Quote Originally Posted by Rivlet View Post
We can label things all we want "Free Trial", "Free to Play"... But I'd rather have us sticking to facts. Simply, the game lets you play for free. Yes, cut in QoL, but you can beat ARR and HW for free.

Doesn't make sense to go technical on the labelling. Otherwise, we would have big problems with our "labelling law". SWTOR is F2P and yet they pretty much put very similar restrictions to FFXIV FT. If two things are the same, why different labelling? Human is hard. If there's labelling to be applied, the basic is fine
Because it's a free trial. The labeling is important in this case. You don't get to dismiss it because it gives you access to the free to play side of things, which some games have used.

A free trial is used to see if you like something or not. Free to play games are games that you can play for free for as long as you like.

By purchasing the game, you've told SE that you no longer need to trial the game because you like it.

I'm sorry that you didn't research enough into what purchasing the game meant, but that doesn't change the fact that a trial is for you to decide if you like something enough to buy it or not. And YoshiP has come out and stated that FFXIV would shut its servers down before going free to play.

You can't dismiss the labeling differences between free to play and free trial because they mean two different things. And it is just fine to get technical about it because those differences matter for this discussion.

Just because a different game is free to play but has the same number of restrictions, doesn't mean that FFXIV should follow suit. Each game has its own reasons for the restrictions they put in place on the free trial and free to play members. Each of those restrictions either aimed at enticing players to buy the game or an optional sub or to discourage RMT or both. I typically find the "other game does/doesn't do this" arguments to be very weak ones because they are different games and just because another game does or doesn't do something, doesn't mean every other game in that same genre should follow suit.

On a slightly different vein: they've changed the trial a number of times, when I tried the game out before Shadowbringers was released the trial was 14 days long and only let you level up to level 35. And players who played that trial are actually locked out of the current trial unless they buy the game on that account or make a new account. Those players I do hope one day that Square Enix is able to adjust to be able to play the current free trial on. Because they never purchased the game.