Starlight Celebration 2024

[Avoidy]

Gonna keep harping on this point because it grinds my gears. Why do we not get xmas trees, or others like it like presents or lights? The last time they gave us any of that stuff was 2015 and the one before was 2014. After that they haven't given us anymore and they are only on the store now. It's like blatantly trash. Same with the Halloween stuff. Like ffs at least make some of this craftable if its not going to come around every year. Like its an obvious cash grab. Pretty lame tbh. The only ones that you MIGHT find available are those who didn't use the items or had extras and now each piece individually goes for like 20mil on the market board.

Meanwhile in FFXI we got xmas trees every year and there were like 4 or 5 of them.

Im sorry but this one triggered me when I found out. Like for a game that says it caters to the ultra casuals they don't even give us proper holiday stuff lol.

Years might be off or whatever but the point still stands and it pisses me off too. Or they'll give us, like, an outdoor tree. Cool. Most of the community doesn't own a house and can't make use of outdoor furniture, but alright. Anyway, yeah, it's obvious why they do this and they're not gonna stop. It's grimy as hell. It's free2play levels of grime. It's the kind of thing you'd expect from like, maplestory in 2005 or something. We are all getting a worse game, so that they can monetize solutions. It's the MO of free to play games, but in a buy to play game with a subscription. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

There are so many other examples of this, I could fill a book. Christmas trees and crappy event rewards are like the tip of the iceberg.

Another example of this is retainers. They enforce an arbitrary limit on the number of things you can sell, and have these weird middlemen NPCs as part of the market system, and then they monetize it by charging you for more of them. Or look at the leveling process. It's widely acknowledged that leveling a job is kind of a slog; you can queue dungeons, or run FATEs and that's kinda it. The dull formula has barely been addressed, probably because they would sell less job skips if they fixed it. The MSQ as well, or just the process of having a second character on the same account. By gatekeeping all the content behind an msq that is, frankly, a slog, they tempt players to buy story skips. What incentive is there to craft an engaging and interesting story when you earn money by making it so bad that people pay to skip it? These shouldn't be a product, but they are, and I think that says a lot. Hell, seasonal events are widely regarded as short and uneventful, but this game's been out for over 10 years and has a decade+ worth of seasonal events just sitting in a closet. Imagine if we had a Christmas event where we got the new one, but we also got every old one tossed at us at the same time, allowing people who didn't play in 2016 to go back and try it and get the old rewards. Sounds nice, right? Except they sell those old rewards in the cash shop, so there's a profit incentive to never give us anything nice like that.

Housing falls victim to this as well. We've had kind of a crappy system for years and there's no real incentive to remove the toxic auto-demo system and give us something better like instanced housing (even though island sanctuary proved that the tech is there and they totally can do just this) because there's a financial incentive to keep it bad. The current setup keeps disgruntled players subbed because they don't want to lose a home that's kept scarce by design. Glams fall victim too: They could create nice outfits with beautiful dye channels that make sense and then put them in the game, but since the cash shop exists there's a powerful financial incentive to just funnel the nicest items (or, maybe their idea of the nicest items) to that instead. So we got a dungeon with undyeable glams, and an alliance raid with gear that's honestly horrible looking imo, but a majestic flowing multi-part robe in the cash shop for 18 dollars. Hairstyles released in game lately have looked like an actual joke, between the butchered student-barbershop looking cuts to the weird attempt at curly hair, but I can't wait for them to release a onesie outfit with an actual nice hairstyle attached and then sell that for 18 dollars as well. And that's not even touching on how the shop itself suffers from the shop as well; mounts will be 40 dollars and then cite "account wide" as the reason, with no option to buy a cheaper version that isn't account wide. Why isn't there an option for this? For obvious reasons; players lose out on choice because there's a financial incentive to deprive them of it. Selling only account-wide mounts gives them "justification" to charge obscene rates, so they simply don't offer you a normal version of the same mount. I'd say it's like this for more multiseat mounts as well; we might have gotten more events and content in general giving out 2seater and 4seater and 8seater mounts, but there's a powerful monetary motivation to funnel that stuff to the shop, where they know they can charge the price of a used game for one. Meanwhile, outfits, which players would LOVE to have account wide versions of, conveniently never have this option -- for similar reasons. That option is taken from us, because there is a financial incentive to make outfits single-use in hopes that folks will rebuy the outfit on multiple characters. And they do.

I could go on and on but tl;dr our game is kept bad in a lot of ways so square can make money selling solutions to problems they created. For this reason, the cash shop should not exist in a game that is already buy to play+subscription. Their monetization system of "creating problems and selling solutions" is heavily reminiscent of some of the most rapacious f2p games I've experienced, and they have a content schedule that's about on par with a f2p game as well. All we're missing are gacha boxes and some of the nastier stuff affecting the actual game. Maybe in 8.0 they'll start arbitrarily limiting the number of roulettes you can run unless you buy a season pass, or mayyyyybe they'll finally begin selling savage/ultimate weapon skins in the shop and just call it a day.

And honestly? I wouldn't even mind, except it's evident that the money isn't going into the game's quality.