I dont know about the rest of you but i think that SE could get a boost in accounts, if they made it possible to transfer characters from one account to another. I have a character on a friend of mines account, and I would definatly get my own, if I was able to play my character that I have been playing for months now. To me it would seem easier to move character, than to bring back accounts that have been deleted. Just my opinion, what do you al think?

I wonder how many people are leaving FFXI. It seems SE is launching several campaigns to bring people back, recruit new players, or get start new characters on different servers.

FFXI is a good game, don't get me wrong, but with all the rampant inflation and such . . .

Who knows? I'll be playing it for a while, at least. I still haven't settled down on a job.

I have a friend on my server who is levels lower than I am, and I would love to be able to play with them using these items.

Is there anyway to get these berets, even though they already have an account?

That was my first instinct. I wouldnt say not cutting a profit though. After all, we only pay for the game then the subscription. The subscription price would be determined by not only value and competitiveness of price, but also what sort of fee will give them a profit considering the maintenance of servers and new work plus other overheads to running the game. They may for example make $3 profit per month per content ID. the extra $1 people pay for extra characters would be all profit i would assume, that is why it seems so "cheap" to us. therefor if you consider the fact that there are something like 500 000 content ids (more than that probably) and each person has on average 2.2 characters (according to that playonline census in the developers section. i dont think it is very current data) then you would for example be making around $4 per account per month. so you are looking at about 24 million dollars profit. and that is just for the year with your overheads covered. So you can see how a small amount of profit per subscription would easily make this profitable. Keep in mind as well that the costs would no increase in a linear fashion. it would likely jump in blocks so the idea would be to maintain the lowest amount of cost per customer.

As an example, consider that the cost per month per account of maintaining a customer account comes to $9 if you have 300 000 content ids. now this may drop to say $6 per account if you get 375000 content ids. However it may jump a block when you go up to 400 000 content ids because you may need some new servers to handle it and then the price goes back to about $9 per account per month. These are just guesses at figures but the prices are likely to behave like this because of economies of scale and how they impact virtual services can benefit so greatly from it.

My guess is that the rate of new content ids isn't growing but perhaps decreasing. it could also be that the growth rate (lets say 3.2% per month which would be alot) is dropping (so it is heading to 2.8% or something like that).

Thus their idea would be to leverage the large customer base they have now in order to boost this growth rate. If even 1 in 10 people bought a person to the game it would be an incredibly profitable venture considering that it costs them nothing to give virtual presents.

I want to know which NPC you need to speak with to get these items so that I can use them to XP prty is lower level or higher level players.

YES BERET!!! FINALLY HELLZ YES

got a new friend joining soon, will be able to use this ^^

So,the point of the Guide and Sprout items are to allow a more experienced player (with Guide Beret) to help out a less experienced player (with Sprout Beret); and additionally, obtain some of the event items that other players have missed out on.

Very nice! ^^