[Cash Shop Idea] Game Time Token

[SessionZero]

Works for Wow just fine. Prices were unstable for a few days but it was definatly worth it in the long run

WoW also has a consolidated auction house. FFXIV is per-server. What's a reasonable price for one server may not be for another.

[HPDelron]

WoW also has a consolidated auction house. FFXIV is per-server. What's a reasonable price for one server may not be for another.

The price is whatever people are willing to pay for it. This might be more or less buying power on a given server, however if people buy the tokens for an amount of gil without much buying power fewer people will purchase the tokens (not worth it). As less people buy the tokens, the remaining tokens on the market will go up in value (same demand, less supply). As the tokens become worth more gil, more people will buy them and drive the price back down. In short order the player base on that server will have decided how much gil $20 is worth. That numeric value may change from server to server, even the buying power might.

However in all cases it will be what the players of that server have said that $20 token is worth by choosing to buy or not buy them.

[F_Maximillian]

WoW also has a consolidated auction house. FFXIV is per-server. What's a reasonable price for one server may not be for another.

I would second this, as someone on a very small server I've been told our prices are 2-10 times more than the more populated servers on our datacenter. What may be 10m on say Balmung would cost far more on Zalera.

I have played games with a system like this and was one of those who traded their in game coin for sub fees as it was more beneficial for me. However, I have mixed feelings about the system as around when they were introduced a lot more people were buying runs or high level gear without running content, leading to not being able to base someone's experience by their gear as you never knew if they RMT'd their way through or did it legit. In FFXIV one of the nice things is being able to relatively gauge how experienced someone is by the equipment they have for farms, static recruitments and such. Even on my small server run selling is a thing but only a few can afford to buy runs like that as most of the money belongs to the crafters. If a person without maxed crafters has gear from the latest savage/ex primal it's currently safe to assume they're experienced. With systems like this added I can see people starting to expect an overall higher level of gear in even the simplest things because you can just purchase a run or 10 to gear up with the earnings you get from selling sub time.

On the note of reducing RMT, this game suffers far less from it than many games that have used other systems. For starters, as a pay to play game one has to buy the expansion for and then pay a subscription while being forced (for better or worse) to go through the entirety of the story to unlock content there's a lot less people willing to risk their accounts by buying gil. In other games they either don't link the purchase of the game to the account or it's pathetically easy to get caught back up to where you were should you be caught and banned, especially if you partake in RMT. RMT as it is now is a whole lot of spam but not a whole lot of action, I sincerely doubt that spam will decrease any and there won't be any reasonable change in action either. While it is convenient to be able to purchase sub time through in-game means, I don't feel the benefits outweigh the costs.