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

[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.

[Raven2014]

I keep hearing whale noises. Normalizing pay to win is never the solution.

It's not even pay to win, it's "Pay for a chance to win" while potentially blowing up a lot of cash.

Which is gambling, which is infinitely worse. They are using their budget right, seems they have good writers too? But let's not kid ourselves where that money comes from.
It's the abusing of people's addiction of wanting to be powerful and laud that power over others, and the devs are giving the pathway towards that with money. You don't have to do it, but you are incentivized into doing it, that is why the system exists and that is how the game is DEVELOPED.

You know what the kind of point you missing here? Is that due to your prejudice whenever we talk about these topic, people like you always jump on the wagon assuming we're advocating turning MMO into a gacha games?

The point we want to make is to show the value disposition these games offer, to show how outdated the pace, system, mechanic of FF14 is. Like ... for real, I won't cost you a penny, go trail WUthering Wave right now, give it a week to explore the game than maybe like me, you'll realize you're paying $15 a month for a game with an exploration system that's more than a decade old.

So sure, the games might have better story, better mechanics, hell it might be better over all? But let's not kid ourselves that monetizing-wise they are as evil as games come. Preying on the weaker minded individuals in gamers or to people with a tendence for gambling.

The only one kidding themselves here is you if try to pretend this is about good and evil, but I guess framing it that way give you the morality you're craving for? Go back to 10-15-20 years ago, SE was a company that by all measure as glamorous as Hoyoverse is. What change? Bad decision, that's what.


The Hoyoverse games make a lot of money ... sure. But have you question why it keeps making more and more money? Because it knows how to reinvest those money and make the game better and better.

You can argue FF14 not making a lot of money ... but we all know it makes enough money to carry SE for years at this point. The investment, the fail or under performed main line FF tittles and dozen of other crappy tittles ... Did you ever stop and think that had those money be reinvested back into FF14, the game would be so good that conversation wouldn't be happening in the first place. It may not make as much, but it's sure making enough to make itself a much better experience than the slop we're getting.


This has nothing to do with how much money being made, it's about how they're being spent. Unless you gonna pretend had those money wasted won't give us a better story, mechanic, hell better overall experience then you're lying to yourself. But I guess looking at the argument this way doesn't give you the moral superiority. The fact that you seem to incapable of accepting the fact that a lot if not most people playing F2P/Gacha games hardly spending any money and still able to have a good experience show that you care more about your prejudice than actually holding an argument.

[KurenXIV]

You say that like we aren't getting fleeced ourselves right now. Where did the subscription money go? What did the cash shop money get put into? And if you own a house, hope you enjoy paying rent to keep it.

Folks who invest time and money into MMOs instead of gacha aren't any smarter about getting caught, it's just a different kind of net that we got trawled into.

Louder for the people in the back.

It's 100% predatory behavior from SE that housing has a 45 day demolition timer. It's incredibly inconvenient to have to time your sub/unsub to (at best) get (maybe?) 6 months of the year without having to pay to maintain a house? That's approximately $80 minimum being exploited from players to maintain an artificially created limited resource which, depending on the server, they may never be able to have again.

Questioning where our monthly fee and cash shop money goes is absolutely valid at this point, because it's painfully clear its being funneled into the companies multiple failed projects year after year after year instead of back into the game.

I unsubbed because I am tired of watching our game turn to absolute garbage knowing my money will never go towards making the game better.

[Saidosha]

I mean, I'd just argue gacha is an evolution of the subscription model and I've always felt the latter is iffy. Yes, companies need money to produce and upkeep, but there's a pretty substantial lack of public accountability for the consumer to process. When I sub to XIV, I want to support XIV and not whatever side project SE intends to butcher with undercooked ideas and forgetting what might have made some other franchise/genre fun (RIP Valkyrie Profile). Even then, if all my money did go back into XIV, would it be content I want? Probably not, and that on its own is a balancing act. I'm one of those midcore dorks that's been back and forth since ARR. Outside of catching up on MSQ, XIV hasn't held a lot for me because I don't want to grind EX/Savage/Ult for reasons beyond skill issue, don't see Eureka/Bozja as actually promoting open world content when the rest of the world is just collecting dust, a somewhat fanciful crafting system doomed to second/third fiddle because of content direction, general party rigidity (including lack of solo friendliness for all jobs), an atrocious housing and glamour system that justifies rebuilding to give RPers what little bones they get throughout the MMO sphere, and a few more little quips and quibbles I'm forgetting in the moment.

At the very least, I'm glad XIV mostly isn't a "You must keep current forever lest you fall behind forever!" kind of game that some people seem to want in their MMOs. I did my time in XI, too, and there's a lot there I do not miss. However, I think the team can do better than sub for a month or two post-expansion like my cycle's been. I could easily tell them what I'd want, too, but that would require them reaching out and not just passively farming forum feedback that may or may not make it through the language barrier.

[Hallarem]

You say that like we aren't getting fleeced ourselves right now. Where did the subscription money go? What did the cash shop money get put into? And if you own a house, hope you enjoy paying rent to keep it.

Folks who invest time and money into MMOs instead of gacha aren't any smarter about getting caught, it's just a different kind of net that we got trawled into.

Yeah. I do feel like paying a subscription for a game that floats said subscription by "Do old content" instead of giving a substantial amount of new content is a bit of a rip-off. But theres no way youre comparing a monthly sub with a cash shop for cosmetics to a "F2P" game that gives you a CHANCE at making you more powerful / introducing new shiny characters and items. Gambling is gambling.

[Hallarem]

You know what the kind of point you missing here? Is that due to your prejudice whenever we talk about these topic, people like you always jump on the wagon assuming we're advocating turning MMO into a gacha games?

The point we want to make is to show the value disposition these games offer, to show how outdated the pace, system, mechanic of FF14 is. Like ... for real, I won't cost you a penny, go trail WUthering Wave right now, give it a week to explore the game than maybe like me, you'll realize you're paying $15 a month for a game with an exploration system that's more than a decade old.




The only one kidding themselves here is you if try to pretend this is about good and evil, but I guess framing it that way give you the morality you're craving for? Go back to 10-15-20 years ago, SE was a company that by all measure as glamorous as Hoyoverse is. What change? Bad decision, that's what.


The Hoyoverse games make a lot of money ... sure. But have you question why it keeps making more and more money? Because it knows how to reinvest those money and make the game better and better.

You can argue FF14 not making a lot of money ... but we all know it makes enough money to carry SE for years at this point. The investment, the fail or under performed main line FF tittles and dozen of other crappy tittles ... Did you ever stop and think that had those money be reinvested back into FF14, the game would be so good that conversation wouldn't be happening in the first place. It may not make as much, but it's sure making enough to make itself a much better experience than the slop we're getting.


This has nothing to do with how much money being made, it's about how they're being spent. Unless you gonna pretend had those money wasted won't give us a better story, mechanic, hell better overall experience then you're lying to yourself. But I guess looking at the argument this way doesn't give you the moral superiority. The fact that you seem to incapable of accepting the fact that a lot if not most people playing F2P/Gacha games hardly spending any money and still able to have a good experience show that you care more about your prejudice than actually holding an argument.

Look. Pay to win all you want. Enjoy the games you want. GAMBLE your money all you want. Its your money. But there is 0% chance youll ever convince anyone aside from whales that paying a subscription is somehow equally predatory to a lootbox gacha system gambling mechanic that at worse is targeted at young people who cant potentially handle their money wisely yet.
Its like getting netflix, and having a 10% chance at rolling to watch the newest most popular show. With a 5% increase for every 5 dollar roll.

[Hallarem]

Dont know what you want me to say here? SE doesnt care about its players and blows their money instead of futureproofing FFXIV? Yes. Ive been saying that for ages.
Plenty of better games gameplaywise out there, including the gacha games. If youre free to play, good for you. But lets not pretend that the budget for improving that game comes from anything but abusing people with gambling addictions.
Mechanically gacha games are more predatory monetarily. If you cant admit to that. Youre a whale, simple as.

[Voidmage]

f2p.

Give up. We talk to people who didn’t even try things like Genshin and already formed their opinions.
There is so much plain wrong prejudice in these posts it’s really funny.
The posts alone that say “a character once is usually not enough” are just plain misinformation.
No in Genshin you only need a character once, you don’t even need tge good weapons because the over world is easy enough.
No you don’t get a lesser experience if you don’t pay money and even if that was the case we are talking about 5 bucks a month. That’s less than some of you pay to keep your virtual house in this game here.

Honestly you guys just form your own opinion on things instead of jumping on the hate bandwagon.
No one is asking for Gacha in ff14. People just say that those games have elements like story, event structure or just plain patch pacing that ff14 devs could look at.
If you can’t even form a neutral stance at these things I don’t know what to say to you.
Do you honestly think the mogry kiosk exists for the good of the players? That they don’t know that fantasia addictions exist? That Yoshida doesn’t see the money first and foremost? The reason we have so little content is not because of covid or poor overworked devs but because it is just enough to still get the money.
No one forces you to play a gacha and no one wants gacha in ff14 but instead of holding a cross against those games at least look at what ff14 could copy from them like a damn good story for instance.

[BabyYoda]

Louder for the people in the back.

It's 100% predatory behavior from SE that housing has a 45 day demolition timer. It's incredibly inconvenient to have to time your sub/unsub to (at best) get (maybe?) 6 months of the year without having to pay to maintain a house? That's approximately $80 minimum being exploited from players to maintain an artificially created limited resource which, depending on the server, they may never be able to have again.

Questioning where our monthly fee and cash shop money goes is absolutely valid at this point, because it's painfully clear its being funneled into the companies multiple failed projects year after year after year instead of back into the game.

I unsubbed because I am tired of watching our game turn to absolute garbage knowing my money will never go towards making the game better.

I would spend 12% on loot boxes in any F2P game over subbing for a broken house system

[BabyYoda]

Dont know what you want me to say here? SE doesnt care about its players and blows their money instead of futureproofing FFXIV? Yes. Ive been saying that for ages.
Plenty of better games gameplaywise out there, including the gacha games. If youre free to play, good for you. But lets not pretend that the budget for improving that game comes from anything but abusing people with gambling addictions.
Mechanically gacha games are more predatory monetarily. If you cant admit to that. Youre a whale, simple as.

It depends on the person really,
I don't have this mindset, if someone have gambling addictions it is better to stop playing games with loot boxes.