The mercenary board — your characters keep working after you log off

Your characters keep working after you log off.

You list one of your characters on the mercenary board: an hourly rate, a maximum contract length, and up to three of the gambit sets you wrote for it. Another player — maybe one with no leveled characters at all — browses the board, hires it for the hours they need, and summons it into their party as a trust: your gear, your levels, your rules, synced down to their level. Gil flows from them to you, the house takes its cut, and none of it needs you online.

This closes the loop the gambit system opened. A rule set was already a build you could name, save and share — now it is a product. The player who writes the server's best Medic doesn't just argue about it in shout; they price it. And for the hirer it is the squad system without the grind: day one, level 1, rent a veteran.

Hiring one

`` !merc board ``

Browse, then ask about somebody, then take them on:

`` !merc info Yuna !merc hire Yuna 2 ``

The hire quotes first — the gross gil, the hours, when it would end — and a second command pays: type the same line again, or !merc confirm. There is deliberately no single line that spends. A contract is paid up front and not refundable, so the second word is the consent.

`` !merc call Yuna ``

puts them in your party. They fight by whichever of the owner's loadouts you pick, they answer job tags and behavior commands like a squad member, and the drops from what they help you kill are yours — hired help doesn't loot.

The small print that matters:

• You book whole hours, up to the listing's cap, and the clock runs from the moment you pay — dismissing early or logging off does not stop it. Book what you need.
• A level 1 can hire a level 99. The mercenary syncs down to you, gear and all. No gates, no level floor.
• The hours run out, the mercenary doesn't vanish. One already fighting beside you finishes the job; it is the next call that gets refused.
• Zoning sends them home like any trust. !merc call brings them back for as long as the contract runs.
• Six party slots is the ceiling, mercenaries included.

Listing one

Type it from a character on your account that is not the one you are listing — the snapshot needs them offline:

`` !merc list Ayame 5000 8 My Medic ``

That is Ayame at 5,000 gil an hour, contracts up to 8 hours, fighting by your My Medic rules. Up to three sets per listing; the hirer picks one at summon and cannot edit any of them. Your authorship is what is being priced.

• The listing is a photograph. Everything is frozen at listing time — gear, level, spells, rules. Level the character, regear them, play them every day: the listing does not change until you re-list. What the board advertises is exactly what the hirer gets.
• One contract per character at a time. While it is under contract the listing is locked; an unlist waits politely for the contract to settle.
• Your own squad can still summon the same character, free, any time. The snapshot and the live character are different things.
• Hiring your own listing is refused — it would only pay the house.

The money lands on a ledger, not on the character:

`` !merc earnings !merc claim ``

earnings shows every contract — what the hirer paid, what the house took, what is yours. claim collects the balance to whichever of your characters is online. The house keeps 35% of every contract, and that gil simply ceases to exist — every mercenary paid is also gil leaving the world.

A window, if you would rather click

/merc opens the storefront: the board with a job filter and the full detail on every listing — how long ago the snapshot was frozen, and the exact gear it was frozen in, piece by piece — your contracts with live time remaining and call, dismiss and loadout buttons, and your own listings with their earnings and a Claim button. It ships in the launcher's Default addon set.

It is a renderer. Everything it does is a !merc line it could have typed, and the server re-checks the price, the ownership and the contract on every one, whichever way it arrives. Hiring in the window works the way it works typed: the confirm button appears only after the server's quote is on screen, quoting the gross and the end time — a purchase needs a deliberate second click, and there is no one-click spend anywhere in the UI.

Things that will look wrong and are not

The mercenary you hired has worse gear than the owner is wearing right now. The listing is a photograph and the photograph is what you bought. !merc info says how long ago it was frozen — read it before you pay.

Your contract "disappeared" from the board. A mercenary under contract is off the market until the contract settles — that is exclusivity working, not a bug. It comes back when the hours are up.

Dismissing early refunds nothing. The hours were yours the moment you paid; how you spend them is up to you.

The owner earns no XP from being hired. Gil only, on purpose. They can level the same character in their own squad; the board pays them for their build, not for your fights.

If something on the board does what it should not — especially anything involving gil — that is worth a bug report: /merc and the typed tier both answer to !dwr, and reports arrive with your real state attached.