SE Please implement a Chonoscroll/PLEX system in FFXIV: ARR

[Andrien]

My point, which I now repeat: Your assertion is lacking sufficient evidence.

Do you have reviews of how this benefits a plethora of mmos?
You have yet to prove your statement right, let alone give me sufficient subject matter to analyze.



Your words, not mine.

Edit: Twelve, can we please get back on topic?

The evidence of my assertion is in EVE Online, perhaps you should play it. I can argue the fact that they have a strong player base that stretches for 8 years. In fact the game is so good for CCP, that they even release expansions for free on a regular basis. I will continue to advocate that.

You lack any evidence proving that this hybrid subscription service has negative effects on the games that utilize it. If they are any bad in this, the good ultimately out weighs it.

[GodseijuroHiko]

I think this could make the RMT problem worse. All they do is farm gil to sell for RL money, and this system would give them the opportunity to play for free at the same time.

SE has been at war with RMT for years, why would they want to introduce anything that could help them? Or to turn their own player base into (reverse) RMT? That would be pretty hypocritical.

Also, what do you do when your subscription runs out, and there is no scroll on AH to buy? I don't think there will be enough people willing to pay RL money for gil to keep up with the people who would rather just pay gil for their subscription.

They could always make the pass bought in game from an NPC for a crazy ammount of gil, so they could set the price... but gil doesn't pay the bills.

And finally, as we've seen time and time again: people will always find a way to exploit. So I think it's best if we just leave it alone.

Seems to me you don't understand how the system works. We can often extrapolate outcomes when we understand something. If we lack comprehension of the system, our extrapolation is then well.... I can think of one exploit I have seen. People over pricing the scroll.

[GodseijuroHiko]

Gil might not be introduced but you're buying an item which you can sell making your player get more gil. Buy more items, sell, make gil. It will still have the same effect. Just like you got crystals, sold to npc, made more gil.

You're talking in circles sir~

[Nuinn]

Except you forgot a VERY important part in your equation, and that is, for every dollar you spent and covert into GIL, is gil that you will spend for your item purchases and in fact benefits many other players because they can convert their play time into gil-profit to also better themselves.

This by nature also sets a more true balance supply and demand cycle for the market, as people now can set a cost range for in game items against real money. IE: Back when I was playing EVE, PLEX was pigged at 300m, so players were calculating on the bases of 20m = $1.

So no, it doesn't just benefit you as you have envisioned it. It benefits all parties.

Someone just brought up that RMTs can corner the market by buying all the PLEX and resell at higher prices. Besides the fact that it takes thousands of dollars and really illogical for them, don't forgot the given condition here is that ANYONE can buy PLEX with real cash and place a sell order on the market to fuel the supply. So when the in game price goes up, more players will go buy PLEX and add it back into the market. So if anything, RMT really wants to avoid cornering the market this way, as they want your money, not spend their money.

jc

I agree, but it still basically means that I, still, am at an advantage of getting more gil, in a shorter amount of time. . . .
. . . .buying the "new" items off the market as soon as they appear
. . . .can deliver quest supplies faster by not having to grind them etc.

provided I have more real money that I can spend.

And as I mentioned in another post, RMT won't just cease to exist, they could well offer the double or triple amount of gil for the average price of a game time item, which is to say that people who were willing and still are willing to take that risky route could get more gil illegally that by reselling the, legal, game time item. I would love to think that RMT will vanish completely, and that I'll no longer see trains of Lalafell in Cedarwood or fishbots near Camp Bald Knoll, but I'd be a fool to believe it.

Not saying that it wouldn't suck for the people that can't afford subscriptions, taking in account that I myself might, at some point, not be able to pay for them.

I just want someone, anyone, to tell me, how it's not an advantage for anyone, legal way or not, to be able to get gil by selling an item, he bought for real money, in under 30min if they /shout with a good price.

[GodseijuroHiko]

lol

Again, you say in those games they didn't exploit. Don't underestimate some of the XI/XIV community.

So answer me this, which one are YOU? Are you the one buying the scroll to sell, or the one buying the scroll to use to play for free? And if the latter, how much would you be willing to pay with gil?

Attacking him personally will do nothing to help your apparent ignorance. He, like myself, would probably fall into the neither. In fact, we are the only ones who wouldn't directly benefit from this. Well, I would love more subscriptions for FFXIV, so its a plus for me I guess.

[GodseijuroHiko]

Don't make that assumption cos thats not were i was going. I just think any system which allows the use of irl money to interfere with the game is bad. period. I personally like it the way it is, the rmt's we currently have are annoying but we're used to em.

So, you accept the RMT we do have? Amazing..

[Abriael]

Except we're forgetting that RMT and botting will still exist, meaning easily obtained gil in large amounts will still exist for the ones willing to risk their accounts or the companies that deal with RMT. If they chose they could still sell gil on their site, in a model close to this:
10$ = game time item = for example, 1mil gil ( if 1mil would be the average price of such item on a server)
RMT company takes notice and adjusts their prices resulting in:
10$ = 2mil gil on a RMT site

With the obvious and very positive result of slicing radically the profit of RMT companies, as they have to sell cheaper gil that took them the same resources to farm.

I'm just not sure why people claim, or fail to see, that introducing real money 'advantages' (as in, I can earn gil without actually playing the game for more than 30 minutes) has no long term impact on the game's economy. Just makes me go Jackie Chen face. Furthermore, why they refuse to acknowledge that it is an advantage.

That's probably because you don't know much about economy. Without making massive transactions or direrctly inserting currency into the economy, you can't have an appreciable effect on the economy.

To prevent the first, you simply limit the amount of months someone can purchase in a period of tine (as it's done on TERA). You don't need to prevent the second because no currency is inserted in the market with this system.

As a matter of fact, currency is removed from the market, as this kind of transaction is normally taxed, further helping to prevent inflation.

There's no "advantage" because money does not grow from trees. People paying for this service would still have to spend a sizable amount of time making the money for it.

To be honest, if you can't afford to pay for subscriptions, then you can't play. If you can't afford a decent computer to run the game on, then you can't play. If your real life is crammed with changing jobs, moving to other country, loosing the roof on your house etc. then you can't play.

It's not your place to decide this.

Tough cookie, but FF XIV will not suffer, as people are leaving and coming back to any MMO constantly.

Wrong. It's SE's best interest to allow as many people as possible to keep their subscription active. This is as elementary as it gets. Every lost accounts "hurts" them, because it's missed income. No matter if it's small or large. Missed income is missed income.

I'd rather if SE offered deals like 3 months worth of crysta (game time) purchased = get 1 month for free, or something along those lines. Cheaper crysta prices during big holidays or whatever.

This has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Are we really facing some major unofficial gil selling issue that we need to legalize and increase RMT?

Considering that RMT bots have been around until the very last day of the game before the save, despite the game's unpopularity, yes. Because if ARR becomes even remotely popular, the problem will become unbearable as much as it was in XI.

The real problem of RMT is not that people can buy gil with real life money, but the fact that RMT companies have a workforce against which players cannot compete, and end up controlling the economy to maximize their own gains. Slicing their profits considerably also slices their budget (as they can't spend more than they earn in a game), considerably reducing the workforce that they can use to control the economy, and their ability to control the economy at all.

the OP is tired of paying so much on RMT gil.

Libel doesn't really add any solidity to your weak points, Indira.

[Kiroh]

I've said it once already today but since there are so many terribad ideas floating around the forums I'll say it again :

[GodseijuroHiko]

Sure, Aenarion. As long as you understand that when someone opposes your idea, you respect their opinions and don't argue each and every one of them down.

So you wan't him to just agree with you. Got it.

[axemtitanium]

I agree with Aenarion that the vast majority of objections to a PLEX-like system are borne from not understanding exactly how it works. I also agree that it is unknown how a game like FFXIV would react/change to its introduction and it may or may not be beneficial. It clearly works well for EVE because of its lack of server segregation. I have a vague recollection of cross-server trading in 2.0 said by a dev somewhere but I could be mistaken. If that were the case, a PLEX-like subscription model might be more effective.

Here's the basic rundown of how RMT works compared to PLEX. Under the current conditions, there are only three ways to increase the "total amount of gil in circulation" (i.e. the sum of all gil in all players' inventories, henceforth "tgil"): killing human mobs which drop gil, selling items to NPCs, and quest rewards. There is no other way to increase tgil in the game. There is also currently only one way to reduce tgil: taxes in market ward transactions. This is known as a "gilsink". It's also possible to reduce tgil by buying items from NPCs, but that introduces more items into the economy as well so it's not a true gilsink.

RMT has a negative impact on the economy because it relies heavily on increasing tgil, thereby devaluing everyone's gil. This is bad because it causes inflation, i.e., more money is in circulation so the average price of goods increases. The same principle applies in real life. If the US government decided to print $10 trillion extra dollars today to pay off the national debt, it has increased the total amount of money in circulation ("tmoney", if you will), causing rampant inflation of prices. This principle also why a movie ticket which used to cost $8 1995 is now $14 in 2012. Back to the game, we saw a similar inflation in market ward prices after the Atomos exploit went live since it created an easy way to increase tgil and was being done on a massive scale by many people. The takeaway point of this is that increasing tgil generally causes inflation (increases in prices) which is generally not good if it occurs too quickly. Conversely, any measure that does not have an impact on tgil will not have this inflationary effect on the economy.

PLEX, notably, DOES NOT increase tgil at all. In-fact, it may even decrease it. Here is how it works in excruciating detail. Players use real money ($) to buy an in-game item called "PLEX". This item goes into your inventory, just like any other item, but can also be consumed to increase your subscription time by a set amount. You can sell it on the open market for whatever in-game price you want to sell it at. There is no way to (legally) sell it for real money. The market will decide what price PLEX sells for in in-game currency, just like any other item. If the same market ward tax is applied to XIV's PLEX, then that would actually serve as an effective gilsink as well, especially if the PLEX item sells for a high amount.

As a player, you have several options under this system. 1) You can play the game exactly as you are right now, treating PLEX just like a monthly subscription. Every month, you pay your monthly fee to get 1 PLEX and then use it immediately. It's easy to automate this step so you don't even have to worry about lapsing your subscription. 2) You use in-game currency to buy PLEX from other players. You have effectively made playing this game free for yourself. You probably fall into this category if you're a producer in the economy and have a lot of disposable income from selling crafted items or farming mobs. 3) You use real money to buy PLEX to sell on the market. This is generally the case for people who have a lot of real money but not a lot of time to spend in the game. You will earn in-game currency and pay for someone else's subscription to the game.

A few things to note here. At no point does in-game money get injected into the system as a result of PLEX. It merely stimulates money to change hands, from producers to consumers, who thus have more money to spend on producers. Similarly, the number of "subscriptions being paid for" does not increase or decrease. The only change is who is doing the paying. Player A might be paying for 3-4 other players' subscriptions on any given month but the number of "paid for" accounts does not change. (This is the bottom line for the company running the MMO, by the way.)

How does this affect RMT? Well, basically it means they have to compete with PLEX-buyers for the same product (in this case, gil). Let's say you can buy gil from an RMT company for $10 per 1 million gil right now. This RMT gil was created using methods that increase tgil (which is ultimately good for RMTers and bad for players since it makes them more real money per gil sold, especially over long periods of time). On the other hand you can buy 1 PLEX for $10 from Square Enix, which you can sell on the market wards for ~10 million gil (market price will fluctuate). Magically, SE has undercut the RMTs by 10x making it astronomically less profitable for RMTs to operate in your MMO. Thus, they would have to work 10x harder or 10x longer to make the same $10 from a player who is interested in buying currency. Presumably, it would be so difficult that they would stop operating in the game because it no longer makes economical sense, weighing subscription fees to revenue. Will the RMTs be able to use PLEX to make their own accounts free-to-play? Of course they can, but that would involve spending their product (gil), which cuts into their bottom line. Will it stop RMT completely? Of course not, there will always be sweatshops that work their slaves harder and longer for money but the vast majority of them will realize that other MMOs are more profitable in real money terms (money earned per time spent).

Finally, a note on "fairness". While it won't hurt the economy directly, it does allow players with more real-world money to have access to money, which can be spent on "good" gear. However, I don't believe it will destroy interest in crafting or melding because if anything, the demand for this good gear will increase due to more people having money to spend on it (making a tidy profit for producers). If that's the case, what does it matter to you as a regular non-PLEX-buying player? You are free to spend the exact same amount of gil to buy that same equipment or produce it yourself to keep or sell. What exactly goes into any particular piece of triple-melded gear? Just money, not skill, so it's essentially the same as the current system where you don't judge someone who bought their triple-melded STR gloves as opposed to making it themselves. If Yoshi-P's comments are to be believed, the best gear is going to be U/U anyway. However, buying enough Garuda/CC/AV runs to get your desired drop would be prohibitively expensive using just profits from selling PLEX (8M gil * 20 Garuda runs for 40 totems = 160M gil = $160 at least, using numbers quoted elsewhere in the thread; Darklight drops are a whole order of magnitude more expensive, since DL bodies generally require upwards of 200 runs). The only guaranteed U/U drop I can think of is White Ravens which isn't really game-changingly good. In conclusion, endgame gear will be unaffected by the introduction of PLEX.