Quote:
Additional retainers are a luxury. You don't actually need them. You want them, and they can be useful, but you don't need them. It's not unreasonable to expect people to pay for some luxuries. You may not like it, but hey, that's life, and if it bothers you that much you can always take your money elsewhere.
My objection isn't so much to paying for it (though yeah... a sub game that makes you pay extra cash for bank space is super gross), my objection is having to SUBSCRIBE to it. They raise your subscription cost... a lot.
Even f2p games that sell you inventory and bank space (a common practice) don't make you subscribe to it. They don't lease you space monthly. You buy it, it's there, you're done. SE wants you paying monthly for extra bank space, and that's crap.
Regarding one of the more common arguments for why paying extra subscriptions per month for retainers is somehow ok...
Quoted from the official forums:
Quote:
I don't buy the excuse that increasing server-side data like this should mean having to pay this much more... and I'll explain why:
Right now there are two subscription options: Basic and Full.
- Basic gets you 1 character per server with a max of 8 characters across all servers
- Full gets you 8 characters per server with a max of 40(?) characters across all servers
Full costs $3 more per month than Basic.
So eight characters with two retainers each would be 16 retainers (no additional ones purchased) for $3/month over the Basic price. That's an absolute TON of extra data compared to just a bunch of retainers on a single character. Besides all the retainer data, it's also full character data for seven additional characters. But adding 6 retainers to a Basic account doubles the subscription fee? Nope. I don't buy it.
Furthermore because we can't share inventories or mail between alts outside of some personal FC shenanigans (which precludes you from joining an FC to pull off), we don't even have the choice to pay for the more efficient option to expand inventory space. All this ostensibly to curb rmt activities.... yeah that's going really well.
So no. If these end up doubling the sub fee for Basic-level players, it's just greed. There's no technical reason for this that makes any sense at all. SE just wants more money from you and they've figured out how to get it.
Not even free-to-play games charge you MONTHLY for your expanded inventory space.
Right now there are two subscription options: Basic and Full.
- Basic gets you 1 character per server with a max of 8 characters across all servers
- Full gets you 8 characters per server with a max of 40(?) characters across all servers
Full costs $3 more per month than Basic.
So eight characters with two retainers each would be 16 retainers (no additional ones purchased) for $3/month over the Basic price. That's an absolute TON of extra data compared to just a bunch of retainers on a single character. Besides all the retainer data, it's also full character data for seven additional characters. But adding 6 retainers to a Basic account doubles the subscription fee? Nope. I don't buy it.
Furthermore because we can't share inventories or mail between alts outside of some personal FC shenanigans (which precludes you from joining an FC to pull off), we don't even have the choice to pay for the more efficient option to expand inventory space. All this ostensibly to curb rmt activities.... yeah that's going really well.
So no. If these end up doubling the sub fee for Basic-level players, it's just greed. There's no technical reason for this that makes any sense at all. SE just wants more money from you and they've figured out how to get it.
Not even free-to-play games charge you MONTHLY for your expanded inventory space.
Quote:
There's a little more to an item in your inventory than that, but you've got the basics.
At most you're looking at an object that contains:
itemId, quantity, dye, aetherialStats[5], aetherialValues[5], materiaId[5], signature, spiritbond, condition
So that's an: unsigned int, unsigned short, unsigned int, 5 unsigned ints, 5 unsigned ints, 5 unsigned ints, string, unsigned short, unsigned short. About 106 bytes per item. Be generous and round us up to 128 bytes per item to give us room to expand later.
That not huge. Each character can have a few hundred of those in regular inventory (including retainers). And then of course the armoire and calamity salvager have a much simpler structure consisting entirely of: itemId.
Yeah the disk space claim doesn't pass the smell test. Previously they've complained about the number of read/writes they're having to do (apparently the game writes your entire character every 15 seconds, which is frankly a ridiculous thing to do), but then that's what you attack. There's no reason we need to be writing character data that often. We could double that interval, toss in zone changes as forced writes, and still cut the CPU time used for this and the bandwidth required roughly in half.
Or we could double people's sub fees so they can have enough inventory space. Yeah let's do that one!
At most you're looking at an object that contains:
itemId, quantity, dye, aetherialStats[5], aetherialValues[5], materiaId[5], signature, spiritbond, condition
So that's an: unsigned int, unsigned short, unsigned int, 5 unsigned ints, 5 unsigned ints, 5 unsigned ints, string, unsigned short, unsigned short. About 106 bytes per item. Be generous and round us up to 128 bytes per item to give us room to expand later.
That not huge. Each character can have a few hundred of those in regular inventory (including retainers). And then of course the armoire and calamity salvager have a much simpler structure consisting entirely of: itemId.
Yeah the disk space claim doesn't pass the smell test. Previously they've complained about the number of read/writes they're having to do (apparently the game writes your entire character every 15 seconds, which is frankly a ridiculous thing to do), but then that's what you attack. There's no reason we need to be writing character data that often. We could double that interval, toss in zone changes as forced writes, and still cut the CPU time used for this and the bandwidth required roughly in half.
Or we could double people's sub fees so they can have enough inventory space. Yeah let's do that one!
Edited, Apr 15th 2016 3:33pm by Callinon