Blizzard is stealing SE ideas......BUT

[Naraku_Diabolos]

This is the lamest excuse I've seen regarding trusts.

With Squadrons, you are the leader/commander. With Trusts, it’s standard AI party members to act in place of actual people. WoW’s take on it is pathetic and cartoony. I wouldn’t be caught dead playing a game like theirs with offensive and stupid looking characters (disproportionate body sizes, gnomes only having 8 fingers, elves having cockroach eyebrows, etc.). The Trust characters in FFXIV have way better dialogue as they give you lore tidbits tied to the dungeon, scenario, or enemies. WoW has theirs jumping around acting like cartoon characters.

[Reimmi]

I was waiting for someone to bring up WoW being "So much worse" about monetization. I got rather bored and compared both stores after seeing a claim about 14 being far more expensive and yeah that wasn't a lie at all. Here is a breakdown by section and I am assuming you own the game if you are looking at these and even if I didn't 14 would still be losing heavily. Now of course this is a simple number to numbers comparison and you realistically will not be buying the whole store for each game of even be buy an entire section like fantasia for example or every character service and token in WoW.

WoW Shop

Charity- $20
Bundels-$54.99
Mounts-$730
Pets-$170
Toys-$30
Transmog-$158
Character services-$199.99
----Total- $1362.98

FF14 Shop

Fantasia- $83
Character services- $28
Bundles- $9.99
Costume sets- $1478
Mounts-$870.95
Emotes-$272.50
Dyes- $170
Weapons- $110
Tools- $3
Armor-$292
Accessories- $60
Minions- $232.91
Chocobo-barding- $99
Music- $280
Housing- $1037.50
Face paint- $7
Fashion accessories- $3

-----Total-$5036.85

That $90 brontosaur while overly expensive in pricing isn't even close to the death of a million small micro-tranactions ff14 is. You are free to correct my numbers as well as I admit I am human and may have entered something wrong. I am by no means trying to paint WoW as being better but I wanted realistic data of the stores for comparison.

You forgot a pretty big one.
Wow token- infinity$ and literal pay to win

[Shougun]

You forgot a pretty big one.
Wow token- infinity$ and literal pay to win

Not as smooth as a token but retainers provide gil, so if you max your retainers you'll earn a non-uselsss amount passively. Not that I think this is really important on who does the cash shop worse, cash shop sucks in general lol. Also for WoW they do take stuff off the shop, so the total damage there is harder to calculate.

[Xeronia]

You forgot a pretty big one.
Wow token- infinity$ and literal pay to win

I did include one WoW Token in Character services. Yes it is an infinitely buyable item but I also included every Fantasia pack for 14 once as they are also able to be purchased multiple time and we obviously have no calculated numbers on how much either games does sell of those so I can't include that total here.

[ZavosEsperian]

Also for WoW they do take stuff off the shop, so the total damage there is harder to calculate.

You can look up all of the items that were removed from the shop. Were you to include them into the list Xeronia provided, FFXIV's cash shop is still around 2-2.5 times larger in terms of cost. You can look at the list yourself on wowpedia/wowhead if you think I am lying, but at most the total cost of the items removed is between $200-500 USD.

Note all items that are not character services/WoW Token are account wide, which means all characters are able to access the items upon creation or when you are given the ability to mounts is.

[DPZ2]

You never really realize how much $7 emotes or $18 outfits add up and that was the point of my former comparison.

So, you're basically comparing a large store with a much smaller store and are objecting because to get one of everything would cost you too much money?! Do you also go to large department stores and figure it's not worth it because you can't afford to buy one of everything?

[Xeronia]

So, you're basically comparing a large store with a much smaller store and are objecting because to get one of everything would cost you too much money?! Do you also go to large department stores and figure it's not worth it because you can't afford to buy one of everything?

More I keep hearing this idea WoW is somehow worse, I again have stated several times I got curious and did a side by side comparison of all on offer. WoW has higher prices but less quantity, 14 has lower prices but a bigger quantity of products that really adds up. I have said several times now I was curious about the monetization of both games and ran the comparison. Of course I do not expect you are buying every item on offer.

[Eyrilona]

This way of comparing shops is... beyond absurd.

Get one of each item and sum the prices? Think this through -- for example, dyes are sold single or in a pack of ten. Imagine they also sold in dyes in packs of 20, 40, and even 100 -- would we be complaining so much harder then because now our total includes the cost of not 11 copies of the same dye but 171 copies of the same, because we apparently buy one of each size bundle?

But also this act like the WoW store requires much less money to 'buy out' because it assumes everyone buys only one single WoW token, ever, in this side by side comparison?

Also by this logic, if one shop sold them a mount to own permanently for $10, and the other store sold them an in-game permit to ride the same mount for a single hour for 5$, apparently they would say the one that sells it to them permanently is the ripoff because $10 is more than $5, leaving out that the propositions of what it is they are buying are completely different?

That anyone put in enough effort to go through every page of the store to tabulate the items and their prices, and then did something so useless with all that, is at the same time ridiculously impressive and impressively ridiculous.

[Miguel85NYC]

With Squadrons, you are the leader/commander. With Trusts, it’s standard AI party members to act in place of actual people. WoW’s take on it is pathetic and cartoony. I wouldn’t be caught dead playing a game like theirs with offensive and stupid looking characters (disproportionate body sizes, gnomes only having 8 fingers, elves having cockroach eyebrows, etc.). The Trust characters in FFXIV have way better dialogue as they give you lore tidbits tied to the dungeon, scenario, or enemies. WoW has theirs jumping around acting like cartoon characters.

First off, Dont be dissing my blood elves, they are the best! Trust system is trash.. Stop being a "Fan Boy" and open your eyes

[Dante131]

This sets a precendent that Blizzard can put any mount on the shop if they wanted to that was originally available through in-game means. Where has FFXIV done that?

Hmm lets just dont count our beloved raid bosses which are buyable as Mount in 14s Shop instead of beeing obtainable ingame right ? FFXIV could do something like this Mount aswell and guess what people would buy it even without hessitation. Like buying glamour of other Final Fantasys or Raid boss Mounts and even wanting more stuff beeing added since one state Clouds hairstyle should come into the shop...besides most of the event stuff beeing for free earlier are in shop what 1 year later ?