New Mog Station items?

[Adrestia]

The project team is? The mogshop people are an additional workforce that are separate from the Dev team. Or are you talking about the higher ups?

The fact that the team making items for the Mog Station is separate is not evidence that the team making the game are never being told “ok you could make X in the game better but right now the fans are sated by the Mog Station options.” Or even “avoid putting a cosmetic similar to Y in the game because we want people to pay extra for that and will have the other team make it.”

An oft-cited “X” could be the perceived ridiculously long MSQ grind between ARR and HW. I played it in real-time as it came out so my experience was different, but a number of new players, when upset by it, are told by other players to break out their credit cards.

E: to clarify in the terms you asked the question in, yes I’m essentially referring to the “higher-ups” telling the actual ground floor game designers that they absolutely must implement or not implement certain things for the sake of increasing Mog Station traffic.

I do *not* believe that the people who designed, say, post-ARR storyline, were evil mustache-twirling villains who made a really long story based on their belief that it would make some slice of the playerbase want to pay to skip it. I believe they are honest workers who were making the best story they could in the way they knew how. But how many years have passed now without the slightest change to the pacing or the content? And how many years have gone by that “buy a skip potion” has been the socially-acceptable answer? I don’t believe these two things are 100% unrelated. I believe that on some level, new player experience enhancements have been prioritized lower than they might be if skip potions didn’t exist. Not that there are no development tickets about it or that no one cares, but just that because we have a “workaround” those tickets don’t need to receive any love any time soon.

[Krotoan]

The fact that the team making items for the Mog Station is separate is not evidence that the team making the game are never being told “ok you could make X in the game better but right now the fans are sated by the Mog Station options.” Or even “avoid putting a cosmetic similar to Y in the game because we want people to pay extra for that and will have the other team make it.”

The Dev team has enough work that they are constantly pushing up against deadlines just for the content we're used to. Unless they're outright lying (which is a possibility but unlikely since if that ever got out it'd be kinda career suicidal) , they have done nothing but shuffle around scheduled content whenever they want to try something "different". The idea that the tiny bit of content the mogstation produces could ever be cited to sate the constant content lust the playerbase has is a bit ridiculous? The devs may be out of touch with some of the userbase but I'm pretty sure they don't think a couple new cosmetics will please anymore than the few hardcore glamourhounds out there. If they thought that glamour was that important, they wouldn't have such a drawn out expansion schedule for the Dresser. It's possible they've communicated between the teams to restrict glamours, possible examples would be the shisui sets, but even that was an event set first. Nothing similar has come out since. Generally the sets have been entirely unique, either to characters or in and of themselves, most of the time slightly out of world seeming. Hard to say if the character costumes would have been in game , ever, but it seems like precedent that they will forever be mogshop only.... and also smaller investments than unique sets since they require only resizing and testing.

An oft-cited “X” could be the perceived ridiculously long MSQ grind between ARR and HW. I played it in real-time as it came out so my experience was different, but a number of new players, when upset by it, are told by other players to break out their credit cards.

Other players.. NOT the devs. Consider that the skip pots are inclusive , always, up to the beginning of the latest expansion, and the devs rarely rework old content unless it's blatantly broken, it's hard to think they're avoiding fixing it just because they think the mogstation things are keeping people happy. That X is very VERY old content that would require significant investments from most departments, except the art and modeling department oddly enough. Generally the userbase complains more about lack of new content than old content. The only reason there are any threads about MSQ right now is people want the giant wad of XP without the cutscenes, which is pretty funny because they are a large reason for the huge wad of XP.

edit to answer edit:

E: to clarify in the terms you asked the question in, yes I’m essentially referring to the “higher-ups” telling the actual ground floor game designers that they absolutely must implement or not implement certain things for the sake of increasing Mog Station traffic.

I do *not* believe that the people who designed, say, post-ARR storyline, were evil mustache-twirling villains who made a really long story based on their belief that it would make some slice of the playerbase want to pay to skip it. I believe they are honest workers who were making the best story they could in the way they knew how. But how many years have passed now without the slightest change to the pacing or the content? And how many years have gone by that “buy a skip potion” has been the socially-acceptable answer? I don’t believe these two things are 100% unrelated. I believe that on some level, new player experience enhancements have been prioritized lower than they might be if skip potions didn’t exist. Not that there are no development tickets about it or that no one cares, but just that because we have a “workaround” those tickets don’t need to receive any love any time soon.

Higher ups will always want more revenue, and while there is a level at which players need to take a stand on shady practices of bringing in that revenue, FFXIV at least has been in the minority (debatably if you believe people who think our inventory problems are manufactured) , for the scummy methods of doing so. We have no rng money transactions. It's straightforward pricing, and generally does not affect the rate at which people in the current expansion progress at appropriate levels.

The one giant complaint I have is a reluctance to increase of resources available to the developers VS what the game is bringing in and a lack of transparency for design challenges. We know they're limited, we know there's "coding" problems but we don't know exactly why our data and expansions are so limited. They tell us it's not a matter of throwing money at it, but it definitely should be solvable by throwing resources such as expert talent and new technology, why are these not available? It would be very Japanese of them to NEVER imply the company has limited them since the attitude there is one of "we are all one, none should take credit above all, great precautions should be taken not to shame the others", and I'm thinking that's what's happening.