YoshiP stated that MMOs are trending toward F2P

[Shadowlink]

F2P hhmmm remindes me of Aion.
Tiamat raid i think 3 days id and you only get one chance so if your grp wipes well wait 3 days or pay cash so you can reset the id.
Wouldnt it be funny if you get one hour per week for dungeons and raid in ff14 and if you screw up well pay or wait a week.
What someone disconnected and you wiped because of it dont worry cash shop helps for money haha.

[Gilraen]

see FFXIV going F2P, even if not heavenward yet, but the main game possibly.. especially since its starting to feel brocken with the unsynced BS!!

.. Yoshi, pl change that back, the unsynced is ruining the main game and experience.. or only allow unsynced if 2 (yes 2), players less are taking part.. and then only allow up to +50 gear lv unsyned not more or some other solution.. (.. its a bit off topic, but see that breaking the game, and possibly forcing it into F2P at sooner than expected)

How is unsynced play breaking the game? This is among a grocery list of things people have been asking for, and requires a premade party to even start. As for going free to play, Yoshida may be acknowledging the model he's stated in the past that XIV will never be that. Archaic, maybe, but he's stuck to it pretty strongly so far, I don't see him changing it anytime soon.

[Alberel]

P2P games use grinds to keep players subbing month after month.

F2P games use grinds to get players to pay to ease the grind.

The OP is suggesting that this somehow makes the two equal in terms of how they go about getting your money but this could not be more wrong. Find me a F2P MMO that allows you to buy everything in the cash shop for the same price as a monthly subscription. You won't find one.

The very nature of the F2P business model means the majority of players pay nothing for the game and typically get a horrific grind 10x worse than any P2P game and a far shallower experience to boot. These players usually don't play for more than a few months as they burn out on the free content and move on. This causes the developers to target only the rich 'whales' that play the game when making things to sell in the cash shop. The result is a hugely over-priced cash shop that supports the game by relying on a very very small 5-10% of the playerbase spending hundreds or thousands of dollars a month on the game.

Whether the game is P2W or not is irrelevant. The fact is with a subscription MMO everyone gets all the content at a fair price, whilst in a F2P MMO you would spend 10x as much money to get that same amount of stuff. I should also point out that F2P games tend to focus much less on releasing actual content and much more on releasing random cosmetic items in the shop to sell for quick money. The entire F2P business model is built on making as much money for as little effort as possible; they don't care if they lose 90% of their players because they don't pay anyway. In comparison a P2P MMO has to release regular, high quality content to maintain all of its subscribers.

I don't know about you but I think it's fairly obvious why P2P is a much better deal for consumers. F2P is an illusion used as a marketing trick to lure in naive players, nothing more. Anyone advocating for it has unfortunately been duped and lacks the capacity to actually see how much more expensive it is.

[ckc22]

I have 0 interest in F2P MMOs and will be gone about 12 seconds after it happens if FFXIV goes free to play.

[Iromi]

Same here^ If it goes F2P I'm done for sure...those kinds of games get boring faaaast

[Xieveral]

I've played many a sub-turned-F2P game and its not what you should wish upon this game.

A subscription-based game going F2P is essentially going onto life support. The subscribers they have at the time aren't bringing in enough to please the higher-ups and the switch to a F2P model is an attempt to bring in former subscribers and a new target market to get what money they can before the game's eventual demise (which still isn't enough to please those in charge).

The game's quality goes down... unless you pay up but its still nowhere near as great as when the game was exclusively subscription.

Also the kind of people that come after a F2P switch are likely jump ship to the new hotness once they get bored and most often spend little to nothing during their time playing which in turn contributes to the decline of a game and its heavy-handed reliance on a cash shop.

[Canadane]

I can't imagine how boring it'd be to pay money to skip the grind and then... what?
Like, yeah you have Savage Alexander but if everyone had full i210 or something a lot of the pain would be gone. Stress on healers and tanks relieved so everyone can just focus on the mechanics and the fight is then won.

Even if it's a grind, I enjoy the idea of having something to do. Being able to just throw money at it would give me so little reason to play.

[Shiroe]

How is unsynced play breaking the game? ....

players are getting pulled thru it without anyeffort.. at least in T13 (even with echo), a noob could not get pulled thru without haveing routined it well...

just recently, a sol bonus was pulled thru it without trully know the full fight..., others are just gearing up fast (with heavenwards done fast) then goingn back and doing the scob and fcob fast for the first time then farming it off the bat, without ever really experiencing what made it cool...

and farming ponies is a joke..., at least you could still wipe a bit in the past, and to really had "mastered" it to certain dagree..

.. if they allowed the unsyced, at least only for players who've completed it once withou an unsynced group.., its detryoing the game for new players.. , ex primal farming and scob and fcob lost all their epicness

[Verius_Nox]

players are getting pulled thru it without anyeffort.. at least in T13 (even with echo), a noob could not get pulled thru without haveing routined it well...

just recently, a sol bonus was pulled thru it without trully know the full fight..., others are just gearing up fast (with heavenwards done fast) then goingn back and doing the scob and fcob fast for the first time then farming it off the bat, without ever really experiencing what made it cool...

and farming ponies is a joke..., at least you could still wipe a bit in the past..

.. if they allowed the unsyced, at least only for players who've completed it once withou an unsynced group.., its detryoing the game for new players.. , ex primal farming and scob and fcob lost all their epicness

People were being pulled through T13 before. That was the entirety of the carry business model.

[Kallera]

players are getting pulled thru it without anyeffort.. at least in T13 (even with echo), a noob could not get pulled thru without haveing routined it well...

just recently, a sol bonus was pulled thru it without trully know the full fight..., others are just gearing up fast (with heavenwards done fast) then goingn back and doing the scob and fcob fast for the first time then farming it off the bat, without ever really experiencing what made it cool...

and farming ponies is a joke..., at least you could still wipe a bit in the past..

.. if they allowed the unsyced, at least only for players who've completed it once withou an unsynced group.., its detryoing the game for new players.. , ex primal farming and scob and fcob lost all their epicness

The hell are you on about? The lowest ilvl fights are still there as an option, that people do not take it isn't your problem.

And what do you mean "what made it cool"? Getting killed for weeks on end is not something people want to do for outdated content. No unsync would only have made fewer people enjoy or care about the fcob content to run it, especially with newer players.