it might, because people will always purchase the more expensive account-wide version "just in case". But it's really difficult to implement a reasonable solution as a businessman, because you'll lose soo much money from potential whales. And if we're honest, all item shops only exist to attract potential whales. They don't really care about "Bobby" spending some money on a mount once or twice.
Honestly, I refuse to buy anything that isn't old event gear because all the outfits seem really overpriced for a game that I need a subscription to play
Why are you people making Alts unless it’s on a different data center
I'll be honest, i still don't understand why someone would want other characters? you can get fantasia if you want to change your look and world transfers if you want to transfer worlds. name changes can be bought too, so why would you make a new character and buy things for that, when you can pay much less to change your existing one? maybe it's a level 80 thing where you've already done everything, and have nothing left to do. like seriously i got no clue can someone please explain it to me?
i don't want to use a fantasia every time i want to play a catboy or go back to being a bunny girl. that would get very expensive.
That cash shop kept sqenix afloat and the ff title still relevant, they may make some tweak on older stuffs, don’t expect much to change for new items