It's time to reevaluate the idea of adding a PLEX/Chronoscroll-like system to FFXIV

[Intaki]

TLDR: Remove all forms of cash shop to in game transactions, and do not introduce any other forms of such systems, as they will not fix anything, period.

"Dear Giant Corporation, please stop making money. I'd really appreciate it. Thanks."

Good luck with that appeal of yours. I'm sure they'll take it into serious consideration.

[KisaiTenshi]

"Dear Giant Corporation, please stop making money. I'd really appreciate it. Thanks."

Good luck with that appeal of yours. I'm sure they'll take it into serious consideration.

The reason people who play Subscription games object to the "freemiumization" of their games is because "Giant Corporation" sees free money at the expense of the subscription base.

A Freemium game has 10X to 100X the subscriber base of a subscription game, BUT only 2% of the player base will ever buy anything, and of those 2% maybe 0.5% will drop thousands of dollars on the game. This is just a cost shift. So instead of 1 million players paying 15$/mo to play a game, it's now 100 million players, with the original 1 million players continuing to spend 15$/mo to maintain their lead, and a quarter of them now spending on the cash shop to get ahead of others. So the remaining three quarters then cancel their subscriptions once they lose sight of the end game, and now big giant company isn't making 15 million dollars a month constantly anymore, now they're making maybe 5 million dollars a month constantly, and maybe another 2 million dollars every time they they put a new cash shop item out.

I would not trust a company like Electronic Aarts to give good value for money. I've been on and off again playing the "The Simpsons Tapped Out" game on my iPad, which is by EA, and it pulls all the same freemium crud MMO's pull, locked content, accelerated content for money, and because it's a humor game, it even self-references it.



In case people have forgotten, Zynga is failing royally, and they're the ones who brought freemium games to social games. Nexon however was the company that started it all in MMORPG's.
http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/201...c-napkin-math/

This worked for a little while. Being cheap, easy on the uptake and a no-brainer is a good thing.

But it is also REALLY BAD. Especially when the cost and difficulty of developing games continued to plummet and especially when the poster child has a billion-dollar IPO. Because when something is easy to build and sell — and appears to make money — a lot of people are going to gold rush the market and drive your margins into the ground. Now there are a million alternatives.

Which is the point... when you start freemiumizing a game, the game developer spends more time developing more ways to exploit the customer for money than producing quality content that people actually care about.

The entire PLEX type of system has effectively ruined the games they were introduced to, because it doesn't attract new paying players, it attracts more RMT, and more spam because now the bar is lowered to creating unlimited accounts and characters.

The only appropriate place for a cash shop in a subscription game is to curb abusive and exploitable behavior. Limit the number of characters, limit the amount of free customization (to prevent impersonation) of popular players/staff/celebrities. Sometimes even sticking seasonal content in a cash shop makes sense if the means to acquiring them has been permanently removed from the game.

[Charisma]

because it doesn't attract new paying players

Yes it does lol, i know a lot of people who hate Monthly Subscribtion payment methods, that would play a game with this system.

it attracts more RMT

How exactly would it do that? People would prefer the legal way to "buy" Gil, and RMT cant make it cheaper all the time.

and more spam because now the bar is lowered to creating unlimited accounts and characters

lolwat? This doesnt make sense at all.