Please make cash-shop stuff earn-able in game

[Hestzhyen]

So then they would be rather easily farmable, which would stop all sales. If they make them too easy, no one would want to buy, so they would have to make them difficult, putting them in the same level of grind or difficulty as the PVP/Hunt/Savage mounts etc. Meaning their worth would be sellable as well.

Make the drop rate 1% or less- so low it's very much worth the time saved to buy it. The rise of smartphone games nickle and diming people to death with purchasable productivity/ability to even PLAY the game after you run out of stamina is proof of that. If you give someone the choice of waiting to get lucky or paying "reasonable" fee to get what they want, a depressing amount of people will simply pay up.

Farming savage mounts can be extremely tedious, but you still need to have the requisite skill to farm the encounter. Something mindless like story dungeons are not indicative of player skill unless said players are somehow not able to breathe, move forward, and press some buttons at the same time. Adding optional tedious grind for a minuscule chance of getting lucky doing something that even the most brain-dead players are supposed to be able to complete will not diminish the worth of Savage/EX mounts. And the option to buy it and skip the chore of running the instance will be very appealing to the kinds of people who already buy mounts and stuff from the shop. For the rest of us, it's something we can try to gamble for. You can still have your mount when you want it and everyone else can still safely ignore it or run old, necessary content repeatedly to try for a drop.

No one needs anything in the cash shop to play and enjoy XIV. But to me it's stark naked greed on SE's part to have cash-shop only items when we pay a sub to fund the game's entire existence in the first place. I'm not saying they shouldn't try to make more money, but they could at least take the sting out of seeing a $20 mount for sale by giving us SOME way of trying to earn it, even if the odds are stacked against us.

Heck, I've been playing since 2014 and have nothing to show for my loyalty except for thousands of achievement points I can't use. Why not convert them to a store credit of some kind? Maybe not enough to pay for the mount entirely, but enough to bring it down to a price I'd settle for since SE is indirectly rewarding me for playing the game and supporting them for all these years. I'd be ok with buying a mount or emote or some such thing if I could somehow credit all of my in-game effort towards the price in some way.

[Settiesama]

Snip

Phone games and MMOs are two different things. MMOs are a whole different type of grind, and the determination on farming things with unlimited limits will drive them to continue days on end. If you add say, Nightmare to the Cash Shop which is something very similar to what you are implying, do you honestly think people would buy him? Knowing they could farm Garuda so easily. Sales will die, or become so low that they wouldn't even be worth putting in the cash shop, and then guess what? All these special designs we have for the cash shop would cease to be created because the team that works on them wouldn't get the payment worth it.

Again, if you don't wanna buy, don't buy. If you really want it, then work an extra hour or two at work for it or beg very nicely for extra pocket money.

[Hestzhyen]

Phone games and MMOs are two different things. MMOs are a whole different type of grind, and the determination on farming things with unlimited limits will drive them to continue days on end. If you add say, Nightmare to the Cash Shop which is something very similar to what you are implying, do you honestly think people would buy him? Knowing they could farm Garuda so easily. Sales will die, or become so low that they wouldn't even be worth putting in the cash shop, and then guess what? All these special designs we have for the cash shop would cease to be created because the team that works on them wouldn't get the payment worth it.

Again, if you don't wanna buy, don't buy. If you really want it, then work an extra hour or two at work for it or beg very nicely for extra pocket money.

I'm not rich, but I can certainly afford to spend an extra $20 if I want a mount. Not everyone who's upset about the cash shop is barely able to pay their sub.

I'm not saying to add Nightmare or trial mounts to the shop. I'm not sure why you're willfully misunderstanding me unless you really like my replies for some strange reason.

The hypothetical conditions I'm talking about are 1) content that everyone can do, 2) NEW content that is vital to the story (old content entirely unaffected and unchanged), 3) drop rates so low only the most hard-core grinders out there would go for it on a regular basis and get rewarded, 4) probably in a very long instance that takes a long time to complete and prohibits speed runs by design.

I'm not kidding when I say if you put a simple choice before people to get what they want- wait and maybe get lucky or buy and get now- a significant majority WILL pay. That's how you see all this pay to win nonsense creeping into major games, even single player titles. People will pay money to skip or ease up on grind restrictions if the price is right. XIV has hardcore players that might cost them a few sales. But if you put a mount in the game and say "get now and be cute with your friends or grind like a no-life loser", I think SE will definitely come out ahead. And the rest of us will be less annoying to you since we have a way to get it if we want it badly enough without spending extra cash.

[Ameela]

But then how would SE get piles of money to invest in that FFVII remake?

How about from the millions of copies it will inevitably sell?

[spagthetapdancer]

Alot of people don't like having cash shops in sub based games, but then most of those don't understand what the sub actually pays for.. They seem to believe it's for everything the game has to offer. They also seem to believe the Mogstation is down to the XIV team, when in fact most of the Mogstation team don't even work on XIV itself, and Yoshi P has very little say on stuff for the Mogstation too. They also can't seem to grasp that things for the Mogstation (Not including seasonal and other stuff that was in the game before) were created specifically for the Mogstation, meaning if the Mogstation didn't exist, neither would most of the content within it. They were created for the purpose of more funding, which most P2P MMOs have cash shops for.

christ...I'm not sure if it's forced outrage or people being shortsighted but that's pretty cringey.

[Enla]

How about from the millions of copies it will inevitably sell?

Theoretical money doesn't help make games, especially not with SE's history of run away budgets that lead clear success stories to be marked as failures when they don't meet sales expectations. The original Tomb Raider reboot sold four million copies in it's first few months which is something most companies can only dream of achieving. SE called it a financial failure and stated that in order to turn a decent profit it would have had to sell ten million instead, something that only games like CoD were pulling off at the time. FFXIV is no different. That game had to have been remade three times on top of the runaway expenditures on graphic fidelity and it's projected that had it not done nearly as well as it did, it would meant potential financial ruin for the company. /That's/ the situation we're dealing with. At the level SE is spending and developing going to investors isn't nearly as useful as it would be for any other company. It's also the reason very, very little money from the Mog Station actually is seen by the FF14 team. And also why Yoshi-P had to practically beg for new servers ahead of Stormblood. Right now FF14 /is/ their best recurring investment that helps pave the way for future titles.

[spagthetapdancer]

I kind of hope the remake flops hard because of them going full tryhard and making the whole thing some sort of cringey overly serious garbage just so trash heaps like Nomura move one step closer to being flushed out of the company.

[Enla]

I kind of hope the remake flops hard because of them going full tryhard and making the whole thing some sort of cringey overly serious garbage just so trash heaps like Nomura move one step closer to being flushed out of the company.

I don't want it to fail, but /man/ do I hate the fact that they're taking an Advent Children approach to the remake. Particularly when FF7 is probably one of the cheesiest, most campy games in the entire series and it actually is better for it.

[Settiesama]

I'm not sure why you're willfully misunderstanding me

You also seem to be misunderstanding me and my counter debate. Having a mount from the cash shop go into the game is no different from having a mount from the game go into cash shop, so my statement on Nightmare stands. Given the choice of farming or buying in an MMO such as this, the majority will flock to the former so long as the difficulty is easy, even if it is time consuming. It would need some element of difficulty, or an extremely long dungeon that no one would ever do for them to switch majorly towards store. Even IF sales were still decent, it would be no where near what they are now, and that still would not make it worth the creation of the mounts for the team working on the Mogstation. It's also because of said team that this is an absolutely pointless conversation, since they don't work on XIV, only make stuff for it. Since Yoshi P is not actually in charge of the Mogstation too, he can't add the stuff in the game as such.

[spagthetapdancer]

I don't want it to fail, but /man/ do I hate the fact that they're taking an Advent Children approach to the remake. Particularly when FF7 is probably one of the cheesiest, most campy games in the entire series and it actually is better for it.

well, the moment all modern FF-related content used AC Cloud Art, characterization, etc. I knew that the teams considered it to be the public face of the game's marketing. and I knew it'd remain terrible.

and yeah, I agree that VII being a cheesy old school goof fest is preferably to a steaming pile of tryhard.