Just transfer the money to your friend and they will get it on the shop, what's wrong with your people overacting with this? SE its always right and they made the best game ever in the history of MMO'S
Yeah, I don't see any reason to complain about texture or model changes. Especially things like hats on rabbits or lala deleters or UI skins which people are really passionate about. Purely aesthetic enhancements aren't something to take a hard line against.
"Quality of life" addons might cause problems, though. It's easy to handwave a tiny feature like "a ground circle that shows maximum melee range" or "a collection addon that tells you what you do or do not have." Taken individually, QoL addons can seem trivial, but people typically install a lot of them and put themselves at a substantial convenience advantage over anyone that isn't comfortable putting their login credentials into a third party application. The "duh" tier of these is stuff that needs to be baked into the game to begin with, and I'm concerned that "just use the third party app" will prove just as much temptation for the developer to halfass the UI as it did in XI.
FFXI had a similar issue with Windower. Windower makes some amazing changes to FFXI, but it spiraled out of control to the point where if you don't use Windower you're playing an inferior game. One of the great strengths of FFXIV is the ability to pick it up and put it down -- jumping through a Skyrim-esque (or FFXI) addon process to get things up and running again flies in the face of that. That's the friction angle, but it's also just straight up unfair to the console players for PC players to have even more of an advantage than they already have.
This isn't even touching the "don't ever put your SE account details into anything other than the patcher and our website."
Yeah, plus it does depend on the add-on. Cosmetic changes are usually one thing, since at the end of the day the game's still going to function as intended.
If it's something that just helps you organize some stuff, then that's "fine", but when you start adding in stuff like more hotbars, indicators for job resources or stuff that automatically tells you what to do at X mechanic... like, that's not an indication that you'll clear Ultimate all of a sudden, or even that you'll play your job any better. But it's still going to give you an upper edge, and that's problematic. So yeah, that I can understand.
I was referring to stuff that's actually minor though. One that didn't have that large of an effect on gameplay, which I'm sure even among the tools people use there are functionalities that are that minor. Again, I don't really see using shaders due to being colourblind as "suddenly I'll perform better than normal". I just viewed it as "It gave me somewhat of an equal footing, given everything looks totally purple/orange to me and I can't tell my arse from my head in here..." Our in-game options don't change the colours, they just change saturation and some colour levels. That helps in very few cases, it sometimes makes other cases worse. (The in-game options, I mean, not the shaders. The shaders do change some colours. It makes everything look so ugly, but hey, if it works, it works).
I don't know how much of a difference other add-ons do, but I don't really think much of whether a Hrothgar's wearing hats/has a hairstyle. But that's me. And from what I know seeing other people talk and such, I don't think we'll find a definitive 100% consensus so soon either.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/...36/014/f75.jpg