FF14 Companion app Premium Service

[Luna-M]

Same old rant thread. Never gets old.

Popcorn anyone?

So, at least someone online here considers "extremely inconvenient storage in Chocobo Saddlebags" as pay-to-win?

hahahahahaha

That joke never gets old ...

And having 1 more retainer is P2W too!

Now introducing The Ultra Companion App (5 years from now)

Premium

-Double tomestone space
-Triple inventory space
-Gain access to extra presets in Character Creation
-Enable Account-Wide features on all past purchases
-Gain one more additional loot from any dgn and raids
-Quadruple the amount of Kupo nuts you can hold! (OMG, that's so amazing)
-Access to the Viera race
-Triple your MGP gain
-"Limitations" and "Server Stress" mysteriously disappears (woooo)
-Gender restrictions on gear is now removed
-You can select pieces of an outfit from the mogstation to buy individually (We could've done that 5 years ago but SERVER STRESS!!)
-Overmeld your gear...by not eight, not nine but TEN SLOTS (sugoi)
-Glamour storage can now hold 1000 pieces of gear....PER SLOT



Man, 2023 is gonna be AWESOME

You forgot you get a ultimate title and weapon of choice.

Can't believe I am the first to make this comment so here I go.
*Inhales* If you don't LIKE it, then don't BUY it!!!

Get out with your logic!

[swiss_Momo]

hAvInG mOrE iNvEnTORy SpAcE iS p2w!

man, I can't wait for my new extra retainer to bring me back an ultimate clear and for my chocobo to rank top 3 in the current feast season!

gil are incredibly useless in this game. Having lots of it is an amenity at best for being able to jump the latest glam bandwagon a bit faster

[MicahZerrshia]

I haven't even downloaded the free version. It just seems like it would be wasted space on my phone. I doesn't really do anything that important, I mean I cannot think of a reason someone would have to sit at work and sort their inventory on their phone. And as someone who doesn't play the marketboard since I have a mansion already and have no real need to buy anything and even then its too expensive anyways since the 1 or 2 times I day I could do it free seems pointless. idk they could have done something great but they didn't and it really was a waste of resources imo. Just seems like they are fishing for whales with it.

[Noodle_Trinidad]

Honestly a "Freemium" Companion App from a Subscription Based game is pretty atrocious in my eyes. As it stands its pretty subpar at doing what its meant to do, storage modification really means nothing when everything is saved client and the fact that they limit use because of stress issues really speaks volumes at the work they've done to alleviate the spaghetti code of their rushed out rebuild of the 1.0 game into 2.0. Seriously SE should have gotten on the ball about fixing that from mid 2.0 -> 3.0.

As it stands the App is subpar when compared to its competitive cousin WoW which released separate apps to serve the same purpose but for free, with the only obvious prerequisite being you had the expansion and an active account at the time. With them shutting it down and planning to rebuild as a general non-expansion exclusive app I can't help but feel they've alreayd knocked FFXIV out of the park solely because they have an infrastructure that works going off their old Apps and they're free. Whats even more insulting is when a Free2Play game has a Free Companion App that allows you to do anything relevant in its game, outside of the obvious gameplay, without charging you a dime when its F2P status has more than enough incentive to charge you for said app or at the very least paywall some features.

For Reference Here is Said F2P Game (Warframe): https://imgur.com/a/FCV7iLr

This is all free, this all works and doesnt need people to share an app to even talk. Foundry access is unlimited as long as you obviously have the resources to craft said items and everything else helps keep track of whats up to date with the game from Events and in-game alerts. It's there to supplement the experience not gouge you out for more cash. I honestly don't know how the community can justify it when others have done it for free and much better on top of that. We should be asking for better quality and overall less paywalls. We pay a god damn subscription for god's sake and on top of that if spamming the marketboard creates a lot of stress on the servers maybe its time the devs actually took the time to see why something like that even causes stress in the first place? It always seems to lead back to their band-aids to make systems work that they never seem to go back to and fix.

The emote is ok I guess, bit silly but hey its Fantasy.

[Voltyblast]

Can't believes I am the first to make this comment so here I go.
*Inhales* If you don't LIKE it, then don't BUY it!!!

Not to burst your bubble, but that was the same thing when they introduced the mogshop and people said: "if you don't like the stuff, don't buy them!". And a few years later look at the situation of the cash shop...

Bottom line, we might not like it NOW, but in a few years, they might add additional unlocks that will make us wanna buy them...I mean it did happen with the cash shop, why not with the app?

[Kirsten_Rev]

Now introducing The Ultra Companion App (5 years from now)

Premium

-Double tomestone space
-Triple inventory space
-Gain access to extra presets in Character Creation
-Enable Account-Wide features on all past purchases
-Gain one more additional loot from any dgn and raids
-Quadruple the amount of Kupo nuts you can hold! (OMG, that's so amazing)
-Access to the Viera race
-Triple your MGP gain
-"Limitations" and "Server Stress" mysteriously disappears (woooo)
-Gender restrictions on gear is now removed
-You can select pieces of an outfit from the mogstation to buy individually (We could've done that 5 years ago but SERVER STRESS!!)
-Overmeld your gear...by not eight, not nine but TEN SLOTS (sugoi)
-Glamour storage can now hold 1000 pieces of gear....PER SLOT



Man, 2023 is gonna be AWESOME

Let's not forget this would be coupled with a Live Letter a month or so earlier discussing all the various server limitations preventing SE from offering said features to everyone.

So far as I'm concerned, the app is a shameless cash grab. It's not especially game-breaking, but it is beneath the dignity that SE used to have as an organization. Alongside other shameless cash grabs, like their meddling with Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or their decision to release Rise of the Tomb Raider as a timed Xbox exclusive, it simply makes me less likely to buy future SE products. It's the cost of doing business in such a grabby fashion, but I'm sure they know that.

Edit / Aside: It's worth keeping in mind for people on both sides of the aisle that whether or not something constitutes 'P2W' is a subjective sort of thing. Personally, I view the Mog Station as P2W, because I view Glamours and Mounts as key rewards in FFXIV. Others don't. That's fine - P2W is in the eye of the beholder.

That being said, even if someone doesn't view the app or Mog Station or whatever as P2W, it should be concerning that significant numbers of others clearly do. I personally am less likely to support SE and FFXIV because of the optional paid features and content. It's not strong enough for me to stop playing right now, but it'll be a significant factor when I eventually do. I've had other friends quit over it. Seeing so many on the forums laugh off my opinions tends to push me closer to the point of quitting for good, as it lends evidence to the fact that I'm not an intended customer for FFXIV.

Now I can't speak for other forum-goers, but I'm guessing I'm not alone in feeling this way. It's risky for SE to continue disregarding our collective opinions. There's a tipping point somewhere, a point at which people will start leaving for less-monetized MMOs. I don't know where it is, but SE keeps inching closer. When, and if, that point is reached, it'll be a negative outcome for all players of FFXIV - regardless of whether or not they're OK with things like the app or Mog Station.

[polyphonica]

Now I can't speak for other forum-goers, but I'm guessing I'm not alone in feeling this way. It's risky for SE to continue disregarding our collective opinions. There's a tipping point somewhere, a point at which people will start leaving for less-monetized MMOs. I don't know where it is, but SE keeps inching closer. When, and if, that point is reached, it'll be a negative outcome for all players of FFXIV - regardless of whether or not they're OK with things like the app or Mog Station.

In fairness, they'll be the first to know when that happens, since all these financial decisions are made by looking at metrics. (They keep adding these options because people keep buying it.) They also do pretty extensive exit surveys and have tons of feedback from many sources so that, when the trends start pointing in a certain direction, it should not be hard to figure out why. But I suspect the solution they arrive at will not be to just suddenly roll back the MogStation or the premium app. Rather, I suspect they'll reconsider the underlying subscription model for the game. The thing that riles people up the most about all this monetization is that they're paying a subscription, so the easy fix is just to make it so that you don't have to pay a subscription to play the game. That will also help push their player numbers up, exposing more people to up-sells and side-monetization. I suspect their own version of "WoW Tokens" might be the next step down this road.

[Luna-M]

Not to burst your bubble, but that was the same thing when they introduced the mogshop and people said: "if you don't like the stuff, don't buy them!". And a few years later look at the situation of the cash shop...

Bottom line, we might not like it NOW, but in a few years, they might add additional unlocks that will make us wanna buy them...I mean it did happen with the cash shop, why not with the app?

The argument still stands, issue with mogstation is that people don't follow that argument and keep buying stuff so of course SE add more. And we keep asking them to add more too. We dug our own grave in that regard.

[Kirsten_Rev]

In fairness, they'll be the first to know when that happens, since all these financial decisions are made by looking at metrics. (They keep adding these options because people keep buying it.) They also do pretty extensive exit surveys and have tons of feedback from many sources so that, when the trends start pointing in a certain direction, it should not be hard to figure out why. But I suspect the solution they arrive at will not be to just suddenly roll back the MogStation or the premium app. Rather, I suspect they'll reconsider the underlying subscription model for the game. The thing that riles people up the most about all this monetization is that they're paying a subscription, so the easy fix is just to make it so that you don't have to pay a subscription to play the game. That will also help push their player numbers up, exposing more people to up-sells and side-monetization. I suspect their own version of "WoW Tokens" might be the next step down this road.

Quite possible, but I wouldn't be quite so confident in their ability to spot trouble before it happens - particularly if the P2W aspect is, like for me, more of a contributing factor than the primary reason for leaving. After all, the downside of obtaining most of your information from exit surveys is that the player has already exited - if and when a wave happens, it will quite likely be too late to initiate a rapid policy change to retain those players.

I'd also argue that the complete and utter lack of active-player surveys demonstrates they can't be paying too much attention. Case in point, unofficial censuses, along with SE's most recently quarterly financials, suggest strongly that Stormblood is not aging nearly as well as ARR or Heavensward did. The likely culprit is the format of FFXIV's content cycle and relative lack of truly fresh content, a topic which routinely generates long feedback threads here on the OF. Yet, I don't see any indication that SE is changing course. No surveys. No feedback sought. Eureka Pagos even appears to be a doubling-down of sorts, with Yoshi-P essentially saying in his recent Gamescom interview that players should suck it up. It appears to me that SE is ignoring a growing problem here, one that risks blowing up spectacularly in the near future if 5.0 appears certain to continue down the current path.

Finally, even assuming SE can see this coming, it's quite likely a lot of the people who support the Mog Station, app, etc. - people who do not view these as P2W features - nonetheless don't want to see FFXIV go F2P. SE could jump out of the frying pan and into the fire if it's not careful, and people who support the current monetization model might find their own personal red lines are tomorrow's slippery slope. Worth keeping in mind, anyway.

----------

All that said, I don't want to diminish your point. It is a fair one to make, and it's well taken. But personally, I have extremely little faith in SE's ability to gather and interpret customer opinions, specifically in regards to FFXIV. Their community outreach efforts have done nothing but diminish since ARR released, and the running joke about SE not caring until the Japanese player base complains is only partly humourous.

[polyphonica]

Case in point, unofficial censuses, along with SE's most recently quarterly financials, suggest strongly that Stormblood is not aging nearly as well as ARR or Heavensward did.

At least on the quarterly financials front, they actually called out on-going FFXIV revenue as a strong point, and on Lucky Bancho's unofficial census the amount of people who cleared recent patches is actually higher than it was at an equivalent time in Heavensward, so it's not exactly a very clear picture or trend at this point. Of course, there's no doubt that there's an increasing amount of disgruntled people, as is bound to happen as a game enters its 5th year, plus we have just had a few major releases that'll compete for players (particularly NA/EU players). The monetization strategy will also be an issue for some people, but I suspect it's particularly aggravating people while they're feeling the content (and volume of content) isn't to their liking.

If the game were to go F2P, although it would upset some people who like the game precisely because it's subscription-based, it will also open up the game to many large markets, so the net impact on the player count will be a gain. That said, I'm not saying that I personally want it to go that way, as I've definitely seen (as many of us have) the ways F2P can warp a game. But, at the end of the day, Square Enix isn't going to accept a loss in revenue based on a belief that it'll make people happier; the decisions will be based on the numbers, for better or worse.