The Trial vs Standard Edition doesn't feel fair

[HollowedDoll]

Yeah, it is unfortunate.
I do advise for new players to first complete HW to get the most out of the free trial, but sometimes that's not possible, like if you want to play a SHB race for example.
At the end of the day, I lived having paid a few months more catching up.

Oh also, if you got the lvl 70 buff and manage to reach that level within the alloted timeframe then you get a once per account 15 days iirc.

[TaleraRistain]

I think I do see your point but I also think I see the misunderstanding. The trial is exactly that. You're trying out the game. It's not a free to play experience. And it sounds like that's the type of thing that you wanted.

I can see where some of the advertising could give the impression the trial is equated to a free to play experience, so that is probably somewhere they could shore up some details.

[kaynide]

I get what you’re saying. If possible, you would have played the free trial until you no longer could and then bought the game. I get that.

But ultimately buying the game does give you a lot of QoL stuff like being able to form a party or use /tells.

The hindrances of the free trial is what eventually made a friend decide not to play: he had made some bad calls in choosing quest rewards (got money instead of gear) and found himself unable to get gear easily. Couldn’t trade me for it, couldn’t use the auction house. Couldn’t send tells or ask me for help/to start a party so we could do a dungeon without calling my phone, etc.

At the end of the day you would probably clear the trial in like 2 months…maybe 3. That’s a chunk of money, but not too bad when compared to the stuff you can get access to.

[Krotoan]

FFXIV is unique among MMO's currently (and this is a big surprise apparently to many who have recently joined in) in that "Old" content (read, not current expansion) is still relevant , necessary, educational, and above all entertaining (to many).

As many others have said the trial is meant so that you can get a good idea of what you'll be doing for most of the game and find out if you like the content and world, not as a "finish the "early" game" free ride. The content you're doing is the game. It is what people pay for access to (and many newbies seem to be enjoying, as they're not even in the 3rd expansion yet).

While I can appreciate and understand you're disappointed you're missing the economic benefit you COULD have had.. you're paying 12-15 dollars a month (or whatever your regional pricing is) for an experience and entertainment. It is perfectly FAIR that you should pay for that. You have no "right" to play for free. This is not a free to play game. You obviously are enjoying the game enough to want access, your request and lament seems, frankly, greedy.

Basically you're complaining you could have gamed the system for extra playtime but didn't. So while it's nice you like the game.. you were treated perfectly fairly.

[Alien_Gamer]

I understand what you'd like to happen but its simply not possible. Lets take a level 50 character on a sub, at level 50 you can have amassed several million gil, filled several retainers with stuff and bought a house. Now lets say you stop your sub and revert to a trial account, what happens?

Are you blocked from accessing any of your gil over cap? Are you blocked from earning more gil? Do you lose all the gil over cap?
Your retainers become locked, and you lose access to anything on them the same as if you stopped paying for an extra retainer.
And the real kicker is your house. Do you get locked out so the demo timer kicks in? Does it get auto demolished? What happens when you sub again? If someone else bought it you can't get it back, so now you have to try again...which would feel like an extra punishment.
If you created an FC for you and your wife, you get kicked out. If nobody else is there then the FC is disbanded so you lose all work on it. Do they store that data on the off chance you resub and try to recreate the FC? Leave it gone forever?
You'll be kicked from any LS you're in and have to rejoin if its not full.
Any items you had on mogmail will be frozen because you can't use it. Likewise, if you had bought something on mogstation and made a new character, that character wouldn't be able to receive the item.
If you had stuff on the MB, you wouldn't have any active retainers to continue selling them or collect gil so they'd be removed from the MB.

These may be edge cases but they're the things that need to be planned for. Putting restrictions onto an account like that would just be a horrible nightmare and mess for both players and developers. I think most players would be more annoyed at playing with the trial restrictions than not playing for a few months.

[Vidu]

What I dont understand is: Why did you buy the game in the first place if you wanted to stick to the free trial?

This isnt explained in the OP, so I'm confused.
Did you felt like you liked the game enough to want continue playing it? Then the free trial did excatly what it was supposed to do. (As other people explained - its a free trial option, not a free-to-play option).
Or did the restrictions bother you enough that you wanted those lifted to get more enjoyment out of the game?

I dont really understand why you paid for a game you didnt/dont want to pay for (at the moment)?

[Reinha]

How would they remove gear and items bought from the market board? That sounds like a nightmare to code.

You already decided that the game, with a subscription model, is worth paying for. If you change your mind you can unsub for a while like the rest of us. The trial used to be capped around level 30 so letting people play up to 60 during a trial is very generous. Yet people still ask for more.

[Thaun]

Imo, the upgrade path to the game is a bit more confusing now than before.

You get free trial upto lvl60, but you also get starter edition to lvl60, so what is the difference? Just the limitations that unlocks.
Before it was that the free trial cap was lvl35, and then you upgrade to starter edition to get to level 60.

But, if you buy starter edition, you don't get anything other than unlocking restrictions, you would then also have to buy the expansions, so in the end, if you always do hit lvl60 at free trial, complete edition is basically the choice.

It just feels weird that buying the base game, is just removing the few free trial limitations. Though, i have no idea how to fix this kind of weird issue.

[dezzmont]

How would they remove gear and items bought from the market board? That sounds like a nightmare to code.

Most games would allow you to keep items you purchased when your sub lapses, because your temporary sub helped maintain those services as you used them.

XIV is in a pretty unique place as far as free trials go that makes it absurdly generous, but if we were to view the 'free trial' as instead 'free to play mode' which is basically what the OP is suggesting, the MMO market has already heavily explored and solved this issue, and FFXIV is deliberately aping some other aspects of the market like the idea of a distinction between F2P, paid, and full 'premium' players, while also implementing them in a confusing way that really makes the difference between 'paid' players and premium players non-existent because the usual difference is just an up front purchase.

Again, I strongly suspect the fact the free trial isn't just F2P mode is entirely to do with the back end nonsense with how XIV stores character data which makes F2P players unusually expensive and thus makes having a' relaxed' attitude not possible, despite it being an industry standard and generally a good idea.

Like anyone who knows about how that works hearing what XIV can and can't do probably gets anxiety attacks imagining what they are working with that restricts them so much and makes everything such a nightmare. Hearing how hard it would be for them to add ring slots makes me wonder what kind of nightmare lurks in the code that makes something normally so trivial so hard.

Low key I think the solution is to just remove the Starter version, and replace it with like a 10 buck mogstation purchase that unlocks partying, FCs, and the MB, but not retainers or housing or anything that includes storage space, and have that purchase 'credit' towards the full edition.

[kaynide]

It most definitely boils down to revenue. There is a cost of maintaining the game with paying players paying for whatever upkeep is needed for trial/free to play. This works because eventually the F2P will ideally become paying customers. This falls apart when you can keep using the system without putting money in.

My wife exclusively plays the game to socialize with friends and occasionally be dragged into stuff by me. When a new expansion comes out, she’s basically done all the content she is interested in doing in like…2 months.

If she had the option to unsubscribe for the year and a half or so between her finishing the expac and the next one’s release yet still be able to log in and socialize, she absolutely would, and SE would lose those that..what.. 200 bucks? I’m sure many others would do the same if possible.

—
Personally, I feel many of SE’s titles have very generous trial periods. Dragon Quest Builders 2 demo was like 6 hours of gameplay..maybe 10% of the total game. Dragon Quest 11 is like 10 hours out of a 50ish hour game.

To OP, sorry about your situation- maybe SE could have said something to tell you the benefits of staying free..but they are in the business of selling games, not convincing you NOT to buy.