Merit+Job points Sphere Grid implementation and 1 month subscription tokens

[Zenion]

Well yes and no. The concept of a sub token is you can buy months of game time in the form of an in-game item, which can then be traded/sold in-game to other people. The idea is that whales (people with lots of money to burn) can use them to get gil or trade for stuff in a form of "sanctioned RMT," while people who may be short on IRL cash but have lots of gil can spend the gil they earn on these tokens to play the game for free. It's supposed to give the game publisher a piece of the RMT pie while reducing bots because the real players become the "bots." But in the end, the RMT just play the system too and it really just doesn't solve anything.

Well, if the only way to create the tokens was by paying the exact equivalent of a monthly subscription fee directly to SE, there wouldn't really be anything there to exploit (EDIT: Well, except that in typing this I realized that hey, item duplication is a thing that happens here sometimes!) At the end of the day somebody's still paying the subscription fee, they're just getting gil or items or mithra dances in exchange for paying it on somebody else's account.

It couldn't work on FFXI though, because we don't have a flat subscription fee here. Or will there be a token for one character, two characters, three characters, one character with one wardrobe, one character with two wardrobes, two characters with one wardrobe, and so on?

Maybe it would be viable by trading real money for Crysta, pushing the Crysta into FFXI, selling Crysta for gil, pulling Crysta back out of FFXI, then spending Crysta on a month's subscription fees, but... like, wow, that sounds like a lot of hoops to jump through, and I think Crysta technically has a real-world value, making handling it in-game really sketchy.

And that's ignoring the very real possibility that adding an item like that into the game could allow players to exploit bugs or sloppy code to generate large quantities in ways the developers didn't intend. What happens to FFXI if just one unscrupulous individual finds a way to create infinite Crysta, does so on one account and then launders it by selling off to a number of other accounts they control, then sells it for, say, 70% of face value? How much of the player base will buy that instead of paying Square-Enix, and how long could the game survive that drop in revenue?

[Alhanelem]

WoW does this, you can spend your ingame gold on these tokens on the auction house. The only real difference between this and normal RMT is Blizzard is getting the money. Thing is, RMT can just sell gold as they always have, and people will use that to buy the sub tokens because it ends up being cheaper. So I've never really understood how this improves the situation.

[Fahzewn]

Rift also does the token thing (granted the game is FTP and the use is a bit different...round-a-bout subscription) and I can say with certainty, don't expect a fair in game currency trade in the long run. It might start off somewhat reasonable at first but the cost balloons pretty fast. Probably spend the entire month farming just to make sure you can buy another...so you can farm more money...

Plus, what happens when you miss the timing and the token subscription ends while you don't have a new one? Going to have to pay for the subscription anyway at that point as FFXI is not FTP (unless I missed the memo) or wait for the free week to get and use the token.

And would the token itself be somehow auto-consumed when the game recognizes that a reoccurring payment system is not in place, manually use it like food or do you turn it in to a NPC when ready? If not auto-consumed, how do you prevent accidently losing the subscription despite having that token?

Can you stack subscriptions on top of each other and build up months?

At the very least, hoarding it could probably be prevented by making it rare, non-transferable via mog/delivery, but somehow still auction (maybe bazaar) it...

In short, too much thought/testing/implementation/patching after the fact (and therefore money) has to be put into this on SE's side to consider this option probably.

But who knows... I never thought they would change the auto-targeting to work with Trusts!

[Tehant]

I doubt he knows the game that well. Who does he even do anything with. He sits at the colibri camp and pretend he doesn't know the ends and outs of odyssey. Honestly, you're probably not a veteran yourself or want anything about the game to have a major upgrade or change. You should be asking for lickables to be implemented in game to that degree.

[Tehant]

Also, someone has to buy them right. The price of everything potentially goes up.

[Tehant]

WoW does this, you can spend your in game gold on these tokens on the auction house. The only real difference between this and normal RMT is Blizzard is getting the money. Thing is, RMT can just sell gold as they always have, and people will use that to buy the sub tokens because it ends up being cheaper. So, I've never really understood how this improves the situation.

Can someone bring him to the beetles' camp in King Ranperre's Tomb.

[Alhanelem]

Can someone bring him to the beetles' camp in King Ranperre's Tomb.

And what purpose would that serve? If you think that botting would decrease if we had sub tokens, you've got another thing coming.