Why Having an Alt in FFXIV Sucks 

I'm glad I'm not the only one

I like to theme my characters.

That’s my mood

I just bought like 6 re edit potions, pretty cheap. And I have 3 saved characters ill change race depending how I feel :)

i'm the same way, i like to mess around on the character creator and see what i come up with. Heck i've had characters completely unrelated to XIV start life as a random design i did on the character creator. lol

Same. Got a bunch of very different characters on various servers, doing different jobs on each one.

Add me to list and reasons, I have 3 mains, each has a tank, heal and at least 1 dps class, as well as the matching tradeskills. I have more that I don't play as much so they each got a level and story skip while they were on sale.

Same. Have several alts mostly because of the races and genders. Like I love cute hyur female main but I want a hot tall and intinidating male au ra as well. And a cat boy 🤷‍♀️

I do have alts as well. One for each starting zone. Alts to me means more chances at making more friends. Love the game for the story and to me, I don't mind the grind to get my alts up there, cause in the end it is just fun to me.

Agree with this one hundred fifty percent. I get bored with looking at the same type of character and I don't want to fantasia. I want to one day log into my bunny, one day log into my lala, one day in my catgirl. It is a pain in the butt to level, and I hate that I can't send stuff that I get on one character to another character than can use it.

Same, random internet stranger, same.

she is sooo cute

I heard "hey bums" and was confused at why she was opening in such a harsh manner

PLEASE

P A I N

you dont know the way, cause you would go from limsa making it 5 second journey and mute point :P

Yea and alt in bdo has a lot of benefit like energy storage or daily login silver

In ragnarok online too there was like the storage system that was account wide. All your items shared trhough your characters

They don't share cosmetics? That's something that _should_ be shared. That's one of the bad things about FF14s cash shop, that the cosmetic stuff you buy from it like mounts, outfits and emotes aren't account bound.

@@TheDaxter11 Well, look at the costumes in BDO and the different classes/races... it'll make some sense. I don't like it, but I get it.

@@TouchedProductions I mean if there's class specific outfits then yeah, but it can still be account bound and just only work if you ever make a second character using a certain class or if you lose a character for whatever reason.

You might need therapy bud

@@GuncaFromlv He's right though.

@@GuncaFromlv XIV is kind of a madhouse tbh.

That's definitely me xD

Oh wow. Sociopaths detected.

Seriously... Physical merch should always be account wide. I'm not gonna buy more than one lorebook SE!

They...aren't account-wide? That is absolutely despicable!

@@splenetic_sylph Nope

You buy art book now! We no allow fair use of item! Hurry up and buy!

That’s a very good way to play a game like this. Games are to be enjoyed not just completed.

I felt that.

Bunnyboy Dragoon!!

I have a catgirl main and I'm creating a dragon girl alt and bunny girl alt

You’re an alt-aholic

@@confidential5743 Fine! take your upvote! 😆

Yeah I was going to say I remember reading about a bug to friend an alt awhile back.

Oh, does that not work anymore? I friended a couple of alts when the alt+F4 re-log worked (at least, it did if you were on a SSD)

@@ComradeNexus I think they patched it.

The fact your alts can't use the same house is absurd!

@@ComradeNexus Patched several years ago

On the technical side, everything you own in the game has to be tracked and recorded by the system, and that data has to reside somewhere. More inventory space = more items = more data that needs to be tracked. Furthermore, accessing those items requires transmitting and receiving data between the servers and the client for each item accessed. Doing all of that costs real-world money on SE's end, which is why increasing the amount of data your character consumes both at rest (when not looking at it) and in motion (when accessing the inventory) has a fee associated with it.

@@Eibon Yet.. WoW have no problems with this, nor sells you more space for money. GW2 is a one time purchase for more item space. I'm sorry to say, but if, 175 items at a retainer, costs under 2 dollars (because profit) then honestly, something is wrong with your game at a fundamental level. If ONE retainer is worth 2 dollars, then I don't want to know how much one player character is worth, the entire sub?

@@PolarEclipse remember you can have more than 1 character per account and each of those characters gets the extra retainer if you buy them, so you technically are buying more than 1 retainer

@@PolarEclipse lots of text below, so a quick tl;dr: I think the main points to keep in mind when looking at a decision like this are that "game designers are not stupid" and that "every implementation has been carefully considered." For a company as large as SE, many talented people have done intense calculations to figure out the best way to walk the fine line of giving the best experience to players while still making/saving enough money to support the game and grow the company (and both sides of that line are important). To your specific points, you can't directly compare how one game implements something this technical to another game - WoW and GW2 will have different implementations of how they store and retrieve the data because the entire game is constructed differently; put another way, WoW's solution could not work in GW2, and could not work in FFXIV. There is an argument that theoretically can be made about the efficiency and methodology used to do those things, but since there's very little factual information about how SE does this (through things like Game Developer Conference talks), it's very difficult to say SE is doing it wrong compared to how Blizzard is doing it, etc. What's more likely is that Blizzard has chosen to monetize in other ways, but I don't know enough about WoW to point to what those ways might be. In the little I've heard about FFXIV's programming, it is somewhat of an open secret that the game engine FFXIV uses is pretty old, so there definitely could be some spaghetti code in there making it more costly than it ideally could be to store and retrieve data. Fixing something like that, though, can sometimes cause more problems than it fixes, especially if the issue is really old, as that means it's likely more deeply connected to other parts of the game and risks breaking more things if changed. To your last question, the answer is sort of yes: Your subscription covers the cost of both any interactions with the system per allowances based on your sub type (so if your sub allows for multiple characters, a calculation has been done by SE to determine how likely it is people will make and regularly use alts, thus it's factored into the cost), as well as some of the budget for ongoing development of expansion, patch, and promotional content. Also worth considering: The monetary cost of a retainer creates a barrier that the developers could use to balance the game, in a sense. Beyond the accounting for the actual, real-world cost of storing and retrieving inventory data repeatedly, SE can exert some control over the economy in the game by making it harder for players to justify expanding their inventory, forcing players to make decisions about what to keep and what to sell/discard. I'm not saying they *do* for sure do this (again, no good factual information about this through dev talks), or that it is agreeable, just that it is absolutely a very real consideration I'm sure they've thought about.

​@@Eibon 1. We can't compare FF with any other game because of structural differences, You have a point, but it's a valid way to see what other companies are doing right/wrong, this is subjection to personal biases obviously but ok, FF is a standalone with no comparisons, let's roll with that. 2. Considering that the following items exist: on the cash shop: Fantasia, Dyes, Mounts, Level skips, etc, and Fantasia being one of the most popular consumables, there's no way, that you would need to fork over 2~ euros for one retainer, or 5~ euro for 70 more saddlebag slots. (and a mostly useless app to begin with) And as I said, if it cost you THAT much money to just swap around items in your saddlebags and retainers, then, just maybe, we have a bigger problem on our hands. If, in theory, every character costs more than your sub fee a month, then you have a problem that needs fixing, and this has been around since 2.0 (I'm pretty sure) So this is an issue, they could have looked into while rebuilding the game, but ignored if so, and implement a pay wall for more storage space, in a game that clogs your inventory already, lest we forget about the ventures the retainers can do. Thing is: Sever costs are, somewhat high, but not that high, considering f2p mmos can exist comfortably in this space, data transfer, is not expensive. Yes, mmos are expensive, but they are not extremely expensive, it's a "myth" that's been around since wow days. You do have a some points, I admit, but: I'm not going to defend a company that does something wrong when they do it wrong. The retainer system should not cost money, extra bag space should not cost money, we should have more glamour platers, more storage etc etc, but if everything is going to be paywalled because of costs, I'm afraid of what the future might hold. Quick closing note: WoW's type of monetizing was Subscription mainly, with *true* optional things like, race change, server transfers and the like. Only now on later days, have they been selling mounts and pets (undermining the game by doing so, by the way, the same thing SE does) and nobody likes it.

None, they wouldn't lose a single cent.

Dont call me out like that

They'd probably make more. Mog station mounts, hair, outfits, emotes mostly only unlock on one character so imagine how much they could make if people were buying that stuff on multiple characters. People would also still have mains because it's more convenient to do things like levelling, raiding, farming on one character.

@@yraco1232 I’m that person who has multiple alts and buys them stuff from Mogstation from time to time, like the sheep minion I love it so much I bought several copies on sale haha 😂

It is the only reason I have an alt

Took the words right out of my mouth. I feel the exact same way. When I first started I made about 6 characters so I'd have alts and decided to do my main first but after playing for a bit, understanding the game, and realizing I could play every job on my main character I never touched them again. They only exist on my login screen.

Same here, I can't stand the first few levels, also not having account wide items is just not forgivable honestly AND, imo, the races of ffxiv are the most vanilla thing ever, so boring, so I have no interest in changing anything, I have THE race I find it's the only decent one and that is it

That's why I don't have alts. I just don't have the time to plow thru the story again.

And I haaaaate it

I agree with this 100% with the possible exception of past event items that are put on the mogstation, as only one character would have been able to get them by doing the event in the first place. but otherwise, the idea of paying another $7 USD just to be able to /playdead on a second character is ludicrous. Paying a second $30 so my alt can have a maid dress is even more absurd.

same honestly. Can't imagine my catboy as anyone else, I even have problems changing hairstyles and sticking with them. I changed it once when I unlocked the barber but then couldn't change to anything else xd. still have my free fantasia

Same. I might not like the human cposes, I think the cposes shouldn't be race or gender locked, but I doubt I'll ever change race. I have a phantasia from the base game collectors edition and the one you get from finishing the base games story and I haven't used either of them. They're sitting in one of my retainers inventories collecting dust.

Same here. I've grown really attached to my character and how they look. It's so odd. Outside of armor I never really cared about a character before in an mmo. At least not to this extent. Got my free Fantasia's that will never be touched too.

This lack of name change with fantasia is exactly why I won't buy them. My alts have lore-friendly names or a pun with her/his apparence.

Yeah, it's unfortunate that you have to spend ten MORE dollars for a name change-I want to make my main an Au Ra because I like them and I have the free Fantasia from The Ultimate Weapon, but...she's a Miqo'te whose name is C'lantaa Septha. That's not very Raen Au Ra of me.

Yeah- 'because fantasia' makes no sense to me. I think it's "because story skip" lol

This is very good to know, thank you! Makes that extra couple bucks a month seem a lot more worthwhile.

Yeah and doing quick exploration has given me so much cool glam and items that I'd otherwise had to farm dungeons for.

I'm seriously glad this isn't just me. I started a few weeks ago and this has been..not the most annoying thing but wanting an alt of each race (and maybe gender too but haven't gone there yet) has made me feel like I'm playing wrong, and it kind of bugs me.

This pleases me for some reason haha

That is mostly the only reason xD

I dunno, those little buggers are pretty feisty.

^ THIS OMG! I made a hyur alt about a week ago on a different data center and I’m attached to him so much that I’m thinking about switching him with my current main.

Ths same for me. I call myself an altoholic. I like reliving the story and enjoy playing other races and characters and genders

This tbh ^

To me a fantasia isn't an alt- you're deleting the old character (character as in OC, not as in 'in game player account'), so....replacement, not alt

Yeah, the fact Zepla brought up is exactly the point we should be able to level another character without having to do everything again. There's a bunch of other MMOs that allows that and I feel XIV falls behind.

Psssst....hey...over here... Do you wanna try some fantasia?

@@SomeRandomDude235 I still have my free fantasia from ARR that I got like 6 months ago lmao

Why? I have an alt and I got it to lvl51 PLD before I even got the MSQ above lvl25. So preposterous! I had to switch and lvl BLM just to have something closer to the MSQ and even then it's too far ahead already!!!!

@@dr.fragrance3185 not everyone has all the time in the world so its hard to play an alt sometimes. Its boring to level up from 1-50, so it's a bit rude to say its totally preposterous.

@@CastiellaXIV well, partially, I had a lot of exp+ items. All I did to spam to 50 in a short time was do the daily dungeon. ONE dungeon a day for a very short time and then unlock new dungeons as they came. It wasn't a big time sink. The story and the beast tribe is way more of a time sink!!! So it can be very fast to level! I barely play my alt, I am one of the people that doesn't really understand the point. The only plausible reason I could see is for crafters. But I don't think it's worth it.

Perfect example of why it's not alt friendly.

You can't visit other data centers and you're restricted daily or weekly on different types of content per character

Well is allready good the fixed the fact you can still keep your chocobo out. Before you had to dismiss it for enter solo duty (so more greens wasted); i guess they might add it if both are on the same point of the story... But on that is not a big set back take off part and remake it