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

[Laerad3993]

Yet for some reason a lot of people on this forum aren't happy about the idea.

That's because everyone on this forum likes to pretend this game is something special, something completely apart from the rest of the MMO's out there, when in reality it isn't. Doomsayers whenever change of any kind is brought up. The same people that forget that money speaks, and that for every one of them against a system like PLEX, there are most likely 3-5 in favor of it that negate their votes, lol.

[Chasely]

If you're so confident so many people are in favor of this awful system, why not go to every single server and survey all of the active players? Then, post the untainted results here.

[DreadRabbit]

Ehh, being pretty new and having played a decent number of both P2P and F2P games, I have mixed feelings about the issue. I never played EVE, so I might be skewed, but every game that has had this that I have played usually ended up with only the already rich in gil players being able to afford the credit system. The only way I see this working is if NPCs sold the PLEX and they weren't tradeable. Any time you place a system that allows a legalized exchange of real money for an in game item a player sells, it DOES snowball.

Editing for character length:

My very first MMO was a Korean F2P called Mabinogi. It's still going strong here: http://mabinogi.nexon.net/

When I first joined, they had just released their second big story expansion. Ever since the game launched, their cash shop prioritized mainly cosmetic items. The one hot item has always been "dye ampules". This premium item allows a player to change the color of any gear in the game to whatever they want (mostly). They could only be bought in the cash shop, but players could trade them on market boards, player shops, and individually.

When I first began playing the game, the dye market had these dyes ranging from 5k gold to 10k gold. At the time, very reasonable so no one thought anything of players selling these items they purchased with money for in game gold.

You know the prices of those same individual dyes now? Anywhere between 1 million gold to 5 million gold depending on your server. Their price in the premium cash shop never changed. The dye sellers very much controlled the ebb and flow of the market, and because the rest of the players were willing to pay the inflated prices, they increased. So for literally $1 you got $1 million gold at minimum.

Now this isn't the same as in-game subscription credit, but the idea is very similar. Yes, the market for Mabinogi and the economy changed over the years, with several variables to take into account that aren't in this game. But it wasn't the only premium item that had a similar fate, and Mabinogi isn't the only game whose economy became wrecked because you could essentially legally buy in game currency through premium item trading. EVE online is a very, VERY special case and should NEVER be looked at as a leading example.

PVP centric games can handle this idea much better because players can freely hunt down gold/gil sellers. Games like FF14 that are primarily PVE can't. So long story short, I am also against this idea.

If you really want to be able to earn game time, then have it be a player reward system where x-amount of achievements/points earned/time played will reward the player with game time. Do not put it in the hands of players themselves. It just doesn't work.

[314159265358979323846264338327]

Adding officially sanctioned systems like PLEX will not reduce RMT and especially will not reduce RMT spam, it will increase RMT spam and I know this from experience

The games that have it have significantly less RMT, and I know this from personal experience. How do I know this?

WoW for example has never had as many bots as it does these days after the introduction of the token system and it has more RMT spam than ever before.

It's literally not even in the game yet. How can there be so many more bots as a result of something that doesn't exist?

Thirdly the RMT will control around 90% to 95%% of the PLEX system by buying up en masse the majority of the PLEX's which would be sold in the game for gil

There's not a finite number of them available. They are infinite. RMT can't simply "buy them all", and if they did try to buy a huge stock it would just smash the price into the ground from over saturation. Free game time for everyone!

I have seen this happen in many MMO's that use such token systems like PLEX where can buy it with real money and sell in game for the games currency

Many MMOs use it, or switch to using it, because it has a direct negative effect on RMT. If it really caused problems, more and more of them would be willingly switching to such a system.

But hey, I only have a good 5-6 years into EVE, which is one of the most well known games out there that uses any kind of token system. Wanna know how many RMT I've come across there, be it in game or via PMs? ZERO

[Moqi]

FFXIV is designed, balanced and paced around the concept of "required time played in-game to achieve a given goal". It is not designed around "how much a player is willing or able to spend".

Not since the cash shop.

[ScarletDawn]

Not since the cash shop.

Cash shop is purely vanity gear, you do not require those items to play the game.

[Moqi]

Cash shop is purely vanity gear, you do not require those items to play the game.

If my goal is to achieve that vanity gear then yes, I have pay. You can also shorten the time it requires you to get other achievements through the cash shop by purchasing 2 extra retainers, or make gil by selling wedding packages/dye gear for people.

FFXIV is already being designed with "how much a player is willing or able to spend" in mind.

[ScarletDawn]

If my goal is to achieve that vanity gear then yes, I have pay. You can also shorten the time it requires you to get other achievements through the cash shop by purchasing 2 extra retainers, or make gil by selling wedding packages/dye gear for people.

FFXIV is already being designed with "how much a player is willing or able to spend" in mind.

Pretty sure they said selling the wedding items was against the ToS. And you holding it against a company for vanity gear? Would you rather they didn't add new content due to lack of funding?

[Gilraen]

But hey, I only have a good 5-6 years into EVE, which is one of the most well known games out there that uses any kind of token system. Wanna know how many RMT I've come across there, be it in game or via PMs? ZERO

I don't think you quite grasp the differences between here and Eve. With Eve CCP monetized time. Not in real money, but game money. Everyone sells game time nowadays, but CCP is one of the few (if not only) companies to do so as an in-game item. To support this they also made their game subscription-optional. What's the point in offering time as an in-game item if you're just going to force people to subscribe anyway? XIV is so very NOT that. Game time has no value in XIV because we're all required to subscribe to play. All more time does is unlock veteran rewards, of which only one can be sold over the marketboard (at a very low price at that). Now, in order to make time worth trading in XIV they would have to adopt CCP's model and get rid of mandatory subscriptions. That's just not going to happen.

[ScarletDawn]

snip

They would have to add a system much like Eve skills system, where time = training. So then people are forced to buy time in order to keep training. But how does one do that in FF?