Anyone else just feeling really disapointed this expansion?*vent*

[Ameela]

You wanna talk predatory? Let's talk about the mobile games that start off free, but they run limited time events and offer all kinds of boosts and special sales for currency and special items to use in-game. Some MMOs are like that as well, FFXIV is not. It's 100% playable with full features for the price of sub and expacs only. This is just good business.

I mean at the end of the day free games need to have some sort of monetisation in order to recoup the costs, whether that monetisation is fair is another matter entirely, but it's not something that they can just take out.
With XIV you have to pay for the base game, then pay for the latest expansion and then pay a monthly sub fee on top of it all. There is absolutely -no- reason for this game to have a cash shop as extensive as it is currently.
Plus it's not like XIV doesn't also run its own limited time events, which are fine and all but the fact that if you miss one of them you then have to pay for the rewards you missed in the cash shop rather than just having it be available again the next year is kind of baffling.
And this is on top of all the other questionable tactics the game pulls to wring some extra bucks out of you. Yeah, Yoshi-P can pretend like it's all fine and dandy for you to take a break and unsub if there's nothing to do, but that doesn't stop the devs from putting a bunch of content in that's time gated just long enough to make sure it takes over a month for you to complete it all like the beast tribes and the tome limit. The biggest pisstake here was definitely with 5.5 when they had those weekly NieR quests that took like 6 weeks to complete for absolutely no reason.