Quote Originally Posted by Asierid View Post
Wait a minute. We got used to buying those, they don't count?

That logic is totally backwards.
For the purposes of determining the potential outrage of the community, no, they clearly don't count.

However, in fact they're a perfect example of what happens when people meekly accept microcharges for content that should have been available via alternative means.

There's no reason why adding two additional Retainers shouldn't have been a quest line coupled with a chunk of gil. There's no reason why Fantasia shouldn't have been available via one or two one-time quests, as well as via a chunk of gil. These would be undeniably better options from the player's perspective. Instead, SE arguably withheld, intentionally, features that could have been contained within the game world as a part of our monthly sub, purely to charge money for them.

This just highlights the fact that if things start off small, and reasonable-sounding, and are around long enough, people adapt and stop complaining. This is precisely one of the fears that people have about the cash shop - and rightly so. We already can see evidence of it, within FFXIV itself.