It's time to reevaluate the idea of adding a PLEX/Chronoscroll-like system to FFXIV

[axemtitanium]

Unless you're giving your credit card information to an RMT website to buy an in-game PLEX item (which you can get for cheaper and more safely directly from SE), there's no way an RMT can profit from PLEX. There is literally no reason you'd want to risk your account by choosing to buy PLEX from from an RMT website over an authorized seller like SE.

[DoctorPepper]

Time to let this one die I think.. 37 pages of people repeating themselves over and over again.

[Ceodore]

No to this whole thread. THIS is not the way to deal with RMT gil sellers. Referring to the economy, let's put things this way. There are no gil fountains. The gil being sold by these RMTs is not being made from any super easy farmable content, because if it were, anyone could do the same content and make their business useless. These sellers are coming from accounts that are being hacked, stripped, and abandoned. So the gil they are selling is just stolen, and inflation of the economy because of it is no more drastic as the inflation of it from normal players. So no, there is no economic impact other than them selling gil that was just taken out of circulation. To even think that they are getting this gil from some magical source of super gil production is hilarious and down right moronic. PLEX on the other hand would have a major economic impact, especially since you can not base the game's economic health just on the gil in circulation, but also the items in circulation. As you add something that can be sold that was bought with real world money, you drive up the supply of an item, but when an item is deemed necessary enough (i.e. play time), then demand is never ending, thus supply can never be high enough, and inflation results due to the currency being used to originally develop these items is not from the game, but instead from another source outside the game. This results in secondary inflation that can not be reversed or kept in balance, and the economy will spin out of control. This has been seen in other games with similar systems, even those that don't sell game time. TERA is one I use to play, where the economy due to the in game store has become terrible, however, Tera is a free to play game. Guild Wars 2 is another issue. Their system allows you to by pass the market boards all together and allow you to directly convert real money into store currency and then into game currency. The result: real money still equals the same amount of store currency, but the store currency has become 50 times the value of in game currency, allowing players to directly inject real world cash into in game currency and drive up the economy. The point I am making is that these systems have no control. Even if the game were free to play, the point is that any system that allows real world money to be injected into an online game via items or currency results in an out of control system that destroys the economy and results in massive inflation of prices. Things that were once important or that held value that can not be traded on the market boards (like housing) would lose all form of importance. No gil sink what-so-ever can counter act a force of another economy (especially one so strong as a real world economy) impacting on a game economy.

Second, if you don't have the time to play this game enough to make the gil with effort, then you don't deserve the big shiny mansion with the swag. The housing wards are limited enough as it is, and only the players and free companies that put in the effort and time should be recognized. Joe Schmoe who works 2 jobs, no wife, and no kids and plays 30 minutes a week shouldn't hoard a large house in The Mist which he visits once a week to throw his 100 billion gil into his retainer's bank. The house could be in the hands of a free company which spent months and thousands of hours running content, selling items, farming nodes, and liquidating their entire company chest to come up with the gil. They are active, and will make a proper representation in the game.

On the topic of buying runs, coils, turns, primals, whatever, a system needs to be in place to prevent this type of crap anyways, but that's neither here nor there. First of all, the system for the Final Coils is retarded. 4 boss battles being separated into 4 raid fights much similar to the primals is down right sloppy design. First, Second, and Final turns of Bahamut should have been dungeons with properly hard trash pulls in between fights. Second, the looting system for coils is also a sham too. They got it right with CT and ST when they first came out and also WoD currently. There should be no reason that you can not run content, ever. It turns it from what could be a fun experience where you go in to enjoy the fights to a once a week grind fest with a disappointing loot system. What coils should have been was three 8 man raids, much like CT, ST, and WoD, with 4 bosses, some interesting trash, no lock out, but restrictions on loot limiting players to 1 piece of gear per week. Your entire raid can then work together until everyone has their piece for the week and still go for the challenge and fun of the fights if they want to. But no, what has been introduced instead is essentially 12 primal fights and limited visuals of pieces of Dalamud. I hope SE does Alexander differently.

Now, back on topic. PLEX systems simply don't work because there is simply no way of controlling it without completely breaking it. Other ways other games have tried to control this system are things like limiting how many time scrolls you can buy per month, but that doesn't stop someone from saving up the time scolls then flooding the market all at once, or purchasing multiple accounts to flood the market in other ways. Further, these systems just provide alternative avenues for RMT gil sellers to infect the markets, and obtain mass quantities of gil but now in legal ways. Even if their profit margins are minimal, they will still take advantage of a system to make a profit. Sell a time scroll at market price, then sell the gil back to players at just over the price of the time scroll. The gil still has no real set value, because the market fluctuates and changes that value. A RMT gil seller can also crash a time scroll market, driving the prices down by purchasing time scrolls with stolen credit card information. The result is a massive rebound on the market where prices sky rocket again past what they were at the start as the bubble pops. As players have more time to play to generate more gil, and with more gil in circulation, prices increase to a worse state. This was easily represented by the housing bubble, where the ability to get a house became simpler and easier, requiring a lower down payment, but then the bubble popped, and interest rates increased, monthly payments increased, and hundreds of thousands of houses were foreclosed on. If you drive down a market, you create a bubble, and when the bubble pops, the result is a massive rebound in the opposite direction. There is no perfect system where the prices can just go down and down without any consequences to any of the parties involved, it just simply doesn't exist. An ideal system is one that remains steady, with little to no fluctuation, where no one wins or loses too much or too little. Money remains in circulation without massive injections of revenue, and the wheels turn. When any of these variables are out of sync, the system loses balance. Inject too much money, the price of the product increases. Inject too much product, the price of the product plummets until supplies run out or get low, at which point, the rebound is worse. Take oil prices. The prices 20 years ago were below a dollar because so much of it was readily available, but the moment it began to become scarce, the oil prices sky rocketed, and had a massive effect on other products as well. When you tinker with a system that effects other systems, then you change all of those systems. In this cast, time scrolls would be oil prices. As you inject them, you cause their prices to lower, causing people to have more play time, making their current play time have less apparent value, and driving down the prices of all other markets in the game. The time they spent getting those items to sell now seem less valuable, so the items themselves now hold less value. However, as the time scrolls become more scarce, and believe me, they will become more scarce, because no one source can supply enough time scrolls for all the players to buy, the value of peoples' time increases, increasing the value perceived on the items they are selling and inflating the prices. There is no simple way of counter acting this system other than not tampering with it in stupid ways such as real world into game world exchanges. Gil sinks are only so strong, and their acceptance by your player base is minimal at best. No one likes to feel that their money, in game or real, was a waste. I myself am guilty of sinking gil into some things too, but for the most part, I try to avoid such things.

TLDR: Remove all forms of cash shop to in game transactions, and do not introduce any other forms of such systems, as they will not fix anything, period.

[Intaki]

TLDR: Remove all forms of cash shop to in game transactions, and do not introduce any other forms of such systems, as they will not fix anything, period.

"Dear Giant Corporation, please stop making money. I'd really appreciate it. Thanks."

Good luck with that appeal of yours. I'm sure they'll take it into serious consideration.

[KisaiTenshi]

"Dear Giant Corporation, please stop making money. I'd really appreciate it. Thanks."

Good luck with that appeal of yours. I'm sure they'll take it into serious consideration.

The reason people who play Subscription games object to the "freemiumization" of their games is because "Giant Corporation" sees free money at the expense of the subscription base.

A Freemium game has 10X to 100X the subscriber base of a subscription game, BUT only 2% of the player base will ever buy anything, and of those 2% maybe 0.5% will drop thousands of dollars on the game. This is just a cost shift. So instead of 1 million players paying 15$/mo to play a game, it's now 100 million players, with the original 1 million players continuing to spend 15$/mo to maintain their lead, and a quarter of them now spending on the cash shop to get ahead of others. So the remaining three quarters then cancel their subscriptions once they lose sight of the end game, and now big giant company isn't making 15 million dollars a month constantly anymore, now they're making maybe 5 million dollars a month constantly, and maybe another 2 million dollars every time they they put a new cash shop item out.

I would not trust a company like Electronic Aarts to give good value for money. I've been on and off again playing the "The Simpsons Tapped Out" game on my iPad, which is by EA, and it pulls all the same freemium crud MMO's pull, locked content, accelerated content for money, and because it's a humor game, it even self-references it.



In case people have forgotten, Zynga is failing royally, and they're the ones who brought freemium games to social games. Nexon however was the company that started it all in MMORPG's.
http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/201...c-napkin-math/

This worked for a little while. Being cheap, easy on the uptake and a no-brainer is a good thing.

But it is also REALLY BAD. Especially when the cost and difficulty of developing games continued to plummet and especially when the poster child has a billion-dollar IPO. Because when something is easy to build and sell — and appears to make money — a lot of people are going to gold rush the market and drive your margins into the ground. Now there are a million alternatives.

Which is the point... when you start freemiumizing a game, the game developer spends more time developing more ways to exploit the customer for money than producing quality content that people actually care about.

The entire PLEX type of system has effectively ruined the games they were introduced to, because it doesn't attract new paying players, it attracts more RMT, and more spam because now the bar is lowered to creating unlimited accounts and characters.

The only appropriate place for a cash shop in a subscription game is to curb abusive and exploitable behavior. Limit the number of characters, limit the amount of free customization (to prevent impersonation) of popular players/staff/celebrities. Sometimes even sticking seasonal content in a cash shop makes sense if the means to acquiring them has been permanently removed from the game.

[Charisma]

because it doesn't attract new paying players

Yes it does lol, i know a lot of people who hate Monthly Subscribtion payment methods, that would play a game with this system.

it attracts more RMT

How exactly would it do that? People would prefer the legal way to "buy" Gil, and RMT cant make it cheaper all the time.

and more spam because now the bar is lowered to creating unlimited accounts and characters

lolwat? This doesnt make sense at all.

[Magis]

The best post I ever read

Sums up basically what everyone is feeling and thinking.

[QiLymePye]

Actually, Pacer, there is precedent. We are living in a different era now. When FFXI was released i think it was 15 yrs ago, MMO were known mainly to hardcore game players. I would wager that most of the people playing now wouldn't even touch FFXI. Its the generation we are in now. Instant gratification. And no matter how much we want things to stay the same, these "new consumers" are what companies are targeting. Just look at videogames in general from 15 yrs ago to now. I used to play game that were merciless, like ninja gaiden. Tell me some of you remember how hard that game was. Im not saying that anybody is right or wrong. Im saying that making videogames is a big business, bigger than it was even 15 yrs ago. And in order to stay in business, you have to attract clients/consumers.You have to realize that there is a larger percentage of casual gamers now than there was 15 yrs ago. And with the advent of new technology and instant success from instant gratification games added with the economy and the amount of time spent working/income generated, more people play games casually than ever before. So it makes sense that gaming companies want to cater to casuals as well because they want their business.

Now since we have established that this isn't the good old days of gaming anymore, you have to realize that its still a business. Yes it would be nice to tell people to go play other games if they don't have the time. But telling those same people that is no different than telling people that can't afford to pay sub to stop playing, or if you don't want to play the game and only want to craft stuff and collect vanity then play something else. But in a business sense, saying those things and alienating people will cost SE more money than they can afford. Its just the way gaming has evolved over the years. Its one of the reasons I believe we don't have as many jrpg's over here in the states on these next gen systems. Lots of new players don't wanna solve puzzles, don't wanna out-think their opponent, don't wanna grind for hours, days, and weeks. They want it now and they want it all. Just look at how games are made now vs. 15-20yrs ago. Not just graphics. Look at gameplay, look at story, look at mechanics. I remember playing Resident Evil on PSOne when it first came out. I didn't have memory card, didn't have strategy guides, didn't have gamefaqs.com and such. I had to learn and memorize the game and figure out its puzzles. Took me almost a year to beat that game. Now...take RE6....I beat that game in less than a week with all characters.

What I'm trying to get at is that game companies are definitely making games to cater more towards casual players (remember, Casual means time put into game, not difficulty) more because if a game takes too long to complete because u have to put too much time into it, the casual gamer is going to go to something else. Especially if that casual gamer is also looking for instant gratification in as little time as possible. That's why I keep hearing people say this game is a theme-park mmo, something for everyone. More money for SE, more updates, more patches, for us. Don't push away, belittle, or blast players that can't put as much time in the game as you, because those same players are paying the same amount for the sub as you, but are getting less.