Cash shop confirmed

[Erudain]

Out of curiosity, what are some examples of these games?

Age of Conan, DC Universe, Aion, Rift, Tera, SW:TOR, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Star Trek Online, LotR....there are plenty of examples...

Edit: and before you ask, yes, all those games introduced their cash shop before going F2P and it drove ppl away from the game....cash shop alone was not the cause for them to go F2P but it certainly helped.

[Riviere]

Age of Conan, DC Universe, Aion, Rift, Tera, SW:TOR, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Star Trek Online, LotR....there are plenty of examples...

Edit: and before you ask, yes, all those games introduced their cash shop before going F2P and it drove ppl away from the game....cash shop alone was not the cause for them to go F2P but it certainly helped.

TERA's store was added 2 months after launch and all it had were the same services provided by the fantasia (Gender change, appearance change, race change), a name change service and weapon skins for every class. Yes, people complained about it like they always do, but I seriously doubt it drove many players away (Most of them are just talk). People stopped playing because it was too repetitive with not enough endgame content to keep the players busy. When Manaya's Core was added, that's all most high levels did (That or AC HM). It's like if the only thing to do at level 50 in this game was Titan HM and Titan Extreme, people wouldn't stay for long in this game if endgame was just that.

RIFT had types of Collector's Editions, for the base game, for the ashes of history world event and for the expansion. The only item I remember it having that wasn't one of the account upgrades before they went F2P was the Armored Tiger mount, that's all it had and it had nothing to do with the decline of the population. Some people were (and still are) experiencing awful performance issues despite playing on high-end computers, others found the Storm Legion dungeons too hard and the community too unforgiving to run them with the Dungeon Finder and others like myself just got bored of learning a new spec every week because of Trion's weekly attempts to balance my calling.

AION's Black Cloud Marketplace opened in anticipation of patch 3.0 which was the conversion to F2P and you could pre-purchase items for the upcoming update. AION lost players because of how grindy it was at the beginning and Western players surely do not enjoy having to kill a million mobs just to get 1 level. There were very few quests available which forced players to grind, some of my fellow guild members ran Fire Temple over and over from Lv30 until around 40 which became too repetitive, so they got bored and quit.

I don 't know about the rest of those games that you mentioned, but the 3 that I played don't apply to your rule.

[Erudain]

snip

Rift added "special editions mounts" back when it was P2P, it was a re-skin of the faster mount in game, ppl was mad since you didn't have to get it/pay it with in game money.

Aion started with weapons skins back in 1.8 (lightsaber skin for swords, popsicle skin for mace) etc, then in 2.0 they added the "socketing success supplements" (permanet item in the store) and "100% socketing success supplements" (timed offer, they sold those for 1 week IIRC) for manastone socketing when it was still P2P. that was their field test that they could include game changing items to the store.
Then on the other hand, you have the "legit RMT" it can create, I remember ppl buying the lightsaber skin on the store and then selling it in-game for millions.

It's true as you say the games had other issues, that's why I said the cash shops weren't the only reason ppl left, but "another" reason people left....and if you are losing ppl the least you want to do is give them more motives to leave.

One can truly hope they will not go down this road with FF XIV cash shop...problem is trying to cope with what you hope for and what history of the MMORPG genre tells us...

[Teryaani]

One can truly hope they will not go down this road with FF XIV cash shop...problem is trying to cope with what you hope for and what history of the MMORPG genre tells us...

The examples you gave (faster mount, better gear enhancements) are P2W, Yoshi seemed pretty firm on it being vanity only. I can understand the skepticism though (<cough>housing<cough>).

I'm going to hold out hope that they are going the blizzard route and just sell pure vanity (excluding WoW's new "pay for level 90!" nonsense. Screw that noise). As long as it's vanity stuff and the gear and minions are untradeable, this shouldn't affect the player base.

[Teryaani]

I hope everyone who whines about the cash shop will unsub.

Here's hoping they don't. Here's hoping they make their opinion known and then keep playing.

....cash shop alone was not the cause for them to go F2P but it certainly helped.

Maybe. But for at least two of those (D&DO and SWTOR), the cash store had nothing to do with driving down subs. Those games had loads of other issues that caused that. I think people are ascribing way too much sub-killing power to the cash shop.