Mogstation taking another step to the darkside

[ElciaDeiLinus]

I'm not too familar with WoW's Cash Shop but one complaint I have heard from WoW players as criticism against FFXIV is the size of this game's Cash Shop and how greedy seem to be according to them compared to WoW.

The bigger problem with WoW's cash shop is that the economy is directly tied to it through tokens- so basically the in game economy in WoW is dominated by RMT. In most MMOs, you can also put store items up on the AH, and in pretty much every mmo, WoW included, there's a considerable amount of RNG crates- WoW having its TCG where some items have been known to sell for thousands. At least when you go on the FFXIV shop, you know the exact price of every item, and I think this is the only MMO which that is the case.

Now, it is true if you solely look at cosmetics, that WoW's cash shop is quite small. But I guarantee WoW players aren't counting all the other very expensive services such as race/class/server/faction changes, many of which have made Blizz excessive amounts of money due solely to Blizz's own glaring ineptitude at running their servers.

Prime example now being Classic WoW, where Blizz intentionally ruined server balance on multiple servers, ended up with several more dead servers- and then sold tens of thousands of expensive server xfers to players that basically would not be able to find groups to do content otherwise. I think in that case context is needed- I don't believe FFXIV is particularly heavy on 'if you do not spend extra money, you simply will not be able to enjoy the game', while WoW very much is and generally Blizz's business model is to mess things up themselves and then have players pay them more money for it.

That's as someone who is playing classic and has been playing WoW since mid Vanilla. I think two things often happen- Blizz gets a pass for their predatory practices, and most players ignore that Blizz doesn't need to rake money in from cosmetic sales since they're doing so from service and tokens which are basically gold selling.

Would people rather have FFXIV become like every mmo and sell RNG crates where all cosmetics are, removing pets/outfits/mounts, etc... from the game itself and instead giving you low chances to get anything that generally have you pay 100-200 bucks for a single item you want. As well, have FFXIV sell us gil, while naturally doing the thing that all in game currency sellers do in ramping up in game RNG elements to extreme levels and including complicated and massively time consuming grinds for just about everything to ensure people need to spend a lot of real life money on that gil?

[Moonlite]

snip

Not to defend Blizz/activison. But remember this dev team/company intentionally took lots of money from players and intentionally sabotaged server stability with their greed. They put server locks on then allowed players to bypass them with a paid fee almost destroying aether with balmung and gilgamesh.



The other big thing is the account wide thing. At least the other guys (not sure now) never expected you to pay for each character you had or any new character you made. Then give server limitation excuse, but then again bypass that limitation with cash.


Both companies are sketchy.

[Zomkei]

Not to defend Blizz/activison. But remember this dev team/company intentionally took lots of money from players and intentionally sabotaged server stability with their greed. They put server locks on then allowed players to bypass them with a paid fee almost destroying aether with balmung and gilgamesh.

was this during 1.0? bc ive been here since 2.0 and i do not remember this at all.

[Moonlite]

was this during 1.0? bc ive been here since 2.0 and i do not remember this at all.

Up until the end of HWs you couldn't create a character on those 2 servers because they were full. They had been locked shortly after the start of 2.0. But you could always create another character on another server and use the paid transfer to get onto them. So around four years they ignored server stability to take more cash in.

[linay]

Not to defend Blizz/activison. But remember this dev team/company intentionally took lots of money from players and intentionally sabotaged server stability with their greed. They put server locks on then allowed players to bypass them with a paid fee almost destroying aether with balmung and gilgamesh.



The other big thing is the account wide thing. At least the other guys (not sure now) never expected you to pay for each character you had or any new character you made. Then give server limitation excuse, but then again bypass that limitation with cash.


Both companies are sketchy.

Uhm, what?

[NanaWiloh]

Uhm, what?

She is complaning about SE ignoring Balmung and Gilgamesh population prior to the data center split. As well as how they locked the server transfers destroying Balmung and gilgameshes players needs to cram everyone they came across on to thier worlds, with Balmung players being the biggest whiners about it. Basically players wanted the stability dealt with, when SE dealt with it players got pissed at how they handled it.

[linay]

Up until the end of HWs you couldn't create a character on those 2 servers because they were full. They had been locked shortly after the start of 2.0. But you could always create another character on another server and use the paid transfer to get onto them. So around four years they ignored server stability to take more cash in.

She is complaning about SE ignoring Balmung and Gilgamesh population prior to the data center split. As well as how they locked the server transfers destroying Balmung and gilgameshes players needs to cram everyone they came across on to thier worlds, with Balmung players being the biggest whiners about it. Basically players wanted the stability dealt with, when SE dealt with it players got pissed at how they handled it.

So, it seems like they wanted to reduce the number of people joining those servers without completely blocking people off entirely. Paid transfer is definitely one way of doing it, and a legitimate way in my opinion.

[Skivvy]

So, it seems like they wanted to reduce the number of people joining those servers without completely blocking people off entirely. Paid transfer is definitely one way of doing it, and a legitimate way in my opinion.

It was a loophole as everywhere official at that time was showing that the servers were closed. I'm chalking it up to either incompetence or they liked the extra cash coming in.

[ElciaDeiLinus]

I can't really comment on past things SE has done, as despite my join date I really only started playing FFXIV in earnest after the ShB announcement and was only getting to HW content by the time it was released.

As it is now, FFXIV's shop seems like the least predatory, clearest with their pricing, and least damaging to its in game economy of all the mmos and many other online games I'm aware of. IMO, this is the ideal way to do a shop, and I generally don't even notice its existence while playing.