The reason I stay subbed....

[Avatre]

Oh thank you for pointing this out. I knew there was something else you could purchase infinitely, but couldn't remember what it was. It is Fantasia. And it's pretty embarrassing to have missed that one. Still, it'd be hard to spend $16,000 on Fantasia.

Based on some of the threads that I saw a few weeks/month ago, pretty sure there was at least one person who Fantasia'd at least once a week. If I can find the thread, I will link it here.

Edit: Found it! Took some digging(almost page 10).

i used to change my race about once a month , but now i use about 2-3 fantasia a week ..
i see some people in this game who had the same character for years , and never thought of using a fantasia . how do you do it ?

[Talraen]

Based on some of the threads that I saw a few weeks/month ago, pretty sure there was at least one person who Fantasia'd at least once a week. If I can find the thread, I will link it here.

Edit: Found it! Took some digging(almost page 10).

Even at 3 Fantasias a week, and buying them individually to maximize cost, it would take 10 years to spend $16,000.

Also in some other thread (or maybe this one, who knows), I calculated how much people would have to spend to be equivalent to F2P whales (1% of users providing 90% of revenue) and they'd need to spend about $11,000/year on the Mog Station. That would be three Fantasias per day. (And if you buy that, I'm sorry, but yes I am silently judging you )

[Avatre]

Even at 3 Fantasias a week, and buying them individually to maximize cost, it would take 10 years to spend $16,000.

Also in some other thread (or maybe this one, who knows), I calculated how much people would have to spend to be equivalent to F2P whales (1% of users providing 90% of revenue) and they'd need to spend about $11,000/year on the Mog Station. That would be three Fantasias per day. (And if you buy that, I'm sorry, but yes I am silently judging you )

I'm not denying that it would take a long time to get to that cost for Fantasia, just showing that there are people who are using multiple a week(I personally am sitting on 6 Fantasia on a retainer- 1 from my very first time buy them, and 5 I bought during a sale a while back just in case I wanted to change things up - I have used 4 total - once to change my appearance slightly when I was Elezen, once to go to Au Ra, and 2 to change to dark skinned and then back because I didn't like it as much).

[Talraen]

I'm not denying that it would take a long time to get to that cost for Fantasia, just showing that there are people who are using multiple a week(I personally am sitting on 6 Fantasia on a retainer- 1 from my very first time buy them, and 5 I bought during a sale a while back just in case I wanted to change things up - I have used 4 total - once to change my appearance slightly when I was Elezen, once to go to Au Ra, and 2 to change to dark skinned and then back because I didn't like it as much).

Oh I've used more Fantasias than that. I was fickle for quite a while. Though on the upside, all of my alts (and I have quite a few) get like 8 Fantasias on character creation, which is fun. (Side note: having alts is a good way to get over Fantasia addiction!)

The thing is, buying lots of Fantasia or dye is really on the player. If you financially ruin yourself on this sort of thing, I'm sorry but you only have yourself to blame. The types of microtransactions that ruin people and which I'd argue are unethical are the ones that are intended to tap into people's addiction centers. Is it possible to be addicted to Fantasia? Sure, but I don't think Square Enix is trying to do that. Having a gambling model, on the other hand, is very much an attempt to do that.

I'm not proud of it, but I did briefly work on a free to play game with some friends while I was unemployed years back. (It was a Farmville clone, which should give an idea of when this was.) The guy designing it was very much designing the game specifically to attract and exploit whales. This isn't something that happens innocently, companies target these people intentionally and ruthlessly. FFXIV doesn't to this point, and I think that's a very important distinction.