I really didn't understand the issue.

[ChibiChan_Hyperion]

Pay to win what? I just made 5m in about 10 minutes, bought me a house I probably wouldn't have gave two craps worth grinding for.I'm really breezing through content now.

Thank you for the beautiful example of you winning the race against other players to get enough gil to buy that house by using real money.

"Winning" does not only mean actually clearing content in the context of "pay to win."

[Coatl]

It's not pay-to-win because gil is optional guys, duh! Toss away your crafting tools and follow where the REAL gil lies, in selling platinum bracelets for 10m+.

[Krr]

Money is player power, and there was a promise that player power won't be sellable in the cash shop.

Making a lot of money - and then using it to invest in goods, such as houses - is by design considered the 'victory condition' of several activities, including crafting and gathering, which are major core components of the game. If this 'victory condition' didn't exist, few players would bother investing time or energy into the game. By spending $20 to effectively buy a personal house ingame, you are paying to win and gaining power over the economy.

Money also directly contributes to combat power in endgame content by enabling you to purchase food, optimally spiritbonded gear, and high-quality X-potions, which give significant enough advantages that they're basically considered mandatory by HC raid groups.

'Paying to win' in most game design statements does not mean 'paying to beat game content,' it means being able to purchase player power with real-life money. Minions, etc, are not player power, though they can be acquired through player power.

Gil is absolutely player power. It allows you to do everything from buying raid supplies to teleporting across the entire world to making sure your equipment still gives you stat bonuses after n amount of minutes spent in combat to purchasing and owning land that lets you more efficiently and exclusively use player power by centralizing most of your basic needs (such as NPCs and even crafting bonus stations).

[Taika]

Gil can also be used to aid progress in this game, as the best food, potions and melded gear can cost a lot. It also buys clears for those players who do that sort of thing. It gives access to speed leveling and gearing crafts. It's about more than just being able to buy a house and furniture or expensive minions and vanity gear, but those things aren't worthless either.

[Kuwagami]

No more gil was put into the economy than there would have been without it, it simply moved it around. [...]

So... I don't really understand the issue. New gil wasn't being put directly into the game, and it let people subvert the cash shop.[...]

Where was the harm in it? It wasn't cutting into your profits, or preventing you from getting the bracelet. It actually made it easier to get it. Why take away that option?

You don't understand how RMT works, or so I understand your post. Let me take that down for you:

People pay real money, get in game currency. This currency isn't "directly put into the game" as the RMT company had to grind the hell out of it to ge them. They are gils created by the game and belonging to the RMT. The only banable fact is that they are selling it for real money, which is against ToS because you don't own anything your character has, thus you can't sell it.

Now the EB's mistake :
people pay real money, and get in game currency. See the similarity ?
That's the damn exact same thing. Except one is (was ?) blessed by SE because you pay them instead of an other company.


That said, I do hope the hotfix fixes that thing. Yoshida said that P2W wouldn't come into the game, it's time to put actions behind the words.

Servers are up, bracelets can still be traded.

meh, so SE definitively legitimated RMT activities and P2W. GJ, WP

actually, I'll save that if they don't put a notice like REAL soon saying that selling the bracelets is a banable offense. I give it a week and then I'll consider that Yoshi-P's words were void.

[Crankysorc]

That said, I do hope the hotfix fixes that thing.

Servers are up, bracelets can still be traded.

[AdamFyi]

I have posted about this in other topics. According to the latest official statement on the matter, we can conclude that this whole ordeal was caused by the players (and to some extent the developers).

However, this issue sparked an outrage because people were making gil off the Bracelets. They started comparing this to RMT-activity and also a pay-to-win method. From the respose we got, this wasn't intentional on the developer's part. A lot of the backlash had nowhere to go because people were denying that it was the players themselves who chose to sell them for gil, and also the ones who decided to buy them with the gil.

[Sarcasm]Since we all know the player's are always right and can do no wrong[/Sarcasm], the Cash Shop and SE were made the prime targets of the issue and players just attacked them for it. No, the player's aren't the only reason; The developers had some part in it due to human error and an oversight on their part. Though, everyone overlooks the former because they rather not blame themselves.

There was some confusion made on the opposing side as their arguments were based on having the economy destroyed because of Gil entering the economy. However, this was immediately dismissed because it was shown that some amounts of Gil was actually going out of he economy and entered the void through housing and market taxes.

So now we were left with only the pay-to-win argument. We've established that the issue was in no harm to the economies as Gil was actually going out of the economy which is good in order to slow down the inflation, and that the pay-to-win factor was actually player-created. So what does this mean? It means that this whole issue was caused by people taking offense and taking it to a personal level.

There were topics describing how they would very much prefer to have this become a major Gil sink when we had very little information about the system and argued that access to the content should be free to everyone even to those who don't have the budget to spend extra. What happened is that even though people do have access to it through other means, such as getting a friend to buy it for him and paying him back through Gil, possibly the players who don't have the Gil nor can they afford to get it directly are taking offense to it. I don't support nor do I care about people selling it for Gil, as that is something us players have to try to fix ourselves to strengthen our community bonds.

The way how Gil is being thrown out of the economy, I do think it is healthy for the economy. We do not have many Gil sinks to balance it out. We only have teleport costs, housing prices and market board taxes in-game right now. And with the way it is now, people are able to avoid a lot of these gil sinks already which doesn't help that the amount of gil going into the economy is too great. The rapid purchasing of houses removes a crap ton of gil to boot so inflation does not become an issue for now.

The argument for the pay-to-win is as simple to rectify as RMT-activity; Don't become a buyer. Yet, here we are because there are buyers that are willing to part with tons of thousands of Gil to get what they want. This is what players are upset about and have taken offense to it; players gaining gil from these buyers rapidly. This is what I'm trying to point out. I don't condone the act of selling cash shop goods, but I can accept the fact that this can potentially solve inflation within our economy, and should anyone else take this as an offense, please don't.

What people do with their gil is entirely up to them. You shouldn't be offended by another player's spending habits in the first place. They are only getting these items at a much faster pace. They do not gain an advantage over you on crafted gear other than time. You can practically obtain all the materials youself for free by farming content and then getting a friend you know personally to craft it for you.

In short, I'd rather SE look into this issue more carefully before deciding anything. I don't want this to turn into a, "the players are always right and everything we say has to be done", kind of game. Sometimes, opinions get the best of us, and a lot of the time, they are good suggestions. However, we as players do have to understand that if the developers did everyone we asked them to, we would end up with nothing more than a broken game.

[BillyBones]

They are paying what, 20 dolars just go get 3-4m ingame currency? Good for them. Money is easy enough to make in this game.
In the end, the one profitting is me, because I can buy the CS stuff easily without paying real money.

[TurnBased]

They are paying what, 20 dolars just go get 3-4m ingame currency? Good for them. Money is easy enough to make in this game.
In the end, the one profitting is me, because I can buy the CS stuff easily without paying real money.

More like 3 - 10m. And of course, these people won't stop at just one bracelet. They will sell more.

If you are okay with this then you may as well just be playing an F2P game.

[KodiHivaer]

This reminds me of a squatter who used a loophole to buy a house for a dollar, his neighbors got mad at him because he was able to find a way to get what he wanted. So what did his neighbors do? They went around with a petition to get him kicked out of the home and have the loophole fixed.


You know the funny thing, the loophole was LEGAL too.
And then he was evicted for something he could LEGALLY do, his neighbors were mad only because they didn't think of it.