Do You Think FF XIV Will Start Getting The Hate WoW Gets Because of The Cash Shop?

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Originally Posted by _Pigzig

FFXIV is not immune to this but it has character progression outside of just "get catchup gear, then go get newest gear". It has MSQ, multiple jobs to level, side content and such. It also has RMT banned.

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THIS right here.

Not that I'd enjoy (or willing to) go through WoW's soulless text wall quests and goofy cutscenes again, but a lot of the time in FFXIV I'm messing around in New Game+ Main Story or Side Quest arcs on my high or max level Jobs to see the story again and utterly obliterate annoying characters/villains for laughs.

Or catching up on new lower level side content that I haven't done yet because it's actually worth experiencing most of the time. It doesn't feel like a waste of time unlike in WoW.

Probably not but it should. People are more accepting of getting milked here for some reason. Wow has alot of unique in game mounts too, probably way more than xiv and xiv is not immune to lazy mount reskins (hello horses and birds)

And they may not sell tokens here but let's not pretend they do anything to stop rmt. Open your party finder any time of day and there's 10+ in your face 24/7.

When your game is in as good of condition as FF14 is you can afford to have a cash shop. WoW has lost that privilege. Their in game services are disgustingly overpriced. Last time I checked it was something like $25 for a race change, $30 for a faction change (which you will need a transfer for if your server is Horde or Alliance dominate so heh heh another $25 please). Hell you can't even just buy one month of time anymore you either have to sub or buy two months at a time.

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

You can buy a WoW token for real money and sell it for ingame gold. This is legalized RMT. Such a thing does not exist in FF14. Everything you buy in the cash shop is not sellable for Gil ingame. But yes, the amount of things you can buy in the mogry station is big.

Cheers

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Ehhhhhh you can get gil through the cash shop. Just make an alt and buy the story skip. $25 for what 500k gil? Nothing spectacular but it's enough to do things like fill up on crafting crystals and what not.

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Originally Posted by sauc

Probably not but it should. People are more accepting of getting milked here for some reason. Wow has alot of unique in game mounts too, probably way more than xiv and xiv is not immune to lazy mount reskins (hello horses and birds)

And they may not sell tokens here but let's not pretend they do anything to stop rmt. Open your party finder any time of day and there's 10+ in your face 24/7.

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Mostly because funds from the mogstation gets cycled back into the game. That is what has paid for for the newer data centers for other parts of the world if I'm not mistaken. And of course WoW has more mounts in it.. it's been operating for almost 20 years. >.>

As to the RMT comment.

October 21st 2021 - 5,700+ accounts terminated - https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...5483ba7a009e67
October 14th 2021 - 6,000+ accounts terminated - https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...b96e9db2cd2a71
October 7th 2021 - 4,300+ accounts terminated - https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...966ccefa09b819
July 29th 2021 - 10,000+ accounts terminated - https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...17da61235fd9e1

Source for the above - https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...ews/category/1

They do plenty to deal with RMT. Typically they're tracing where Gil goes before they act so that they're hitting the buyer, the advertisers, the traders, and the bots that are sourcing the Gil.

Unless you're referring to RMT pertaining to paid carries, then those are being worked on to be addressed. In a recent interview Yoshi-P stated the ToS needs updating so it can properly be addressed.

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Originally Posted by Kyrj

Ehhhhhh you can get gil through the cash shop. Just make an alt and buy the story skip. $25 for what 500k gil? Nothing spectacular but it's enough to do things like fill up on crafting crystals and what not.

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I mean if you want to look at it that way sure, but you're just getting the Gil you would have gotten from the quests up until that point.

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Originally Posted by ChocoPuni

i looked over the topic and reported numerous comments that were stirring up trouble and making rude or downright negative remarks towards me. It seems I have a number of fangirls and fanboys :shrug





yeah, I'm pretty disappointed with a lot of the mounts. Same model, different texture.

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I thought this thread was closed???
Did you reopen it??

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Originally Posted by Kyuuen

Mostly because funds from the mogstation gets cycled back into the game. That is what has paid for for the newer data centers for other parts of the world if I'm not mistaken. And of course WoW has more mounts in it.. it's been operating for almost 20 years. >.>

As to the RMT comment.

October 21st 2021 - 5,700+ accounts terminated - https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...5483ba7a009e67
October 14th 2021 - 6,000+ accounts terminated - https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...b96e9db2cd2a71
October 7th 2021 - 4,300+ accounts terminated - https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...966ccefa09b819
July 29th 2021 - 10,000+ accounts terminated - https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...17da61235fd9e1

Source for the above - https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...ews/category/1

They do plenty to deal with RMT. Typically they're tracing where Gil goes before they act so that they're hitting the buyer, the advertisers, the traders, and the bots that are sourcing the Gil.

Unless you're referring to RMT pertaining to paid carries, then those are being worked on to be addressed. In a recent interview Yoshi-P stated the ToS needs updating so it can properly be addressed.



I mean if you want to look at it that way sure, but you're just getting the Gil you would have gotten from the quests up until that point.

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There's alot of unique mounts in wow is what I mean. People act like it's 500 horses and wolves with different colors and all the cool stuff is on the store. Mimiron's head isn't on the store, neither is the engineer motorcycle and helicopter or the tree that changes color depending on what irl season it is or the love rocket or the 5 seater hivemind... You could make a big list and xiv is not innocent at making cheap mount recolors. Both wow and xiv have a ton of cheap reskins and keep the cool stuff in stores with a sprinkle of nice mounts from in game rewards every now and then.

Like you said those aren't rmt bans. Those are for things like the level 1 bots spamming their shady website in town. They could ban a million and it doesn't matter if there's no preventive measures whatsoever and even then that just slows them down a bit. A bot will just make a new account and go park itself back in limsa after the 2 min intro. They'll never be able to ban rmt cause they'll just advertise themselves in pf with something like $UCOB$ followed by a discord without every actually using the word sale. So unless they want to pay people to be undercover gms 24 hours a day 7 days a week to catch them it's here to stay.

Yoshi said it goes back into the game, but he also said houses will never auto-demo. Doesn't matter if he really is telling the truth as things change. I also find it hard to believe they'd have sacrificed the entire revenue of EU if there was no mogstation. wow had na eu and asia servers before in game stores were a thing. If mogstation truly is running the game then they must be siphoning the hell out of subs and game sales for other projects.

I just find it funny when I watch both games do the exact same thing and one gets continuously bashed for it while the other doesn't. If blizzard made holiday mounts only to take them away and sell them on the store 1 year later we all know you'd never hear the end of it and asmon,bellular,preach and all that would make a million videos about how trash blizzard is.

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Originally Posted by ChocoPuni

i looked over the topic and reported numerous comments that were stirring up trouble and making rude or downright negative remarks towards me. It seems I have a number of fangirls and fanboys :shrug

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Well, maybe if you weren't so quick to try and "delete" or "close" your threads, people wouldn't be making those "rude" and "negative" remarks. The fact that you do hide whatever you post whenever someone doesn't really agree with your takes doesn't really leave a good impression on others. And it's really hard and confusing as hell when the only way to get context is from various quotes that might not have the full context because of your attempt to "close" your posts entirely.

Honestly, I think you might have a better discussion and experience entirely if you were to let people see the full context. Why even bother to post something when all you're gonna do is hide it in the end anyways? That sounds really petty, IMO.

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Originally Posted by ChocoPuni

i looked over the topic and reported numerous comments that were stirring up trouble and making rude or downright negative remarks towards me. It seems I have a number of fangirls and fanboys :shrug





yeah, I'm pretty disappointed with a lot of the mounts. Same model, different texture.

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You didn't get any negative remarks. people didn't agree with your post and you got upset and "closed" it.

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Originally Posted by Kyrj

Ehhhhhh you can get gil through the cash shop. Just make an alt and buy the story skip. $25 for what 500k gil? Nothing spectacular but it's enough to do things like fill up on crafting crystals and what not.

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That is interesting. Thank you very much for this information.

Cheers

So, even though the OP's noped out, I have a general idea of what's being asked so I'll toss in my two cents..

No, FFXIV won't get the kind of hate WoW gets for it's store, in part because people will generally not be that vicious about it if they feel that store aside their game is doing well. People may not like that SE sold Cruise Chaser, but generally they will grumble for a bit and move on because overall FFXIV is doing really well to deliver on just about everything. Generally people in this game are satisfied, thus they're willing to leave something like a Cruiser Chaser mount go with only a bit of token complaining. Also helps that as others have stated, everything sold in the Mogstation goes back into the games budget.. meaning that ultimately it still helps the game, still benefits us.

WoW sucks, it's current state sucks, no one but the most delusional fanboys are going to dispute that. This means that every negative thing that people would take issue with.. becomes amplified. People in WoW, especially in classic, would /spit store mounts because the game's state is shit and nothing they sell in the store helps to change that, it just lines executive pockets. WoW's store and especially WoW tokens are nothing but greedy cash grabs that do nothing to actually improve WoW as a game. Let's also not forget that particularly in classic people get tilted over it because a lot of the stuff they're doing now in monetization terms, wasn't there in the original run of those expansions.

Simply put, it's about more than just 'cash shop bad', it's a lot to do with overall customer satisfaction, the good will that the company running the game has (or lack thereof) and the general state of the game.

Let's go with a short food analogy: If you get an order of frites with sauce and a hamburger from your local snackbar, are you really going to raise a stink over a missing packet of sauce when everything aside from that mishap was excellent? Not likely, it's a minor inconvenience that doesn't ruin your overall meal, thus likely you'll leave it be, perhaps with a mention of it next time you order there, constructive feedback. Are you going to raise a stink over it if in addition to that your frites were also soggy garbage and to top it all off, they forgot your hamburger. You damn right you would, because while not the main issue, it's just another thing wrong with what you received.

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Originally Posted by Lanadra

So, even though the OP's noped out, I have a general idea of what's being asked so I'll toss in my two cents..

No, FFXIV won't get the kind of hate WoW gets for it's store, in part because people will generally not be that vicious about it if they feel that store aside their game is doing well. People may not like that SE sold Cruise Chaser, but generally they will grumble for a bit and move on because overall FFXIV is doing really well to deliver on just about everything. Generally people in this game are satisfied, thus they're willing to leave something like a Cruiser Chaser mount go with only a bit of token complaining. Also helps that as others have stated, everything sold in the Mogstation goes back into the games budget.. meaning that ultimately it still helps the game, still benefits us.

WoW sucks, it's current state sucks, no one but the most delusional fanboys are going to dispute that. This means that every negative thing that people would take issue with.. becomes amplified. People in WoW, especially in classic, would /spit store mounts because the game's state is shit and nothing they sell in the store helps to change that, it just lines executive pockets. WoW's store and especially WoW tokens are nothing but greedy cash grabs that do nothing to actually improve WoW as a game. Let's also not forget that particularly in classic people get tilted over it because a lot of the stuff they're doing now in monetization terms, wasn't there in the original run of those expansions.

Simply put, it's about more than just 'cash shop bad', it's a lot to do with overall customer satisfaction, the good will that the company running the game has (or lack thereof) and the general state of the game.

Let's go with a short food analogy: If you get an order of frites with sauce and a hamburger from your local snackbar, are you really going to raise a stink over a missing packet of sauce when everything aside from that mishap was excellent? Not likely, it's a minor inconvenience that doesn't ruin your overall meal, thus likely you'll leave it be, perhaps with a mention of it next time you order there, constructive feedback. Are you going to raise a stink over it if in addition to that your frites were also soggy garbage and to top it all off, they forgot your hamburger. You damn right you would, because while not the main issue, it's just another thing wrong with what you received.

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You act like their players are this way only recently. The first thing they added was the hearthsteed mount for playing one 3 min game of hearthstone (a f2p game that takes 2 sec to download) back during wotlk aka the peak of wow and people were pissed about it back then too. Literally nothing on the shop has ever been well received over there regardless of how well the game is doing. I don't envy blizzard at all trying to please their players.

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Originally Posted by sauc

There's alot of unique mounts in wow is what I mean. People act like it's 500 horses and wolves with different colors and all the cool stuff is on the store. Mimiron's head isn't on the store, neither is the engineer motorcycle and helicopter or the tree that changes color depending on what irl season it is or the love rocket or the 5 seater hivemind... You could make a big list and xiv is not innocent at making cheap mount recolors. Both wow and xiv have a ton of cheap reskins and keep the cool stuff in stores with a sprinkle of nice mounts from in game rewards every now and then.

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Yes, but like I said nearly 20 years of operation in which mounts have been part of WoW vs the 8 almost 9 years that XIV has had mounts. Most of XIV's unique mounts tend to come from it's raids, achievements, and at times PvP. Naturally WoW will have more unique mounts simply for existing longer. And to be fair, there are A LOT of reskinned mounts in WoW. Undead horse, Human horses, Kodo's, Hawkstrider variants, Griffins, and Wyverns just to name a few. Both games are guilty of it no argument, for instance Primal ponies, birds, doggos, and Gwibbers.

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Like you said those aren't rmt bans. Those are for things like the level 1 bots spamming their shady website in town. They could ban a million and it doesn't matter if there's no preventive measures whatsoever and even then that just slows them down a bit. A bot will just make a new account and go park itself back in limsa after the 2 min intro. They'll never be able to ban rmt cause they'll just advertise themselves in pf with something like $UCOB$ followed by a discord without every actually using the word sale. So unless they want to pay people to be undercover gms 24 hours a day 7 days a week to catch them it's here to stay.

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No.. those are literally bans for RMT. Taken from one of the links provided:

Real money trading (RMT) and other illicit activities upset the balance of the game and, as such, are prohibited under the Terms of Service.

Because we have confirmed the existence of players who are engaging in these illicit activities, we have taken the actions listed below.

Time Period: Oct. 14, 2021 to Oct. 20, 2021

・Participation in RMT/prohibited activities
　・Accounts terminated: 4,129

・Botting activity (excluding RMT vendors)
　・Accounts temporarily suspended: 1
*Botting activity by RMT vendors has been included under "Participation in RMT/prohibited activities."

・RMT advertising
　・Accounts terminated: 1,645

Take note of the differentiation of RMT activities and what you claimed to be just for advert. bots, which has its own entry at the bottom. 1,645 advert. bots and 4,129 accounts which includes buyers and sellers.

And what's with this goal post shift? You went from 'they do nothing' to 'they don't do enough' pretty quick there. When you have a more feasible solution to combating RMT be sure to let every MMO in existence know, they'd love to hear from you.

To the aspect of RMT involving paid carries. As stated before there's not enough in the ToS that prohibits the behavior that we're seeing with Party Finder hence Yoshi-P recent acknowledgement of that fact and it requiring some additions before they can act accordingly. Only then will we see them handing out vacations and permanent vacations to those that would abuse the Party Finder for RMT purposes.

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Yoshi said it goes back into the game, but he also said houses will never auto-demo. Doesn't matter if he really is telling the truth as things change. I also find it hard to believe they'd have sacrificed the entire revenue of EU if there was no mogstation. wow had na eu and asia servers before in game stores were a thing. If mogstation truly is running the game then they must be siphoning the hell out of subs and game sales for other projects.

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When did he make the claim that houses would never be auto-demolished? Not saying he didn't, but I don't remember it.

And yes, for a time it has been known that they were siphoning income from the XIV sub. Quite literally old news. For instance do you honestly believe every cent from WoW's sub went back into WoW? Or do you think it was used to prop up other projects?

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I just find it funny when I watch both games do the exact same thing and one gets continuously bashed for it while the other doesn't. If blizzard made holiday mounts only to take them away and sell them on the store 1 year later we all know you'd never hear the end of it and asmon, bellular, preach and all that would make a million videos about how trash blizzard is.

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I think you're a bit off the mark for it here. There would be some push back certainly, but no more than what XIV occasionally gets for it on the forums. The problem with Blizzards model is that there's only one model for their sales. And that's straight into the online store. Whereas XIV presents an opportunity to get it in game before it goes to the mogstation. Granted there are exceptions where a mount goes straight into the mogstation like Cruise Chaser, Chocobo Carriage, or the Whale Mount.

Also I'd argue that there's something a bit more predatory in Blizzards marketing, especially when the online store is literally a button click away while in game, whereas XIV's store is a little more out of the way.

Then there's also the state of the game and their perpetual habit of pushing 6 month subs with a mount attached to it. It's just not a good look imho.

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Originally Posted by sauc

You act like their players are this way only recently. The first thing they added was the hearthsteed mount for playing one 3 min game of hearthstone (a f2p game that takes 2 sec to download) back during wotlk aka the peak of wow and people were pissed about it back then too. Literally nothing on the shop has ever been well received over there regardless of how well the game is doing. I don't envy blizzard at all trying to please their players.

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Hearthstone came out in 2014, so end of Mists/beginning of Warlords. I got it, and didn't have a problem with it. The complaints I saw at the time were that the cash shop mounts always had the better looking mounts than ones that could be earned in-game.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...50#post1500050

''In older MMOs, such as Ultima Online, there was a house maintenance fee you had to pay weekly, but in FFXIV: ARR we decided against this system. Similarly, these older MMOs also had a system where your house would break down if you didn’t log in after a while in order to have you continue your subscription, but this is a thing of the past and we won't have any system like that.''

And what's the problem with mounts attached to 6 month subs? You can buy them individually instead if you want but you get it for free if you were going to 6 month sub anyway. The games launcher also advertises new mogstation items and it's a click away there too.

Wow flat out doesn't make seasonal mounts but I'm saying if they did and took them away only to sell them a year later there would be infinite backlash and this is no secret.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comment...tm_term=jf9rvt This is the only transmog they have on their shop and look at the comments from their own subreddit. There's a ton of non-event glamours that you can't get any other way on xiv store and they don't get 1322 comment threads about how greedy they are with the post upvoted full of awards. And don't look at their official forums good god. I feel wow is loaded with people from 90s mmos still so they literally won't accept anything but sub monetization. You can also buy anything in the store with in game gold too by the way.

As for the rmt I'm saying they are not banning people who buy things like ultimate clears and a tos update won't change that, they'd have to hire gms to catch people in the act on discord otherwise there's no way to prove some paypal transaction happened. And we know they aren't going to do that.

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Originally Posted by Poporito_Popoto

Hearthstone came out in 2014, so end of Mists/beginning of Warlords. I got it, and didn't have a problem with it. The complaints I saw at the time were that the cash shop mounts always had the better looking mounts than ones that could be earned in-game.

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yeah sorry I meant celestial steed and got names mixed up. Still it was all doom and gloom and a sign of ''things to come'' back then and that was in 2010 wotlk

Outside of the in store content (that has it's opponents and defenders), the biggest thing to me is that the store for FF14 isn't even in the game. Outside of the occasional ad you may see on the launcher, it's perfectly conceivable that someone who plays FF14 might not even know there is a cash shop at all. Heck, YoshiP actually said in the recent media tour that the reason they don't want to put a full minion/mount collection panel in the game is because it will, in a sense, act as an advertisement for having to buy content in various ways outside of the game itself.

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Originally Posted by ChocoPuni

Hearthstone is amazing, by the way.
It's pretty sad that someone is mad just because they get a cool mount for playing a fun game... which is entirely free. Yeah, you can buy card packs but you can also win with just the standard cards, I don't even change my deck yet and still win. I did unlock quite a few cards already, though, and the gold amount you get for card packs is pretty generous.

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if you closed your own thread why are you still replying

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Originally Posted by Lihtleita

if you closed your own thread why are you still replying

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Everyone knows why.

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Originally Posted by Lihtleita

if you closed your own thread why are you still replying

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Because ChocoPuni "likes to come back to make jokes or be toxic." Their words from another thread they made. I would put it in a quote bubble, but they deleted the reply due to "eh, whatever", "sneakyyy", "aschoo!", or whatever cringy excuse they put in to sound cute.

Personally I wish we had a way to obtain minions that are long since out of print.

No, why should it?

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Originally Posted by ChocoPuni

closed topic
solved

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Maybe in the near future.

No. Most of the community loves whiteknighting for no reason.
They like reskins for events and over 20 dollar mounts for the cash shop.

You know what is funny I had enough gold to play WoW for free via tokens for game time for at least 10 more years. I still walked away from the game 3 years ago and never looked back. The game wasn't worth the price even at free for me to continue playing. Yes I was one of them that played WoW almost from the beginning of the game.

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Originally Posted by Ranhansha

No. Most of the community loves whiteknighting for no reason.
They like reskins for events and over 20 dollar mounts for the cash shop.

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careful with that word. It's a trigger word for many.

what's a cash shop you mean the optional items you can choose not to buy? .. that cash shop

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Originally Posted by _Koneko_

what's a cash shop you mean the optional items you can choose not to buy? .. that cash shop

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Errm, please do not underestimate the effect of a cash shop. If the cash shop will become the main cash cow of a game then the company will put more resources to it. This means smaller expansions and smaller content patches but more store mounts or store emotes or other "services" etc. This is a rational business decision but almost never healthy for a game.

Cheers

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Originally Posted by Sotaris

careful with that word. It's a trigger word for many.

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Rather like how 'cash' shop' is for many.

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

Errm, please do not underestimate the effect of a cash shop. If the cash shop will become the main cash cow of a game then the company will put more resources to it. This means smaller expansions and smaller content patches but more store mounts or store emotes or other "services" etc. This is a rational business decision but almost never healthy for a game.

Cheers

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And yet Yoshi P complained quite recently in the media tour that the EW expansion is about 30% longer, story and dialog wise, than Shadowbringers was.

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

Errm, please do not underestimate the effect of a cash shop. If the cash shop will become the main cash cow of a game then the company will put more resources to it. This means smaller expansions and smaller content patches but more store mounts or store emotes or other "services" etc. This is a rational business decision but almost never healthy for a game.

Cheers

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there is barely anything in the cash shop other then a few character outfits or things that belong to other games like the ff 7 bike granted I'm a bit of a whale but honestly there disappointedly little in the shop you can't even buy lyse's stormblood intro outfit that many people wanted i'm not saying wrong i'm merely saying from the pov of someone who has whaled in many mmos over my nearly 40 years of life this cash shop is not even worth talking about

now if it was BDO or Blizzard level of cash grab i'd agree with you

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

Errm, please do not underestimate the effect of a cash shop. If the cash shop will become the main cash cow of a game then the company will put more resources to it. This means smaller expansions and smaller content patches but more store mounts or store emotes or other "services" etc. This is a rational business decision but almost never healthy for a game.

Cheers

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Don't feel this applies to this game, not at this period of time anyways.
But if we talk in general among the industry, you're correct. A company will make more money short-term by having a agressive monetization through a microtransaction store-front, like Blizzard and most F2P games. I think the only two F2P games that I think of doing it right is foremost Path of Exile and Warframe, but I'm not 100% about Warframe since I haven't played that game in years but Path of Exile I'm still playing on and off.

Cash Shops don't really bother me, as long as they don't lock the story behind the Cash Shop or make it to where Cash Shops is the only way to progress in game, then they can sell gil tokens, strong gear, cosmetics, whatever.

As long as I have the choice to play the game myself and get stuff in game then I'm ok, I don't have to use the Cash Shop unless I want to is how I like it and if Cash Shop exclusives remain as certain cosmetics or jump potions then I'm fine, just don't lock progression or story behind it.

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Originally Posted by Sotaris

Don't feel this applies to this game, not at this period of time anyways.
But if we talk in general among the industry, you're correct. A company will make more money short-term by having a agressive monetization through a microtransaction store-front, like Blizzard and most F2P games. I think the only two F2P games that I think of doing it right is foremost Path of Exile and Warframe, but I'm not 100% about Warframe since I haven't played that game in years but Path of Exile I'm still playing on and off.

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I feel like this is the operative term here. Short-term. SE's cash shop is noninvasive and allows for players to completely ignore it - no advertisements other than the most basic of ones on the loading screen and nothing in-game to lead players to it. It's also nearly impossible to purchase anything from the cash shop without gates in the way at every step. Their monetisation model is the complete opposite of aggressive, and it's quite obvious that they're not interested in the short-term but in the long-term success and profitability of the game.

I was thinking about this topic on the way in to work the other day. Let's say the average network engineer in Tokyo makes $60,000 US per year so with payroll taxes, benefits contributions, etc, that's roughly $75,000 annual cost to the employer. At $15.00 US per month, that's 5000 subscriptions required to pay for that single employee. I'm sure a majority of income from game/expansion sales is re-invested in development, but with such a large staff and recurring costs, subscription fees likely don't cover the daily cost of running the game. Since game/expansion sales are a one-time capital injection that spikes and drops off quickly, income from secondary monetization streams can make a big difference.

I don't expect the Mogstation to ever cause widespread anger the way cash shops in other games have. Since the items are completely optional, and to my understanding, have no effect on things like collection achievements, SE will likely continue to be an example of how to run a cash shop. I can't blame them for having one either since subscription fees are generally unstable, having another monetization option that focuses on the dedicated players who are more likely to spend money, is a good way to make up for lost income during subscription slumps. Personally, I find the items I would potentially want to be too expensive to be worth it, but that's just me. On the other hand, I'm more than happy to toss them a few extra dollars a month for more retainers. From what I hear, all the extra money is funneled toward development of the game so it's even better. Subjective perception of value, and all that. :)

Defending the cash shop because it's optional is the most absurd reason ever, yet it's the one I see tossed around the most. Do you know what else is optional? The story, trials, raids, glamour, housing, Gold Saucer, fishing, gathering, extra jobs every expansion.
You don't need all of that to enjoy the game and not everyone enjoys those features, but they are available for everyone in case they want to give it a try.
Additional services, ok. Fantasia, ok. Items from past events for people who missed them, ok. Skip potions, ok. Leveling alters, ok.
Items that could be included as rewards for content/events that get snipped from the actual game, not ok.

The fact this is not Blizzard does not mean this is something we should settle for. Also, not everything's great. Genderlock is a mistake. If Iuse a Fantasia (which I paid for) suddenly I can't wear some other items for which I also paid. And if you are a Viera or Hrothgar, chances are you won't be able to use the hairstyle but pay the same for them. MogStation is wrong on many levels but people refuse to see it because as long as they can pay 40$ and get their dopamine rush in exchange for their brand new mount or waifu dress, that's cool. S-E knows, and they play their cards, apparently, somehow, that makes them super good people because they are not Blizzard.

And before anyone says, you already support them with your monthly subscription, they are not dying, this is the most profitable FF game in history. At least be honest to yourself.

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Originally Posted by Ranhansha

MogStation is wrong on many levels but people refuse to see it because as long as they can pay 40$ and get their dopamine rush in exchange for their brand new mount or waifu dress, that's cool.

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So you're upset that other people are happy? Sounds like a you problem.

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Originally Posted by VictorTheed

Cash Shops don't really bother me, as long as they don't lock the story behind the Cash Shop or make it to where Cash Shops is the only way to progress in game, then they can sell gil tokens, strong gear, cosmetics, whatever

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If you wanna argue cosmetics, go ahead (even if I think they should be in game, or at least... account wide...). But do not put actual impacting gear in there, ever. And for the love that is bots and markets, do not ever, ever put that token here. WoW RMT spam might have gone down with the token, but its actual botting issue horribly HORRIBLY spiked up with it. I remember when I had trouble finding bots on WoW, now they might Boomy congo lines across half a zone and it's ignored because it promotes token sales (since those bots can just buy the tokens with their gold, thereby not needing to use stolen credit cards to fund delaying their bans by a long ass time). And that's ignoring the issue it caused with run sales spiking (also promoting token sales) that plague the game's systems. If you think 10 listings of obvious rmt run sales is a problem, wait until it's 100, and actually doing it with token sales so it's not even against ToS, that'll certainly be noticeable.

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Originally Posted by Sotaris

Don't feel this applies to this game, not at this period of time anyways.
But if we talk in general among the industry, you're correct. A company will make more money short-term by having a agressive monetization through a microtransaction store-front, like Blizzard and most F2P games. I think the only two F2P games that I think of doing it right is foremost Path of Exile and Warframe, but I'm not 100% about Warframe since I haven't played that game in years but Path of Exile I'm still playing on and off.

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With Warframe they allow players to grind for most everything, including the premium currency, without having to pay a single dollar. The grinds tend to range from "eh, not bad" to "OH MY GOD WHY?" in intensity, which encourages players to buy Platinum (the premium currency). Without it things can be a bit rough and take a lot longer. Platinum makes things a lot more enjoyable, in my opinion. It's probably the only free to play game I don't mind throwing money at for multiple reasons.

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

Errm, please do not underestimate the effect of a cash shop. If the cash shop will become the main cash cow of a game then the company will put more resources to it. This means smaller expansions and smaller content patches but more store mounts or store emotes or other "services" etc. This is a rational business decision but almost never healthy for a game.

Cheers

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Aside from their initial offerings and old event items, the things made in the cash shop are 100% funded by things purchases made in the cash shop. In addition, 100% of cash shop profits go right back into the game. So yes, while some of the profits are allocated for new cash shop items, a large chunk of it goes towards QoL or things that the community wants but not necessarily high priority to the devs.

The biggest example being the last wave of housing wards.