Hating the new mog station restrictions.

FC events took a big hit with this. Time to change rewards to non FFXIV related items, probably steam gift cards to so can play another game :D

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Originally Posted by Tigerlilley

Edited to add: I can't help but feel like this is yet another massive blow to our attempts at community building on OCE. Our members of the FC there are more casual and gil purchases for gifts aren't an option for everyone. Plus it signifcantly hinders our prizes from events, obviously.

RIP first Christmas.

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Yeah, that's an oof (and it doesn't really help that I often get the anxious feeling that online venues really don't want "communities" in the old social sense anymore, either ... I'm probably overthinking it, but there's a pretty logical seeming case for it, too. See some of my comments about Discord for the likely problem, or all the heat being thrown around towards Zuckerberg in recent years, etc.).

Sadly even not counting the chargeback problems, I'm also not surprised RMT is getting put under the "hyper priority we don't care what gets dinged up in the fight" lens again, given the general scrutiny digital goods have come under lately for various reasons (money laundering, taxes, etc) thanks in large part to NFTs and recent cryptocoin shenanigans. The kind of thing that seems silly for players to care about but likely is something that big business is basically having their arm twisted to.

Wouldn't be the first time I've seen heartless seeming game changes made that seem enough in the face of RL policy shifts to make you at least wonder, either - e.g., Diablo 3 ending its real money auction house feature conspicuously around the time US tax officials were putting "virtual currencies" under the lens (targeting things like Bitcoin of course, but there wasn't any logical reason that D3 gold wouldn't have been covered as well, if Blizzard had continued to officially support its exchange for real money ... indeed, one has to wonder in that light if an insufficiently tough stance against RMT could even get one's ingame currency considered "money." Possibly an overthink there, but could you imagine if it did happen and you did have to pay tax on ingame currency earnings? Active players could basically be forced to become vendors to afford it, seeing that you can't exactly remit taxes in gil or gold ... LOL).

Or WoW reforming its skill system in late BC to always prioritize PvP over PvE needs and heavily mute the effect of RNG, which was right around the time that they were introducing PvP as an esport with cash prize tournaments - and, quite notably, right around the same time US officials were cracking down on those online poker rooms. Possibly a business risk concern as to whether or not WoW was strictly enough a game of skill to avoid becoming collateral damage under such scrutiny?

While I would agree that the entire points made in this thread are all valid, I would be surprised if Square Enix actually didn't consider other options. This is one that makes an overall to the company, for a company that actually cares a lot about their own profits.

I do think that the code removal from the store is fine, but I also think that the reality of the situation is that items should not be removed from the giftable options. While it is true that mount codes are most purchased by scammers, it is plain obvious that the fear of being banned (because now gifts are tied to the player) would mean that players wanting to buy "cheaper" mounts would actually think twice since there is now a reason to not do so.

This is probably just them just hamming down, and loosening up once the dust eventually settles.

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Originally Posted by SpiltPickle

Right there with you. My FC has events that had always given away mounts and minions.. And now one of the leaders is stuck with stuff they bought for a halloween party and can't gift now.=

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If you've already bought the codes, I'm pretty sure they're still going to be valid. You just can't buy new ones.

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Mounts and emotes were my favorite thing to gift.

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Which is why they were prime targets for theft using stolen credit cards.

I only see it causing them loss profits that they could have earned.

I wanted to gift a friend a leveling boost for an alt. Went from me being able to do that anonymously through the mog station to me needing to send the money over PayPal which really sucks and isn't anonymous at all.
I wish they at least allowed players who've had long-lasting subscriptions to use the same CC they use on the sub to send people gifts. Not a perfect situation, but it should at least provide a workaround for some of us.

That being said. Their making store items harder to obtain without a care in the world is oddly refreshing in this microtransaction gaming era. It's unfortunate that it's also incredibly frustrating.

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Originally Posted by EaMett

I wanted to gift a friend a leveling boost for an alt.

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Level and story skips are both giftable. You just need to be friends with them.

https://i.gyazo.com/6f451e12d0b91f7e...a20de8383f.png

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Originally Posted by Shibi

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Nice!! That definitely wasn't there when we were trying to do it. 3 of us looked everywhere. Maybe it was just too close to the announcement and things weren't set up just yet. It's good to know that at least these ones are still giftable.

Square Enix: a gazzillion dollar company incapable of checking if a character being gifted a mount or emote already posesses the corresponding action prior to the purchase.
Sounds like an unsolvable problem to me. If only the required information was stored somewhere accessible. Like in a database...

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Originally Posted by Arboreir

Gifting emotes and mounts was a key part of this community.

Hosting an IRL FFXIV trivia night? Perhaps at a con? What better reward than a store mount for the first place?

Hosting a discord giveaway, or one in an RP venue? Cash shop gift.

Anniversary with the Eternally Bound coming up? Hey babe have a chocobo carriage I know you've been wanting it.

Just, let us give you money dammit. I had an event planned for someone I care about, there's a store mount she's really been wanting that I wanted to give her. And now I can't give her that.

I know SE listens to the community, so I wanted to add my voice to the chorus: Let us buy gift codes.

"Oh but what if they already have it?" then the receiver can re-gift it, or they can contact SE, or any other measure that so far has been working. But don't stop the entire community from being able to give each other gifts on that.

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This way they can have sales on items, before they could not without have to face people buying up cheap items and alot of them, for then selling them cheaper when the sales stop and go the RMT way on it and if you can earn 1-2 dollars on an item and still sell it for a good value under the normal value, then it is no good.

With this system we can have actual sales and discounts without having RMT too much involved with it and the hassle of having to be friended with a sneaky person for 72 hours before being able to receive, also leaves you with scams... and it also leaves you a target for being suspended for having done activities that is against the TOS.

Hey love I bought you a few jet black dyes <3 just doesn't carry the same weight and surprise as hey love I bought you the peacock mount <3
Guess i'll never buy anything from the mogstation again since all I did on it was gift someone a nice present that lives far away for their BD ^^"

It's a fairly solid bet that the cash shop is handled by the publisher (SQEX), not the dev studio (CBU3)... as I've noted in other threads, there is a separation between the two, much like Sony and Naughty Dog, or EA and Bioware. The fact that SQEX doesn't brand the studio separately (and that Yoshi-P has somewhat more influence with the publisher than many dev studio leadership teams have) makes it easy to forget that.

And sadly, based on my own experience with publishers in game dev, a publisher caring more about the hassle of chargebacks in a cash shop rather than a game's community is very on-brand. And that's not on-brand "for SQEX", or publishers in any one region; that's just in general.

What's more irritating is that, as many folks have said, this won't really do much to make a dent in RMT. The only thing I've ever seen that shuts down third-party RMT is introducing first-party RMT, like EVE Online's PLEX or Wildstar's CREDD: an in-game object redeemable for game time, which can be purchased outside of the game for real money. Which is a cursed solution in some ways, but does generally kill off shady third-party RMT.

Changes like this are at best a mild inconvenience to RMT folks, while also being a huge hassle for the actual community. Making changes like that is a huge mistake... but a publisher choosing to make it?

That doesn't surprise me, though I wish it did.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

And sadly, based on my own experience with publishers in game dev, a publisher caring more about the hassle of chargebacks in a cash shop rather than a game's community is very on-brand. And that's not on-brand "for SQEX", or publishers in any one region; that's just in general.

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Yeah, especially these days when payment processors seem to be very keen on throwing their weight around in general, to the point sometimes of trying to act as de facto overlords of the digital world (by threatening to withhold services from companies that don't go along with their dictates). In fact a going concern among tech circles is whether or not the Internet is already too far gone in that manner (i.e., that Apple, Google, and the handful of payment processors now essentially 100% dictate the business activities of modern digital business, and not always in a way that actual paying customers are keen on seeing).

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What's more irritating is that, as many folks have said, this won't really do much to make a dent in RMT. The only thing I've ever seen that shuts down third-party RMT is introducing first-party RMT, like EVE Online's PLEX or Wildstar's CREDD: an in-game object redeemable for game time, which can be purchased outside of the game for real money. Which is a cursed solution in some ways, but does generally kill off shady third-party RMT.

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Or, the 800 pound gorilla of them, the WoW Token, which is what I expect that a similar solution in XIV would resemble if implemented.

Having at least done some endgame in all but two (Vanilla and WoD, if you're wondering) expansion cycles of WoW, I'm going to say it's indeed way too cursed in a PvE raid oriented game with static challenges - in fact, in WoW's case, it has pretty much made the game effectively P2W (and perhaps in the most pernicious possible way, since Blizzard can attempt to argue that it's not actually P2W by blaming the community) for practically anyone who doesn't have a static or absurd amounts of free time. I'd really rather not see XIV devolve along that path, as we can already see what would lie at the end: the already often vexing experience for late comers to endgame content being further aggravated by a large number of raiders no longer freely offering help as, with the ability to derive real-world consideration (even if it's just their sub) from ingame currency, they opt to treat help as a service that is expected to be paid for.

PLEX is probably the only one that really works out decently, but that's because of EVE being a PvP-centric sandbox game. I'm sure the model still has some flaws there but IMO it does fit sandboxes far better than it does PvE based titles.

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Originally Posted by Wolwosh

Hey love I bought you a few jet black dyes <3 just doesn't carry the same weight and surprise as hey love I bought you the peacock mount <3

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You clearly don't have friends who are into glamour.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

snip!.

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Just letting you know that I enjoy your posts a lot. They're more often than not information-filled and very balanced!

I'm so glad I put my wife's account on my credit card! I can go in and buy here anything I want. If I had to deal with the new gifting limitations to get her stuff I'd be pretty upset about it.

He clearly has no idea how much Jet Black dye costs on the market board.

(Half a million for one)