It's so Awesome to See All the Cool Stuff Are Now in Cashshop.

[JamieRose]

Don't like it? Don't buy it. It's optional. It only affects you if you willing to shell out the dough. Been playing this game for years and had a lot of fun with it. Never bought one thing.

This is the shoddiest defense of price gouging I've ever seen.

[Avoidy]

This is the shoddiest defense of price gouging I've ever seen.

It's (un)surprisingly common here. Doesn't matter that the company hosting their favorite mmo is slowly becoming scummier and pushing the envelope on what it can and can't get away with from a monetization standpoint; long as they can keep doing their own thing, then all is well. And it is! It's all well and good ... until the company's awful anti-consumer business practices touch something they like. Once some feature they wanted to see in the game is being sold to them for the price of a whole separate video game, then it'll be their turn to make a thread complaining about it. A lot of people woke up to this reality when the dog mount they assumed would be a blu reward for playing the game was sold to them instead. Sooner or later, everyone sees a glam item they like, only to do the research and learn that it's a cash shop exclusive, sold in a bundle of gear they don't want but will be forced to pay for anyway if they want to get the singular piece they were after to begin with. Or an emote that was bundled with a figurine 5 years ago that can only be purchased nowadays through scalpers. Or maybe it'll be Christmas and you'll want a tree for your FC house and then you'll learn that you can either spend 10 million gil on a hoarder's marketboard tree or several dollars in the cash shop since they're never bringing that event back because they'd rather just sell you the damn thing.

In a perfect world we'd all want Square to adopt more consumer-friendly business practices surrounding their cash shop, especially since we're already buying each expansion and paying a sub, but Square will never ever feel that kind of pressure because for every one (1) person who thinks critically about this sort of thing and what the implications are going forward, there are like 300 people who will just buy whatever's on the cash shop the moment it comes out. So in a weird way, I can understand Renalt's inability to give a shit. I just hope he's not shocked when one day the things he has fun with disappear behind a paywall. It sucks too, because you can avoid the shop and refuse to spend money there out of protest, "vote with your wallet" and all that, but the hyper-whales in this game who buy and gift and fanta-addict and etc. will invalidate your vote 200 times over. You can do everything "right" from a conscious consumer standpoint and still end up with the stereotypical greed-motivated game run by a company that creates problems to sell you cash shop solutions, in part because people with more money than sense can't just close their wallet for two minutes.