Mog Station is overpriced.

[Naunet]

You can cry till the cows come home about X being overpriced and nothing will change because everybody has a different idea of what overpriced is.

My metric for "overpriced" will always be in comparison to other games I play. What's more, as this is already a game that charges you a requisite amount each month to even play, I think it's fair to consider the argument that items on the cash shop should perhaps even be below the threshold set by other free-to-play or buy-to-play games, as FFXIV does not have to rely entirely on the cash shop for its income.

For example in GW2, I can buy an outfit for 700 gems, which is somewhere between $9-10. That outfit is then available to every character I ever make on my account. Oh, and you can buy gems with in-game gold, so technically if you save up enough gold, you can eventually get what you want for free.

In WildStar, most outfits are 790 Protobucks - you can buy 1000 Protobucks for $10, so the cost of an outfit is a little cheaper than GW2. You can then unlock that outfit in your holo-wardrobe so that it may be used at any time on any character ever created on your account from now until forever. Likewise here, there is also a free (discounting time) way to obtain these outfits. You earn Omnibits every time you do something in-game that rewards XP, and each outfit costs 395 Omnibits, which does not take very long to earn.

So that's two games now - one B2P and one F2P - that both offer better deals raw price-wise than FFXIV AND even provide you a way to get these items for nothing more than some time spent playing the game. And let's toss Rift in there as another comparison. Rift doesn't have any free way to obtain their cash shop items that I know of (short of purchasing credits with plat via player channels, which would be unofficial), but Rift's costumes are mostly 765 credits, which is just barely over $5 a bundle. And like both GW2 and WildStar, these costumes are unlocked in Rift's wardrobe system permanently as useable on any character past, present, or future on your account.

Now let's look at FFXIV's Mog Station. Prices vary a lot. The recent "cultural" outfits are priced at $18. Some character outfits are set at $8 while others are $15; some are even sold piece by piece for $5 each. Seasonal outfits appear to go up for $5, but then you have weird anomalies like the single piece Wailing Spirit costume that is $5 on its own. In all, we're looking at prices that are at or above the prices of F2P and B2P games, except that FFXIV does not unlock these outfits for the entire account AND it does not provide a way to obtain these items for free.

It's hard to look at these comparisons and not come to the conclusion that the Mog Station is a pretty bad deal for customers.