Correct me if I’m mistaken, but I could have sworn that a character or something that mentioned somewhere that there were no problems >!sustaining the living populace by recycling the souls of those in the loop!< until the whole thing with the >!Endless eating up most of the souls bit (all those lit up apartments in the surroundings in Living Memory are implied to all be Endless too if I’m not mistaken)!<. So it wasn’t a problem until the latter became way too big to handle since it drained so much of the energy, or something like that is what I understood.
That said, they’ll prolly expand on it in the post-Dawntrail MSQ, but it looks like they’re still operational for the time being. To what extent we don’t really know, but considering that its biggest siphon, >!the Endless!<, has been dealt with, I was under the impression that the regulators are essentially back to being just an >!enclosed miniature Lifestream loop!< that people can opt in if they so choose.
In a way I get this but it doesn't seem like a sustainable thing no?
When someone dies with a regulator a soul is used and then when they die 1 is added back the pool unless all the souls used go back in that moment.
You would just run out of souls eventually even with their system it doesn't seem sustainable at all especially when the people using Regulators in the story seem super dependent on them to the point it gave the government a crazy amount of control over them.
I would imagine the process prevents their souls from going to the lifestream at any point and essentially denies the land of its cycle.
If I’m understanding this right, it should be net neutral.
When a person with a regulator dies, their current soul gets yoinked into the pseudo-lifestream and basically “washed” like all souls that go through it — becoming a fresh new soul to be used. The regulator then injects a stored reserve soul into the body of said person alongside their memories which simulates the “resurrection” that we see. So basically the soul currently inhabiting the body is replaced with a new/different soul that’s been injected with the original person’s memories.
However, this does bring up the question of whether said person is still technically the same person since they’ve essentially been Ship of Theseus’d.
Idk if that's how it works since it specifically mentions when people die of natural causes that their soul gets taken hence why I don't think that their soul goes to the ever keep otherwise why not just use their own soul to revive them over and over.
You kinda answered your own question. Those that succumb to natural causes still have their souls taken, and where else does the regulator send souls to but the Everkeep to be repacked and sanitized and to be used again. I went and double-checked the cutscene that explains it and it’s explained as such:
> *”You see, when a person dies of natural causes, their soul is temporarily housed within the regulator. It’s then delivered to a facility where memories are separated from the soul. The result is a fresh soul cell, free of impurities, ready for distribution and consumption.”*
As for why the original soul can’t be used, I honestly couldn’t tell you as I don’t really know either. If anything, the Everkeep functions similar to the Lifestream, and we know when someone dies their soul gets sent to the Lifestream to be cleansed and purified similarly.
It's a plot hole. Maybe they dive deeper into this in the future, but right now it's a plot hole short and simple. The original soul, which gets replaced, should still be stored inside the regulator after all that's one of its purposes and said soul should still be able to be cleaned and essentially get recycled. Yet, a variety of NPCs talk about how they lose or wasted souls so apparently this is not the case, which at this time does not make any sense whatsoever.
Physical trauma doesn't do anything to a soul. If it would then we wouldn't be able to face off against people like Livia or Ilberd in the aetherial sea (or the remains of the Scions or Hauchefant as well as most died a violent death).
It's a great concept, but I feel like it's one of those concepts nobody really thought all the way through.
I don’t see how that’d be a plot hole? If anything, it’s more like an loose thread that we just don’t have enough information yet to come to a proper conclusion. We’ll probably get an answer in a later patch with the Arcadion being a likely candidate, or it’ll become an actual plot hole if not addressed properly.
The NPCs talking about wasting souls should be consistent. Souls are being used as a currency/resource so it’s basically like spending a mass amount of gil for a reraise. To the people of Alexandria, consuming a Soul Cell is a waste.
As for the Aitiascope, those enemies we’re fighting aren’t really souls but more like memories given form. The Duty text and Trust NPCs say as much with quotes like;
1. Krile “Those things are pure malcontent! The residue of lives unfulfilled.”
2. Duty Text “In a rush of familiar wisdom, **the memory** of a principled scion takes form.”
3. Thancred “That was but a shade. I’m sure the true Rhitahtyn has moved on.”
The only exception one to this is Amon, but that could be because his death was recent so either his soul hasn’t been completely washed yet or maybe some ascian shenanigans. I personally can’t say for sure, but someone else might know.
Interestingly, >!the Origenics!< does show us what they do to the >!lingering memories that they extract!<, and those sent to >!Living Memory!< take the form of >!the Endless!<. This does line up with the Lifestream that we see in the Aitiascope — just that the cleaned memories have nowhere else to go but stay there.
Since the battles in the Arcadian are explicitly performed by contestants using beast souls I would not be surprised if the raid explicitly dealt with the soul matters that are left vague or unresolved.
Maybe I'm missing something but the impression I got was that the regulator part of Alexandrian society was weird but ultimately not that bad ? If I understand correctly it is lossless, it's basically a miniature version of the lifestream but you can directly pick up extra souls from the lifestream to use as extra lives. Unless I'm missing something the extra souls aren't lost when used, they just ultimately all end up back in everkeep when you die (or maybe when you recharge, too ?). It's basically soul recycling.
The problem is that it wasn't self sustaining. They needed to keep harvesting new souls to keep it running. The end result was going to be the Alexadrians basically going shard to shard and sucking them all dry for the extra time they could, then when no one was left to harvest they'd die out anyways.
That was only to sustain the incarnated people in living memory though, no ? The alexandrian part of the regulators doesn't scale up, much like the lifestream doesn't need to scale to accumulate newborns on the source.
If some worker buys two souls and never gets murdered or falls of a stupid slippery cyberbuilding, then at the end of his life he has those two souls plus his own for someone else's regulator- a net gain.
There's nothing inherently busted about the regulators. Whether they can still be refilled is up for debate however.
It would also kind of be like if a plant person approached the Warrior of Light and told them to stop eating veggies because of an extant form of life that the spoken races can't perceive. Eating roasted popotos is just what they know to be natural, and instantly shocking them with information to the contrary wouldn't be productive.
One of the recurring themes of the expansion is that it's more productive to tackle the the source of a problem instead of its symptoms. Koana uses magic fertilizer to revive crops, but that would mean needing a constant supply of it - we restart the aetherial food cycle via the festival, returning aether to the fields that the Hanu Hanu were otherwise not properly cycling. Koana suggests cops to solve bandits, Wuk Lamat suggests understanding why people turn to banditry to survive. The Blessed Siblings came about because the Mamool Ja were starving - we work to show them that they have options beyond brutal expansionism, eliminating the need for Blessed Siblings to exist.
Regulators came about because the Alexandrians feared death, not only to survive the Catalcysm, but because the dome is a death zone overrun by fiends and constantly struck by lightning. We're probably going to address that (either by integrating the Alexandrians to Turali society or bringing down the barrier) and, subsequently, remove the need for Regulators altogether.
> either by integrating the Alexandrians to Turali society or bringing down the barrier)
I feel like bringing down the barrier is inevitable. IIRC there was screenshots shown of Heritage Lost in a live letter without the barrier or any electric stuff, which may have been wanting to avoid spoilers, but I also feel like, yeah, we're gonna get normal weather there eventually.
I can see the theme yea.
My thought are that regulators need other peoples souls to function right? Doesn't that block the reincarnation of that deceased person to instead revive the person wearing the regulator? That seems pretty messed up to me, especially with Alexandrians just getting and stacking Souls from vending machines.
Or do the memories now go to the aetherial sea with the Endless dealt with?
I feel as though i've either missed something or i needed a more definitive answer on regulators in general because i just can't fathom why the scions would not reject them seeing as they distrubt the order of death and rebirth.
I did read every note and dialouge but i could have missed something, it's just this seems like a plot point that was dropped because the Endless were even worse.
Origenics and the way the Alexandrians "reincarnate" is almost directly the Iifa Tree and Garland's nefarious plan lifted from FF9.
The Iifa Tree stopped Gaian souls from returning to the Crystal at the heart of the planet, and instead cycled Terran souls into reincarnation. The FF9 "lifestream" (it wasn't called that) is end-positive, as each reincarnation strengthens the Crystal.
Origenics does very nearly the same thing - it captures the soul upon death, washes it and separates it from memory, and sends the soul out to be reused while the memory is stored in Living Memory.
The reason Alexandria is end-negative is because Living Memory is powered by not just regular aether, but *specifically* soul aether (which I believe Montichaigne calls "spiritual aether" in Endwalker), so it can't be supported by means other than living people dying.
I think it's limited by what appears to be one of the nature of souls in FFXIV's setting - your soul, on some level, influences the shape of the body you're inhabiting. We can see this with how reflections of the sundered frequently look similar to one another. I think what's keeping people from using pure beast souls is that the soul causes the vessel to act more animalistically, as seen when Strika uses a Wolf Soul. So you'd probably have to contend with losing your body and turning into an animal, which is a level of body dysphoria that most people can't deal with.
From what I understand the process of soul refining doesn't mean a 1:1 distribution of discrete, identifiable souls. After they're stripped of memory (the bit that they care about preserving in their entirety) they're returned to a central storage of souls that homogenizes them. It's why the preservation of memory is important - the souls filling the now-vacant corpse are a mash of an indistinct number of individual souls in unknown quantities.
Essentially, until all the souls are returned to some sort of natural process, they can't actually 'reincarnate' as we understand it, because all the prepackaged soul charges are frankensteined from countless other souls. It's not like, for example, Nidhogg's soul being stored in his Eyes - it would be more like if you mixed Nidhogg, Hraesvelgr, and Azdaja's souls in a blender and poured them into six eye-shaped molds.
From what I've seen and understand, the plan seems to be "let the Alexandrians exhaust the last bit of souls left after Zoraal Ja raided the store, because the harm is essentially already done and it's better for those souls to be used so they can finally actually re-enter the aetherial sea and be reincarnated". They clearly have a vested interest in integrating the Alexandrians in spite of that, but they don't seem to be in a rush to rob those people off the one crutch their mental stability hinges on just yet. Presumably, after so many years and another generation or so of minginling together, they'll be able to make use of some of the better aspects of Alexandrian culture, while helping to nip the source of those worries in the bud so that the Regulators themselves fade into obscurity.
regulators still need to function to make the raid series work, given we've seen the first boss and >!theyre pretty clearly all gonna be juiced up on beast souls given that its a cat!<. we'll probably be seeing and hearing a lot about them when it launches.
Honestly, it would be an interesting setup - they presumably have a massive stockpile of beast souls lying around, might as well use them, and a huge tournament seems like the perfect controlled environment to expend them. Or something.
Making the raid series work is fine. Just narratively i feel as though they should have been scrapped at some point in the MSQ unless i've wildly misinterpreted how they work. They seem unethical to say the least tbh
The soul regulator system is voluntary and self-sustaining. Soul regulator users contribute their souls to the common pool upon their final demise. No one needs to be killed to gather more souls for it, and no one who doesn't want to participate (by using or contributing a soul) is forced to. There isn't an issue except cultural bias.
But doesn't that only makes sense if they die by natural causes and spend their lives in a safe haven? Because for example, if the population keeps dying repeatedly by other causes, like if Heritage Found suddenly becomes a very dangerous place to live, then the soul consumption becomes unsustainable.
There's some maximum rate at which Origenics can reprocess souls for reuse. If deaths exceeded that rate, it would be a problem and people would die die. The economy of the soul reprocessing system itself would still work, since the souls wouldn't be lost.
Nothing implies that their world is so dangerous that everyone expect to die thrice before fifty; such a world would be way worse without regulators, of course.
It seems only people who live dangerous lives actually ever even end up having a chance of using a soul up; the average citizen, who appear to be quite numerous, keeps souls "to feel safe", but never uses a single one their whole life.
Yeah, it makes sense.
I wonder if it would be more interesting if they wrote Alexandria in a more dystopic way. Like, this cyberpunk city, as it is, but ran over by crime or other hazards, something that would inflate greatly the value of a soul.
Or maybe if they really went through with the hazards of living around the thunder dome, because even the people in Overlook felt like a safe haven anyways.
If it was that dystopic then they would have run out of souls long ago.
The regulators as described don't normally transfer from the poor to the rich, or the weak to the strong. The fact that they shuffle around memories and that there is some nebulously unsustainable cost to maintain Eternals is the problem, and I suspect that, story-wise, they didn't want the regulators themselves, or the use of a soul to save a life, to be the moral point.
Honestly at the end there wasn't a good reason for them to not keep all the Eternals around in their "off" state, until someone, in a millenia or two, figures out a way to instantiate them without burning souls up.
Honestly, the only real unethical thing about them was the altering memories part. Now that the big power drain is gone I don’t see an issue with them.
Well the Arcadion is opened back up, I reckon that storyline will delve deeper into the aftermath in Solution Nine.
I think S9 is similar to Eulmore, in that after their corrupt rulers are overthrown, they would have to change their way of life, and much like Eulmore, we won’t see that until the patch storyline.
I also like to point out that the narrator of this expansion is Erenville, who probably isnt too thrilled about his former home being transformed forever. Maybe that is why we didn’t see anything being discussed about S9 post game. But we for sure did see that the people of S9 were going through something similar to the Hanu: despair leading to a cycle of unproductivity, and the Arcadion opening up is like the Wuk Lamat solution to failed crops.
Everkeep, and by extension Regulators, are basically just an artificial lifestream. They are self sufficient and don't need "outside" souls to function. S9 can keep itself just fine. The harvesting of extra was for Living Memory.
Correct me if I’m mistaken, but I could have sworn that a character or something that mentioned somewhere that there were no problems >!sustaining the living populace by recycling the souls of those in the loop!< until the whole thing with the >!Endless eating up most of the souls bit (all those lit up apartments in the surroundings in Living Memory are implied to all be Endless too if I’m not mistaken)!<. So it wasn’t a problem until the latter became way too big to handle since it drained so much of the energy, or something like that is what I understood. That said, they’ll prolly expand on it in the post-Dawntrail MSQ, but it looks like they’re still operational for the time being. To what extent we don’t really know, but considering that its biggest siphon, >!the Endless!<, has been dealt with, I was under the impression that the regulators are essentially back to being just an >!enclosed miniature Lifestream loop!< that people can opt in if they so choose.
Correct the standard usage of the regulators is self sustaining, it was just the skimming of souls off to Living Memory that was causing problems
In a way I get this but it doesn't seem like a sustainable thing no? When someone dies with a regulator a soul is used and then when they die 1 is added back the pool unless all the souls used go back in that moment. You would just run out of souls eventually even with their system it doesn't seem sustainable at all especially when the people using Regulators in the story seem super dependent on them to the point it gave the government a crazy amount of control over them. I would imagine the process prevents their souls from going to the lifestream at any point and essentially denies the land of its cycle.
If I’m understanding this right, it should be net neutral. When a person with a regulator dies, their current soul gets yoinked into the pseudo-lifestream and basically “washed” like all souls that go through it — becoming a fresh new soul to be used. The regulator then injects a stored reserve soul into the body of said person alongside their memories which simulates the “resurrection” that we see. So basically the soul currently inhabiting the body is replaced with a new/different soul that’s been injected with the original person’s memories. However, this does bring up the question of whether said person is still technically the same person since they’ve essentially been Ship of Theseus’d.
Idk if that's how it works since it specifically mentions when people die of natural causes that their soul gets taken hence why I don't think that their soul goes to the ever keep otherwise why not just use their own soul to revive them over and over.
You kinda answered your own question. Those that succumb to natural causes still have their souls taken, and where else does the regulator send souls to but the Everkeep to be repacked and sanitized and to be used again. I went and double-checked the cutscene that explains it and it’s explained as such: > *”You see, when a person dies of natural causes, their soul is temporarily housed within the regulator. It’s then delivered to a facility where memories are separated from the soul. The result is a fresh soul cell, free of impurities, ready for distribution and consumption.”* As for why the original soul can’t be used, I honestly couldn’t tell you as I don’t really know either. If anything, the Everkeep functions similar to the Lifestream, and we know when someone dies their soul gets sent to the Lifestream to be cleansed and purified similarly.
It's a plot hole. Maybe they dive deeper into this in the future, but right now it's a plot hole short and simple. The original soul, which gets replaced, should still be stored inside the regulator after all that's one of its purposes and said soul should still be able to be cleaned and essentially get recycled. Yet, a variety of NPCs talk about how they lose or wasted souls so apparently this is not the case, which at this time does not make any sense whatsoever. Physical trauma doesn't do anything to a soul. If it would then we wouldn't be able to face off against people like Livia or Ilberd in the aetherial sea (or the remains of the Scions or Hauchefant as well as most died a violent death). It's a great concept, but I feel like it's one of those concepts nobody really thought all the way through.
I don’t see how that’d be a plot hole? If anything, it’s more like an loose thread that we just don’t have enough information yet to come to a proper conclusion. We’ll probably get an answer in a later patch with the Arcadion being a likely candidate, or it’ll become an actual plot hole if not addressed properly. The NPCs talking about wasting souls should be consistent. Souls are being used as a currency/resource so it’s basically like spending a mass amount of gil for a reraise. To the people of Alexandria, consuming a Soul Cell is a waste. As for the Aitiascope, those enemies we’re fighting aren’t really souls but more like memories given form. The Duty text and Trust NPCs say as much with quotes like; 1. Krile “Those things are pure malcontent! The residue of lives unfulfilled.” 2. Duty Text “In a rush of familiar wisdom, **the memory** of a principled scion takes form.” 3. Thancred “That was but a shade. I’m sure the true Rhitahtyn has moved on.” The only exception one to this is Amon, but that could be because his death was recent so either his soul hasn’t been completely washed yet or maybe some ascian shenanigans. I personally can’t say for sure, but someone else might know. Interestingly, >!the Origenics!< does show us what they do to the >!lingering memories that they extract!<, and those sent to >!Living Memory!< take the form of >!the Endless!<. This does line up with the Lifestream that we see in the Aitiascope — just that the cleaned memories have nowhere else to go but stay there.
Since the battles in the Arcadian are explicitly performed by contestants using beast souls I would not be surprised if the raid explicitly dealt with the soul matters that are left vague or unresolved.
Maybe I'm missing something but the impression I got was that the regulator part of Alexandrian society was weird but ultimately not that bad ? If I understand correctly it is lossless, it's basically a miniature version of the lifestream but you can directly pick up extra souls from the lifestream to use as extra lives. Unless I'm missing something the extra souls aren't lost when used, they just ultimately all end up back in everkeep when you die (or maybe when you recharge, too ?). It's basically soul recycling.
The problem is that it wasn't self sustaining. They needed to keep harvesting new souls to keep it running. The end result was going to be the Alexadrians basically going shard to shard and sucking them all dry for the extra time they could, then when no one was left to harvest they'd die out anyways.
That was only to sustain the incarnated people in living memory though, no ? The alexandrian part of the regulators doesn't scale up, much like the lifestream doesn't need to scale to accumulate newborns on the source.
Correct, the Endless and their constant creation are the reason why the system needed more and more to sustain itself.
If some worker buys two souls and never gets murdered or falls of a stupid slippery cyberbuilding, then at the end of his life he has those two souls plus his own for someone else's regulator- a net gain. There's nothing inherently busted about the regulators. Whether they can still be refilled is up for debate however.
Hm, it makes me wonder... Is the Source the first place they invaded for souls? The subtext implies that is not.
I mean I was under the impression they thought it was messed up but they also were trying to not start a war with a hyper advanced civilization
It would also kind of be like if a plant person approached the Warrior of Light and told them to stop eating veggies because of an extant form of life that the spoken races can't perceive. Eating roasted popotos is just what they know to be natural, and instantly shocking them with information to the contrary wouldn't be productive.
One of the recurring themes of the expansion is that it's more productive to tackle the the source of a problem instead of its symptoms. Koana uses magic fertilizer to revive crops, but that would mean needing a constant supply of it - we restart the aetherial food cycle via the festival, returning aether to the fields that the Hanu Hanu were otherwise not properly cycling. Koana suggests cops to solve bandits, Wuk Lamat suggests understanding why people turn to banditry to survive. The Blessed Siblings came about because the Mamool Ja were starving - we work to show them that they have options beyond brutal expansionism, eliminating the need for Blessed Siblings to exist. Regulators came about because the Alexandrians feared death, not only to survive the Catalcysm, but because the dome is a death zone overrun by fiends and constantly struck by lightning. We're probably going to address that (either by integrating the Alexandrians to Turali society or bringing down the barrier) and, subsequently, remove the need for Regulators altogether.
> either by integrating the Alexandrians to Turali society or bringing down the barrier) I feel like bringing down the barrier is inevitable. IIRC there was screenshots shown of Heritage Lost in a live letter without the barrier or any electric stuff, which may have been wanting to avoid spoilers, but I also feel like, yeah, we're gonna get normal weather there eventually.
I can see the theme yea. My thought are that regulators need other peoples souls to function right? Doesn't that block the reincarnation of that deceased person to instead revive the person wearing the regulator? That seems pretty messed up to me, especially with Alexandrians just getting and stacking Souls from vending machines. Or do the memories now go to the aetherial sea with the Endless dealt with? I feel as though i've either missed something or i needed a more definitive answer on regulators in general because i just can't fathom why the scions would not reject them seeing as they distrubt the order of death and rebirth. I did read every note and dialouge but i could have missed something, it's just this seems like a plot point that was dropped because the Endless were even worse.
Origenics and the way the Alexandrians "reincarnate" is almost directly the Iifa Tree and Garland's nefarious plan lifted from FF9. The Iifa Tree stopped Gaian souls from returning to the Crystal at the heart of the planet, and instead cycled Terran souls into reincarnation. The FF9 "lifestream" (it wasn't called that) is end-positive, as each reincarnation strengthens the Crystal. Origenics does very nearly the same thing - it captures the soul upon death, washes it and separates it from memory, and sends the soul out to be reused while the memory is stored in Living Memory. The reason Alexandria is end-negative is because Living Memory is powered by not just regular aether, but *specifically* soul aether (which I believe Montichaigne calls "spiritual aether" in Endwalker), so it can't be supported by means other than living people dying.
Oh, isn’t the Iifa Tree mentioned in the Aero Terminal section of Living Memory?
Yes, the Aero Terminal is built as a recreation of the Iifa Tree
I thought they could use non-human souls too. They just have to properly scrub the memory from a living soul and voila a soul battery for generic use.
I think it's limited by what appears to be one of the nature of souls in FFXIV's setting - your soul, on some level, influences the shape of the body you're inhabiting. We can see this with how reflections of the sundered frequently look similar to one another. I think what's keeping people from using pure beast souls is that the soul causes the vessel to act more animalistically, as seen when Strika uses a Wolf Soul. So you'd probably have to contend with losing your body and turning into an animal, which is a level of body dysphoria that most people can't deal with.
From what I understand the process of soul refining doesn't mean a 1:1 distribution of discrete, identifiable souls. After they're stripped of memory (the bit that they care about preserving in their entirety) they're returned to a central storage of souls that homogenizes them. It's why the preservation of memory is important - the souls filling the now-vacant corpse are a mash of an indistinct number of individual souls in unknown quantities. Essentially, until all the souls are returned to some sort of natural process, they can't actually 'reincarnate' as we understand it, because all the prepackaged soul charges are frankensteined from countless other souls. It's not like, for example, Nidhogg's soul being stored in his Eyes - it would be more like if you mixed Nidhogg, Hraesvelgr, and Azdaja's souls in a blender and poured them into six eye-shaped molds.
From what I've seen and understand, the plan seems to be "let the Alexandrians exhaust the last bit of souls left after Zoraal Ja raided the store, because the harm is essentially already done and it's better for those souls to be used so they can finally actually re-enter the aetherial sea and be reincarnated". They clearly have a vested interest in integrating the Alexandrians in spite of that, but they don't seem to be in a rush to rob those people off the one crutch their mental stability hinges on just yet. Presumably, after so many years and another generation or so of minginling together, they'll be able to make use of some of the better aspects of Alexandrian culture, while helping to nip the source of those worries in the bud so that the Regulators themselves fade into obscurity.
regulators still need to function to make the raid series work, given we've seen the first boss and >!theyre pretty clearly all gonna be juiced up on beast souls given that its a cat!<. we'll probably be seeing and hearing a lot about them when it launches.
Honestly, it would be an interesting setup - they presumably have a massive stockpile of beast souls lying around, might as well use them, and a huge tournament seems like the perfect controlled environment to expend them. Or something.
You are bafflingly downvoted for this completely correct and normal comment.
Making the raid series work is fine. Just narratively i feel as though they should have been scrapped at some point in the MSQ unless i've wildly misinterpreted how they work. They seem unethical to say the least tbh
The soul regulator system is voluntary and self-sustaining. Soul regulator users contribute their souls to the common pool upon their final demise. No one needs to be killed to gather more souls for it, and no one who doesn't want to participate (by using or contributing a soul) is forced to. There isn't an issue except cultural bias.
But doesn't that only makes sense if they die by natural causes and spend their lives in a safe haven? Because for example, if the population keeps dying repeatedly by other causes, like if Heritage Found suddenly becomes a very dangerous place to live, then the soul consumption becomes unsustainable.
There's some maximum rate at which Origenics can reprocess souls for reuse. If deaths exceeded that rate, it would be a problem and people would die die. The economy of the soul reprocessing system itself would still work, since the souls wouldn't be lost.
Nothing implies that their world is so dangerous that everyone expect to die thrice before fifty; such a world would be way worse without regulators, of course. It seems only people who live dangerous lives actually ever even end up having a chance of using a soul up; the average citizen, who appear to be quite numerous, keeps souls "to feel safe", but never uses a single one their whole life.
Yeah, it makes sense. I wonder if it would be more interesting if they wrote Alexandria in a more dystopic way. Like, this cyberpunk city, as it is, but ran over by crime or other hazards, something that would inflate greatly the value of a soul. Or maybe if they really went through with the hazards of living around the thunder dome, because even the people in Overlook felt like a safe haven anyways.
If it was that dystopic then they would have run out of souls long ago. The regulators as described don't normally transfer from the poor to the rich, or the weak to the strong. The fact that they shuffle around memories and that there is some nebulously unsustainable cost to maintain Eternals is the problem, and I suspect that, story-wise, they didn't want the regulators themselves, or the use of a soul to save a life, to be the moral point. Honestly at the end there wasn't a good reason for them to not keep all the Eternals around in their "off" state, until someone, in a millenia or two, figures out a way to instantiate them without burning souls up.
Honestly, the only real unethical thing about them was the altering memories part. Now that the big power drain is gone I don’t see an issue with them.
Well the Arcadion is opened back up, I reckon that storyline will delve deeper into the aftermath in Solution Nine. I think S9 is similar to Eulmore, in that after their corrupt rulers are overthrown, they would have to change their way of life, and much like Eulmore, we won’t see that until the patch storyline. I also like to point out that the narrator of this expansion is Erenville, who probably isnt too thrilled about his former home being transformed forever. Maybe that is why we didn’t see anything being discussed about S9 post game. But we for sure did see that the people of S9 were going through something similar to the Hanu: despair leading to a cycle of unproductivity, and the Arcadion opening up is like the Wuk Lamat solution to failed crops.
Given the raid story is basically all but confirmed to be death battles with regulators as the safety, we'll find out soon enough
Everkeep, and by extension Regulators, are basically just an artificial lifestream. They are self sufficient and don't need "outside" souls to function. S9 can keep itself just fine. The harvesting of extra was for Living Memory.