Ffxiv monthly sub isn't stretching & response to PCGAMER article

[VeyaAkemi]

Trading MMO addictions for Gacha addictions is not a good thing, and the normalization of the latter through stuff like Hoyoverse games has worried me tremendously as a gamer. Every time someone says, "Just save for a while and you can eventually get a character!" to a F2Per is actually saying, "You must endure a lesser game play experience to get what you eventually want!" Moreover, just getting a character once is rarely enough to make them usable, let alone optimal. Overall, mobile games tend to take the daily grinds of MMOs and exacerbate them to the point that missing days as a free player is never a positive. People who complain about XIV prioritizing the cash shop also need to realize that's exactly what mobile games do from the start. Locking convenience features behind a sub or "battle passes" is also the epitome of scummy.

Adding to this, those games often have an associated gear grind to them, a huge element of Hoyo games gameplay is Relic(or whatever they call in that specific game, I believe they are discs in ZZZ?) grind, it's a miserable process with zero definitive safety nets, the closest being "molders" that reduce the RNG but do not guarantee anything, gearing in those games is an absolutely miserable experience, and it has caused me to quit HSR twice, after I decided to give it another go, and I will take 8 weeks of Savage raiding over that absolute garbage any day, month, or year.

I played gacha games for the better part of a decade, starting with Dokkan Battle back in 2015, before hard quitting all gachas I still played a couple months ago, I have been through every major title in the genre, it's garbage, and I will take any stable MMO over any of that hell again.

[Saidosha]

Adding to this, those games often have an associated gear grind to them, a huge element of Hoyo games gameplay is Relic(or whatever they call in that specific game, I believe they are discs in ZZZ?) grind, it's a miserable process with zero definitive safety nets, the closest being "molders" that reduce the RNG but do not guarantee anything, gearing in those games is an absolutely miserable experience, and it has caused me to quit HSR twice, after I decided to give it another go, and I will take 8 weeks of Savage raiding over that absolute garbage any day, month, or year.

I played gacha games for the better part of a decade, starting with Dokkan Battle back in 2015, before hard quitting all gachas I still played a couple months ago, I have been through every major title in the genre, it's garbage, and I will take any stable MMO over any of that hell again.

The moment gachas starting mixing Diablo-like gear systems in, things were pretty much destined to get worse. The weighting that goes on to implicitly keep people away from perfect gear is also pretty disgusting.

For people out of the loop, imagine XIV gear drops with only the armor value and one substat visible. To get the others you have to do something, like maybe grind EXP, blow up consumables, or whatever. Sequentially, the other substats will unlock, and they'll be random, but after that, you have a limited number of upgrade levels the rolled stats could improve within an additional range. So even if you technically get the RIGHT base substats, they could all roll low and continue to roll low. Does this make the item good enough? Depends. Especially if something is reliant on like a 100% crit rate and you just can't get past 80%.

But also in gacha land, you only get so many pieces of gear and upgrade stuff in a day. Unless! Yep, swipe the credit card, kiddo. Maybe you'll get lucky. Probably not. Don't disappoint your pixel waifus/husbandos, now.