Chinese costumes are out on Mogstation

[Kaurie]

what would be effort? I want to know cause simply putting it in say deep dungeon like they did with that hair everyone wants you would STILL get people complaining about it cause of RNG and or grind wall. So what if it's "free" it'll be put behind some content alot of players don't want to do. Again they can't win, as people will complain no matter what they do. Even if they lower the price people will complain it's even there in the first place. What can SE really do here? People asked for it and even said they would pay for it.. what would YOU do if tons of people were asking you for a product and were willing to PAY for it? Ofcourse you'd give it away for free right? So why aren't things on the MB for free then? Before people slam SE on this maybe they should try practicing what they want SE to do.

Ofcourse that'll be crazy as people will say " But I took time to grind X content to make X item. Time is money etc etc." Maybe I'm missing something but the way I see it, with that thread being slammed with people willing to pay for them to bring that dress over here, what did you honestly expect SE to do? Pass up on money? Money they want/need as they are a company? This shouldn't be that big of a deal, and why am I defending this so bad when I don't even want the item? My life right now.

I guess they could always put it in enjoyable content, instead of trying to lock it behind money or forcing people into content that they don't want to do.

Personally, I'd have put it behind some sort of seasonal event (is it Chinese or Korean, I am unsure. If Chinese, I'd do it as a Chinese New Year event reward).

[Melorie]

Honestly, it's quite amazing how people from this community can defend, agree and even prefer items in the mogstation when they already pay a sub. It's almost if they do not like any aspect of the game. A bit scary, too. I'm a casual glamour-lover player and frankly, I can't understand this. Buying an item because it's there, okay, but defend and ask for more items there? LOL. Makes me feel bad about the future of the game.

[Jynx]

Honestly, it's quite amazing how people from this community can defend, agree and even prefer items in the mogstation when they already pay a sub. It's almost if they do not like any aspect of the game. A bit scary, too. I'm a casual glamour-lover player and frankly, I can't understand this. Buying an item because it's there, okay, but defend and ask for more items there? LOL. Makes me feel bad about the future of the game.

The answer is simple. Publishers have beat consumers into submission to think the only way they can get new cool stuff is to pay extra for it.

Much like DLC they kept beating on that drum until we went from rage at the sight of horse armor to giving rave reviews because of its inclusion. Publishers would have you believe the developers scrape by with what funds they have barely.

[Loggos]

Oh boy, I have been on a writing spree. I'm just very passionate about this topic. Now if university essays wrote themselves that easily...the dream...more time to play.
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I am also on the cash critical side here because in all seriousness I would like to see a financial justification for it. If SE was suffering greatly to keep FFXIV up and the subs were just not cutting it then I could understand the cash shop. So far I have not come across anything that proves this to be the case though so it seems like mere generation of a lot of sweet extra money with little effort and compensation on the player's side that does not come close to the benefit SE draws from this.


The reason this sits so unwell with me is because that there is no substantial value behind those items.
Every value and every exclusivity is assigned to them, i.e. whether it is valuable or not is decided by SE alone (as opposed to rare materials, high real life production costs, etc.) even though it does not necessarily hold such a value.
It is for that reason very difficult to assign a proper price to a virtual item (but that should not mean in turn that every price is acceptable).

Now before you say "but such an item requires development time" then I would say that this does still not justify the price because look at it like this:
The financial effort to create this good is limited to the designing, modelling and coding of the item once.
After that you can reproduce it endlessly without any material cost. You put in the work once but you can get unlimited copies out of it with the press of a button without evening out any further production that you normally would have to pay continuously if you plan to sell a real life item on a regular basis.
Because of this, given the world wide player base the development price can be regained quite quickly.
Another thing is, that despite certain development time items are still not priced accordingly, but again simply by the value SE wants the item to be seen with. The best example is honestly the game itself.
If you buy the collector's edition you paid, what, 50 euros for the original game? (It's such a long time ago, already. I don't quite remember.) You then of course pay subs for servers and patches but given that offline titles often range in the same dimensions it is not unreasonable to assume that this could be the price for the development of the original game - or at least a significant part of it. It is also quite obvious that the developent that goes into the whole game exceeds the creation of a simple dress by far, yet the dress costs between a fourth and a fifth of the price of the whole game (13.50 euros for EU players).
Even if the game price did not cover the whole game but, say, just the creation of Gridania and everything else is subs, there'd probably still be much more development involved in that than compared to the dress.
I think this shows how any value assigned to a glamour item is pure politics and an arbitrary practise of assigning exclusivity. This is why I'm not really convinced of arguments like "this is an acceptable price". This cannot easily be measured. There is maybe no "acceptable price", there may just be the price that we buy or reject it for which is a mixture of everyone's personal threshold and SE's pricing.

As much as I do not judge people who buy the dress as much are people justified to be angered by the price and consider it too high. I mean, heck, you could buy a real piece of clothing for that already.
I do however agree with the sentiment that this is bad business practise on the side of SE because it seems relatively evident to me that they just use this as a formidable opportunity to milk a cash cow without returning the real profit they make back to the game - or at least a significant part of that profit.


Ideally I would also like to have every content covered by my sub because I want to play content for items and earn them. That would be my favourite solution. I could settle with certain alternatives, e.g. they put it in the cash shop AND the game path or simply holding prices very low in the 1-5 euro range (that is what I am personally prepared to pay for such items).

On a side note: I know that there are some people who will buy glamour items that I consider highly overpriced and will provide SE with the customer feedback that they can keep on doing this. But that doesn't mean that everyone in the community agrees with the cash shop model, and neither does it mean that those who like to have cash shop items also endorses the "buy all at all costs" mentality. To basically say "you wanted this, now any criticism as to how it has been handled is obsolete" is not convincing, for reasons that others have already stated before me.

[Melorie]

Exactly.

Yes. People act like Square Enix is doing a favor for them. I even heard back when the moogle mount was released "People spent a lot of effort on it, are you saying those people shouldn't be paid for their efforts?". Which isn't true at all.

The reason this sits so unwell with me is because that there is no substantial value behind those items.
Every value and every exclusivity is assigned to them, i.e. whether it is valuable or not is decided by SE alone (as opposed to rare materials, high real life production costs, etc.) even though it does not necessarily hold such a value.
It is for that reason very difficult to assign a proper price to a virtual item (but that should not mean in turn that every price is acceptable).

Now before you say "but such an item requires development time" then I would say that this does still not justify the price because look at it like this:
The financial effort to create this good is limited to the designing, modelling and coding of the item once.

People go out of their way to justify the price. "Oh, it's account-wide" (not the case, which is worse if you ask me), "Oh, it has a XP bonus" (it shouldn't even be there?), "Oh, but this is from China" which doesn't say much, there's no way to know how that affects the pricing at all and I would like SE to be more transparent about this process.

[Lokier]

snip.

Always thought that was a stupid thing to say when it comes to video games;
Pretty sure, even in Japan, people are given an hourly salary; I doubt their income hangs on the balance of you buying a, quite frankly, ugly mount. They're not commissioned artists that make their living painting / drawing / tattooing, they have a legit job. x)

[Mugiawara]

Honestly, it's quite amazing how people from this community can defend, agree and even prefer items in the mogstation when they already pay a sub. It's almost if they do not like any aspect of the game. A bit scary, too. I'm a casual glamour-lover player and frankly, I can't understand this. Buying an item because it's there, okay, but defend and ask for more items there? LOL. Makes me feel bad about the future of the game.

That's not what gets me, what got me was when a user literally said he would buy something in there if it was $60 in the other Mog topic.
I ain't fxcking trying to make SE add something in there that costs more than newly release video game for a frilly tutu.
Someone probably said they would pay a lot in the first place and thats why all the newly things in Mog are so damn high.

[cammi]

:O

I get you, and no you're not wrong. I think I'm just being abit too defensive as I had people in real life shame me for what I do with my own money. Like I hold down my place and bills better than 90% of my friends, yet I'm horrible cause they see me spend a good chunk of change on video games. So I'm admitting that I might be taking this topic abit to personal. I do wished they atleast did both options then everyone would atleast have a chance at getting it how they wanted to get it. Instead of being forced to get said item only one way, cause not everyone can be retired at 34 with change to spend. And it would be nice if the money went back into the game, this I will always agree with. But if it isn't then FF15 should've been 60 FPS a long time ago.. since thats where people money is going. But that's a different topic I don't want to get into. - not a fan of 15 :c -

[cammi]

I guess they could always put it in enjoyable content, instead of trying to lock it behind money or forcing people into content that they don't want to do.

Personally, I'd have put it behind some sort of seasonal event (is it Chinese or Korean, I am unsure. If Chinese, I'd do it as a Chinese New Year event reward).

I say we get more people asking for this and it could happen. Problem is I think more people are willing to throw money at them, there should be other options. I wish I could find an old post I made, but it was pretty much why can't they do both. A themed event would've been cool tho.