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

[Raven2014]

the only difference is whales are allowed to drop 2,000 dollars if they want to skip all grinds and get to the endgame instantly. If you're not a whale you don't do that.

And in FF14, you can pay 30$ over two month trying to get your savage BiS. Or you can pay PF around a hundred million to get everything in one week. Or employ RMT service if you want to spend real money.

[Voidmage]

Oh, you think *getting* the character is the end of the grind? no, no, you are critically misunderstanding how gachas work, first you need to get the character you want, then you need to spend the next 40 hours, split between weeks to months due to energy systems, doing the most braindead grind imaginable, stuff that makes Shared FATE grind seem exciting and thrilling, to get enough materials to level them up and rank up all their skills, then you need to spend... at minimum 80 hours, but depending how hard you want to go for it effectively limitless, hours grinding gear for that character, until you eventually settle for something that's like maybe 70% of the way to ideal, then you go online, be it reddit, Twitter, whatever, and see someone posting the absolute most pristine piece of gear imaginable with the title "First time doing domains, is this any good?".

Realistically, the bulk of gacha currency grind happens almost passively while doing all that other stuff, they get you with *everything else* by intentionally making all the necessary aspects of engaging with the gameplay miserable.

Genshin I pull a character, get them leveled up and ascended to maximum in about 3 hours because I naturally farm the resources by just doing my dailies. If I don’t have them I just do my dailies anyway and explore the world to get the gathering resources. Boss drops I just farm them about 5x a day but I could go far more because I have so much resources to replenish my daily resin limit anyway.
Furina took me about a week to get to maximum because her materials where introduced in the same new map.
Then I do the domains to get artifacts if I don’t have them anyway. Weapons I have so many I just take them from another character if I don’t even have copies lying around.
Not the perfect ones? Eh doesn’t matter because the game is easy anyway.
You get all you need by doing dailies and events and if you explore the world.
Because I don’t pull for every character I have still about 300 pulls, more money ingame than I ever need and so much upgrade materials I could level up some characters twice.

Honestly with all respect I don’t think you completely know what you are talking about.
You saw a bad gacha system and push it on every other one without being neutral.
It’s the same as saying every MMO is the same hardcore grind it was so many years ago.
If you think the grind in Genshin or Honkai is anywhere near for example fate go then I don’t know what to say.
There is a reason why gachas are so successful for f2p players and low spenders because there are those that are NOT a huge grind.

And in FF14, you can pay 30$ over two month trying to get your savage BiS. Or you can pay PF around a hundred million to get everything in one week. Or employ RMT service if you want to spend real money.

Wish I could agree more.
That’s what annoys me the most. Saying Gacha is bad while defending MMOs.
Both are systems on a scummy principle and both have bad sheep and good quality games that are completely fair.
You can take the expansive shortcut in both types of games but it’s not needed in either of them.

[VerdeLuck]

Oh, you think *getting* the character is the end of the grind? no, no, you are critically misunderstanding how gachas work, first you need to get the character you want, then you need to spend the next 40 hours, split between weeks to months due to energy systems, doing the most braindead grind imaginable, stuff that makes Shared FATE grind seem exciting and thrilling, to get enough materials to level them up and rank up all their skills, then you need to spend... at minimum 80 hours, but depending how hard you want to go for it effectively limitless, hours grinding gear for that character, until you eventually settle for something that's like maybe 70% of the way to ideal, then you go online, be it reddit, Twitter, whatever, and see someone posting the absolute most pristine piece of gear imaginable with the title "First time doing domains, is this any good?".

Realistically, the bulk of gacha currency grind happens almost passively while doing all that other stuff, they get you with *everything else* by intentionally making all the necessary aspects of engaging with the gameplay miserable.

getting the character is the end of the time limited grind yes, everything else can be done as fast or as slow as you want.
time limited weapons are not needed and really just the limited characters matter in terms of getting them right now

the grind whales skip is they can pay 2,000 dollars to get 6 copies of the character and limited weapon to roll over content right now.

[kiotsukete]

Maintaining a full time sub to FF14 is absolutely not worth it with the current 4.5 month patch cycle. Since you can’t sub for just half a month, the cost per major patch if you stay subbed the whole time is: 5 months x USD $12.99/$14.99 = $64.95/$74.95. Which is the full price of a AAA game.

Is each major patch worth the price of a AAA game? Seems like lots of FF14 players are saying no. So only subbing for 1-2 months when a major patch drops is the only decision that makes financial sense for most players.

[Raven2014]

Honestly with all respect I don’t think you completely know what you are talking about.
You saw a bad gacha system and push it on every other one without being neutral.

A common trend among these posters seem either they talk out ignorance, or prejudice, or both. It's like if you ask an average FF14 player how much does the game cost or how grinding it is ... the most common answer would probably 15$ a month on average, maybe 20-30 extra occasionally for skin/fantasia, grind is probably 2-3 months for BiS, a month of two for an EX mount .etc. Instead, someone with an agenda gonna say: oh it will take YEARS for you to get the best mount (tiger hunt), and you gonna spend hunred if not close to thousands of dollar to get everything in the game!!

And that's exactly you see what happening here. These people take the biggest whale and try to frame it as the "average player experience", while the fact that the average gacha players don't really spend any difference than an MMO players.

Wish I could agree more.
That’s what annoys me the most. Saying Gacha is bad while defending MMOs.
Both are systems on a scummy principle and both have bad sheep and good quality games that are completely fair.
You can take the expansive shortcut in both types of games but it’s not needed in either of them.

It's a perception things. People can spend 3k for a weekend at Hawaii they thought you're just living life. But when they hear you spend 3k for a weekend at Las Vegas, they think you probably have a gambling problem. And you can tell the people who think like that are the one who never had set foot to Las Vegas, and they won't believe you if you tell them 3k actually go a lot farther in Vegas than a place like Hawaii.

There is a reason why bias is often the biggest enemy of objective thinking. I play FF14 for 10 years now and I have not buy a single glamour items from the mogstore despite there is a lot of them I want, and despite there were a period where I was deeply in love with FF14. Simply because I find the idea of paying 20$ or more for an item that is NOT account bound is scummy. So for one, I find self control is not that big of a deal. And for two, between that and the house demolition things, I find it pretty moronic when people try to argue on behalf of FF14 on the ground of morality.

[Voidmage]

Snip.

Completely agree it’s prejudice.
Honestly this whole conversation is stupid because no one asks for gacha in FF14.
What you, me and others advocate is to look at what those games do good and use it to make this game here better.
They wanted us to play other games, we did and now people bring ideas from those games.

The whole gaming industry is crashing right now regarding the big developers like Ubisoft or BioWare and if SE doesn’t pull the thumbs out of their butt regarding FF14 and other titles they will follow sooner or later. Maybe not with Dawntrail but finally.
Games like Genshin or Fate are not liked because of gacha but because of story, gameplay, listening to feedback and pure customer satisfaction and I hate to see the good sides of those games disregarded just because someone has a hate for the system of them.
This is the console wars all over just in more stupid.

[Saidosha]

...
The posts alone that say “a character once is usually not enough” are just plain misinformation.
...
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.

You're vagueposting me, but I'm gonna call you out on it.

Gachas may not handle duplicate character pulls the same way, but the reality is many provide significant incentive to their acquisition through stats and additional abilities. For some it's as simple as one extra character per upgrade levels, often up to 5. Others employ a shard system that frequently translates to needing 6+ copies of a character due to escalating costs per upgrade level. A few go even further by wanting character combos at specific upgrade levels for further bonuses. Many of these games also have "challenging content" implicitly aimed toward whales with rankings and (the rich get richer kind of) rewards and the like where not having optimal parties and configurations makes it mathematically impossible to compete or even complete. This isn't fiction. This isn't hyperbole. You may have been convinced you're getting the same value per dollar, or maybe more, but as someone who played and complete RPGs before all this BS existed, I can't really stress enough that gacha gamers are not getting a superior experience. Not all subs are $5, either. For all the games I've tried, $10-15 is more the norm. You can't exactly refute some lock QoL features behind it, either.

Far as I'm concerned, Genshin is right up there with Dark Souls in distorting perceptions of video games and what makes them good. Go play Suikoden. 108 characters to recruit. Not all combat-oriented. Not all are great or get much story relevance... not unlike gacha. Regardless, it's proof that an RPG can expose a player to a wide cast of characters without relying on a slot machine for acquisition. Plus you're not waiting 3+ years for a completed story that may not even finish because oops NA/Global just wasn't profitable enough. And for every game I've tried where people say it's all doable with free story characters, you're always making the game harder for yourself by taking that route. Always. You're grinding longer, wiping more often, losing ways to counter mechanics, and generally just falling behind. That's a lesser experience.

Go play Another Eden, the unfortunate successor to Chrono Trigger, and only use main cast units sticking to base difficulty. Even the difference of power between old launch pulls and those today is a sweeping gulf of difference. You know what? This is another one of those games people have tried to argue is F2P Friendly because of the usual tired litany of copium catchphrases and self-inflicted blindness brought on by sunken cost fallacy (You, too, can have a max light Aldo running the same dungeon 2000 times over 300 days at the expense of all others!). Is it a bad game when you peel away all the deliberate gatekeeping and partitioning? No, and that's what makes it all the more infuriating because a good, standalone RPG could've existed instead.

Sometimes it's sad how that can and does apply to MMOs, too. Both styles get so caught up in their own trappings that the game itself suffers.

[Voidmage]

snip.

I played Suikoden 4 and 5 these are a really strange comparison tbh. The only thing they have in common are a massive amount of characters. Suikoden you need a guide to get all characters and unlock the best ending.
In Genshin you have your main character and just pull for the characters you like or the meta if that interests you but you know what? You don’t need perfect C6 characters to solve the hardest content spiral abyss in that game and the rewards there are just normal ingame currency and a few more pulls.
And you don’t need any characters other than the free starters to get the best story experience.
Heck you can play the whole story without even pulling once because the story fights are made easier anyway.

Dark Souls also didn’t do anything of that sort. It just gave way to a new genre if we can even call it that but that is another discussion (it could also be that I misinterpret your words because I am not sure what exactly you mean here).

No one here says that gachas are a saint for the customers or that you can’t take shortcuts with money.
The original matter was that modern gachas have good things that ff14 could take as inspiration and those posts were anlmost outright denied because “no gacha in ff14” even though that was never the wish. People just started listing all the bad things of gachas in a broader light instead of actually asking WHAT those good things are. Why do we bring the story or the events as an example, why do we think the patch cycle is great in those games.
Instead it all devolved into explanations why gachas are the work of the devil and now here we are discussing back and forth about something that doesn’t even matter in this discussion.
The reason I replied to you was because you reviewed gachas in a broad term and threw all together when that is not the case and that is why I explained how it works in Genshin.

All I am saying is that it is plain wrong to deny good ideas just because they come from a gacha and that it is wrong to regard all gacha as the same. If Blizzard has good things I also think the devs should get inspiration there but I don’t play wow so I don’t know.

All I ask for is to look at gachas fair and neutral like with all games.
There are bad games and there are good ones.

Would I love Genshin as a full blown single player rpg with all character? Of course but times have changed and either I go with them and pick the few good games or all that is left will be indi games.
Gachas aren’t a perfect system but it is better then what the marked transforms into in my opinion.

[Raven2014]

You're vagueposting me, but I'm gonna call you out on it.

Gachas may not handle duplicate character pulls the same way, but the reality is many provide significant incentive to their acquisition through stats and additional abilities. For some it's as simple as one extra character per upgrade levels, often up to 5. Others employ a shard system that frequently translates to needing 6+ copies of a character due to escalating costs per upgrade level. A few go even further by wanting character combos at specific upgrade levels for further bonuses. Many of these games also have "challenging content" implicitly aimed toward whales with rankings and (the rich get richer kind of) rewards and the like where not having optimal parties and configurations makes it mathematically impossible to compete or even complete. This isn't fiction. This isn't hyperbole.

And I gonna call you out for being intentionally misleading.

I'm playing Wuwa right now, lvl 70, all of my character except the MC is either a base or 1 dub max. I have cleared my enter quest log, I had beaten boss and challenge 20 level above mine, and I did so with 4* character using 4* weapons (not even 5* SSR or signature weapon). There is no content that is not accessible to me, there is no content I can't beat except the level cap that I'll eventually get to in another month. And before you comment on that, ask your self if someone start playing FF14 right now, how long it gonna take them to reach the highest level content, assuming they don't want to spend on skips? It's no difference here, I can drop the cash at be at max level already just one month in, but you know ... I think I prefer to take my time and play the game.


Some other games I played I also had done the math, 8 months to max out a character for F2P, whale can do it in a couple weeks with a few hundred dollar, and any amount of time in between depending on how you manage your resource. So what's the difference between a player with no dub/no special weapon and a fully kit out whale? I spend 2 min killing a boss, a whale can do that in 10 seconds ... and that's it. There is no other content a whale can do that I can't, and I'll be where that whale is in 8 months at most even if I don't spend a penny. Your claim about whale getting more reward in the sense of "the rich gets richer" is completely false. Because NO gacha game will "physically" reward whale more, because they will discourage them being a whale next time. The only thing Gacha games enrich Whale is their ego. That ranking system you're talking about, sure the top 5% is whale ... but what is the reward they get for being there as opposed to someone like me who sitting at 30-40%? They get a special chat bubble/picture frame that they have to fight to keep every week, so that whenever they make a post on the forum everyone else can realize they're in the presence of a whale.

That's it, at least that's the case of all the gacha games I'm playing. I don't know whether intentionally or not, you and some others are purposely wording your post in a way to imply whale players have some exlusive access to actual content while they really don't. In fact, I'll go farther and say that in all of the Gacha games I play, I can get literally EVERYTHING eventually if I stay around long enough without spending money. Can you say the samething about FF14? Like I said, I've been playing this game for 10 years and still own ZERO mogstation glam, and I can play for another 10 years and that still gonna be zero unless I fork out the extra cash ... soooo which model is exactly more F2P friendly here?

snip.

The rest of your post make no sense. Why are you bringing in Single Player game into this? We compare MMO and Gacha because they're both live service games. This is like trying to make a case an orange is bad because an apple taste better.

[Saidosha]

I already explained why I brought up Suikoden. If collecting characters is your thing, it had been done before predatory monetization entered the chat. The further the comparison, some would be like N rarities, other would be your SSRs. Some might have been harder to get than others, like Clive on Suikoden 2, but it was always game play that got them. And that's a big part of my point: Gacha sacrifice game play. Kind of like of SE just putting things in the store sacrifices giving them an acquisition in-game, be it a quest, boss kill, achievement, or whatever. It's a continuation of getting the lesser experience. Mechanically, a lot of gacha are barely at the PS1 level of play.

Now, Wuthering Waves is a comparably new game. Assuming it doesn't go the way of shutdown, prestige content is inevitable. It's pretty much always a bad idea for a gacha to shoot that stuff out at launch because the whales aren't going to have their minnows and F2Pers to dominate over because they can't even access the stuff and get their happy feelgood brain juice. Passing rewards off as just border portraits is also being disingenuous, and perhaps more telling of your lack of genre exposure as a whole. Sometimes these rewards are the only source of replacements for dupe pull growth. Others it can be specialized upgrade components that minimize or even eliminate RNG. The old Pay-To-Win phrase didn't spring out of nowhere, even if you're doing your best to try and dilute it down to Pay-To-Progress-Faster. Not all are as hardcore (pseudo-)PVP, but they exist.

Again, I'm going to point back to Another Eden. If you're a new player starting today, you've missed out on 5+ years of dungeon keys. There's no catch up mechanic in this vein and more established players will forever be ahead. This same investment frequently leads into disconnect on the new player experience and what they should or shouldn't be capable of. Chant Scripts would be an example of the bottleneck. Drop rates are bad. You'll probably get 1 every 3 weeks. You need 5 to promote a 4* character to 5* alongside a character specific book (or multiples of them) that may be rare drops of their own. Not all characters are 5* capable. Some are stuck at 3* and are just pull wasters that add zero benefit to the game and weren't even worth using at launch. This is before getting into grasta, upgrade components, equipment materials, and so on where overlap is literally not guaranteed. A modern game where you can never be collectively on par with older players because your only crime was not starting sooner is dumb. I don't care if you think you have a solid main team or that what you do is easy. Someone else is going to have six teams and be better prepared for the future.

Going to this weird length of trying to compare the gacha experience to the MMOer is folly because you're trying to make it sound like everyone must take 8 months just to get fresh to current. Does it happen for the most extreme of casuals? Sure. I've played multiple MMOs, though, and most of the good ones tend to trivialize progress up until the current expansion or equivalent. It's not like going into Shadowbringers demands you do Ivalice and the Omega line weekly for months. But much like AE or other time gated gacha systems, there's no overcoming it once you're out of whatever freebie resources. Even if you're a scrub, the games inevitably tell you to go away until tomorrow, or worse, some specific day if they're one of those. If you want to argue a casual going at a snail's pace is wasting $120 for 8 months, I'm not really going to disagree, but I'm also not going to discount external factors that determine their schedule. Someone else could also go zero to current in a month. Would I encourage it? No. Is it healthy? Absolutely not. The artificial babysitting is at least absent until you hit endgame. The honeymoon phase of gacha, their releases, and how players get treated tends to last about a month before they're put on the drip. A little bonus currency or event here or there is hardly a replacement, as F2Ps tend to see one premium equivalent 10-pull a month. "Just wait 3 months spending nothing you get daily and maybe you'll get the character you want!" isn't a sales pitch. It's an alarm. You've had game play taken from you, but you happily ask for more of the same, and these companies will continue to do it as long as you let them. If going to indies it what it takes to get developers that respect the player, so be it. Entirely too many potential RPGs have been lost to the siren song of the live service model and I can't even blame the authors/coders/artists/musicians/testers/etc. for that. The industry's gone to great lengths to figure out how to hoodwink players and maximize cash extraction. I'm not even saying you can't have fun while it's happening, just that you could've had more fun in a less corporatized package.