Quote Originally Posted by Liam_Harper View Post
No need to exaggerate. Few people expect Enix to release all future cash shop mounts ingame for free. Nor do we expect them not to have a cash shop. Some of us even prefer it, it's like donating to the company as a thank you for creating a game we enjoy. There's nothing wrong with buying the Whale.

The complaints source from the fact that Enix has a far bigger cash shop than other subscription MMO's and is one of the few large subscription MMO's to lock bank space, alts and their mobile app behind microtransactions. People start to feel annoyed when they continually stuff things into the inflated cash shop while throwing Pagos at us as content.

Overall it's excessive. In fact, that's a good question for those who feel it's fine, how much would Enix have to tie to microtransaction for you to view it as excessive? For example if all mounts besides your chocobo were cash shop exclusive, or glamour prisms, or the gold saucer? They're all optional after all.
It isn't an exaggeration whatsoever. People whine about every single exclusive item that ever crops up on the Cash Shop. A good portion of people in this very thread want the Cash Shop discontinued entirely and still equally expect all the mounts and glamour to be made available through quests, achievement points and etc, i.e., they want them for free. You can't claim is a greedy company—which I don't deny, by the way—only to turn around and demand they make exclusive Cash Shop things free. Greedy companies don't do that.

As for the size of the Cash Shop. This stems from SE putting old event exclusives on there whereas other MMOs simply render them lost forever. In other MMOs, I couldn't have Lightning's hair or attire because I wasn't playing during her event. It's simply something I won't ever have. SE's solution was to make a profit of this instead of making event items exclusive.

And now who's exaggerating? We've had two exclusive mounts put on the Cash Shop this expansion out of how many free ones? I'll humor the question though and say I'd be less inclined to play if I couldn't obtain any cool outfits or mounts without paying for them. Good thing that hasn't ever been the case in FFXIV. The overwhelming majority of my mount, minion and glamour collections are all in-game items I never had to purchase.

Quote Originally Posted by Yshnal View Post
FFXIV -this very same game- survived perfectly fine and even saved SE from bankruptcy without the cash shop (including extra retainers, phone app, etc.), doing it after being a failure and an economic black hole during it's rebuilding. On top of that, back then we got more content and with better quality, and all glamour, minions and mounts were obtainable in-game. Also, event rewards were available the next year for gil, we got plenty of them, and without housing stuff that a lot of people can't use. On top of that we had the veteran program offering exclusive items, which now is gone (this is important when thinking about the cashshop stuff, and the ways that the game uses to keep people playing nowadays). And with all that, as I said, this game was financially successful and even funding other projects.

Now re-evaluate what the person that you quoted said because, with all due respect, what you said makes no sense. FFXIV is not in a better shape than it was pre-cash shop, nor offers us more stuff. Quite the opposite, in fact, as I listed up there. So, in light of that, it's either what MomomiMomi said, or that they're plainly incompetent in using their funds (and this includes many possibilities). Both options are terrible, and no customer should say "oh, everything is alright".
Because a lot of the content back then was already made. They literally had Titan sitting around waiting before the relaunch even started. You're also assuming the relaunch did not put SE in a financial hole. Just because it proved successful doesn't mean they weren't operating under the red line. Best Buy spent almost an entire decade losing money and surviving off debt. Considering the dire state of Square Enix at the time, it's not hard to imagine they weren't in good shape either and were looking to find other ways to profit. We already know the Mogstation paid for the Chaos datacenter. If you want to claim that a lie, by all means, but at this point we're arguing opinions and assumptions, not facts.

Better quality is also very debatable. Heavensward is widely considered the best period of FFXIV's life cycle... and the Cash Shop was in operation a year prior.

Regardless, my point is MomomiMomi is looking at past MMOs and comparing them to current ones. You can't look at FFXI, released in 2003 and expect FFXIV to have similar upkeep and development costs when it released in 2013. Even if they release less, the cost of development has increased substantially. And this spans the whole gaming industry. While some companies do exploit, and I have no doubt SE is among them, an exclusive mount every once in a while means very little.