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

[Ceodore]

-snip-

Your heart is in the right place but for the wrong reasons. Inequality in a player base results no matter what you do or what systems you have. Cash shop or no cash shop, some people have more time, energy, and skill to do things that other players can't, and that's just fact of things. There is no getting around it, and there should not be a getting around it. disallowing a cash shop to in game currency transaction, or any kind of transaction from real world money to in game money directly or indirectly is a terrible idea for reasons beyond petty social status or e-peen. Further, such a system would not necessarily make everyone equals where we all hold hands together with all the best gears and loots anyways. So, yeah, you're on the right side of the fight but for wrong and useless reasons that other things besides a cash shop can affect and change.

You reference time played, well, I work a desk job that allows me hours upon hours of free time to play the game on my laptop. I also make enough from my job to also be able to sink hundreds of dollars into a cash shop and sky rocket my bank account. However my reasoning against it isn't about time, it's about the health of the game itself. No matter how much progress you have made personally, any player that comes along with hours of time to spend farming hunts, nodes, and mobs like me can catch up and surpass you in a matter of month while still holding down a 12 hour a day job and raiding for 2 hours at home. So relative progress compared to your fellow player is a useless example and reason for this argument. But, as I said, your heart is in the right place.

[Preypacer]

OK preypacer. Nice post, but here's the thing. Im gonna play devils advocate here. Lets use your example of 10 hr gametime split into 5 2hr sessions. Now that would be nice to do, except that alot of the end game stuff has you going back to do previous content, which takes longer and longer to wait just to play for. So person doing 5- 2hr sessions spends half of each session just waiting to play

.

Put together a group. Arrange a static. Allow for the fact that, ya know what... things just might not come together in a given session, and you might have to put it off 'til the next one. That's life. Guaranteed, whatever it is you're trying to get done... you'll get it done, so long as you stick with it, and don't just go into "whining on forums" mode when something doesn't go your way.

Work on something else in the meantime. It's all grist for the mill anyway.

If you're grown enough to have a life so full that time is so limited, chances are you're grown enough to realize sometimes things just don't go the way you want them to. It happens to me. It happens to everyone.

If that makes the game un-fun to play because you're unable to do things in the time-frame you want, within your schedule... then look for another game where you can. Or, just accept that, again, sometimes things just aren't going to go your way, and soldier on.

I spent a week trying to get a group for Twintania. Never did get one. Still need to do it... and I will. That's life. In the meantime, there's plenty else I can be doing.

It is just plain irrational to expect a game to deliver exactly the experience you want, exactly on your terms, all the time. Especially when you bring other people into the mix, and limited time is a factor.

But you have to work around that. You can't expect the game to change to fit your personal circumstances.

A good RL friend of mine used to play FFXI. He had a full-time job, a wife, a child and a dog - as well as all that goes with it. His play time was limited to late nights, after the wife and child were in bed. Yet, he didn't go on forums, saying "Hey guys, I'm really busy, and this game's setup is inconvenient. You should change it to better accommodate me". Instead, he accomplished far more in FFXI than I ever did - and I had all the free time in the world, outside of a full-time job. Why? He focused, he worked out a plan around his schedule... and he got shit done. He completed all the main storylines (including CoP pre-nerf), and he ran a regular end-game group... all on a schedule of maybe a few hours at a time. And he's not a unique case.

It has been, and can be done.

The first critical step to making progress... is to stop making excuses why you can't. (I don't mean you personally by that ).

Now this is what I want alot of you all to know, especially you preypacer, how long do you think this game will last if all of the players that can't sit for 10hrs at a time said "screw this game"? What percentage of the "entire" player base would SE lose? I will say at least half. Once again, SE is a company in the business of making games "for Profit". If half of the players left this game, what are SE's options? increase remaining players subs by 25 to 50 percent? Then some of those players will leave? Or maybe downsize, so you get expansions maybe 1 every 3 years or patches 1 to 2 times a year? What you all need to understand is that money talks. And SE and all of us players that like this game need this game to survive. So telling people that if they can't afford the sub to quit, or if they can't afford the time to play to quit is not healthy for a business, which SE is. When you are in the business of making money, you want to ensure profits. SE wants to continue to be profitable, so guess what? They will keep listening to people, not just the ones that feel like the game is ok how it is and feel entitled to keep it that way, but they are also gonna listen to the people that are not happy as well.

I see what you're getting at, but there's no point in answering. It's all hypothetical "what-ifs", based on conjecture, and non-points.

Has it been a major problem for XIV so far? No.

Has it been a major issue for other MMOs? Not that I'm aware of. It wasn't in FFXI, and that game was even more demanding of time than XIV is.

There's no precedent for it.

Everybody pays the same basic sub price, no one has more pull than the other, but there is one group that is bigger than the other in this game, and if I had to decide between alienating half of my profit margin or a smaller percentage, best believe im gonna go with the one making me the most money. And right now, SE is trying to get even more casuals in this game, via free login weekends, etc. Remember who is keeping this game afloat people.

Again, you're discussing hypotheticals here. There's no tangible indication that SE is having to deal with "alienating" any such group. People will stay or leave on their own terms, for their own reasons.

Should something like that become an issue demanding SE's attention, then they'll deal with it as they see fit. 'til then, there's nothing even to discuss.

[Ceodore]

"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.

I am not asking them to stop making money. If you took it that way, you are drastically mistaken and obviously didn't read what I typed closely enough. I advised that introducing a system that converts real world money into in game money, whether it's directly or indirectly, they are going to have drastic effects to their in game economy. Doing something such as that would actually lead to them losing money since a game with a terrible in game economy will fail to bring in new players and result in a system that is being fed by mostly veteran players who will whittle away one by one until the game dies. They are more than welcome to introduce systems that allow players to buy extra perks for themselves... and I stress for themselves. The moment you start having players trade these services, you introduce the trade of real world money for the trade of in game money and your economy crashes. So by quoting what I said and then making your comment, you have demonstrated your lack of ability to read and understand English. Cash shop to in game transactions, since you obviously don't understand what that means, is the trade of cash shop items for in game currency, also known as indirect cash to in game currency transfer.

I don't type this stuff up for the hell of it out of some small minded attempt to appeal to the game developers. It's out of a legitimate, and actually educated sense of understanding economic principles as well as how money flows through a system with all its complex variables. You want to look at SE's bottom dollar for the quarterly mark, then you demonstrate your short sightedness to look beyond that to view the company's future well being. This game is not a necessity, and it can die at the drop of a hat due to real problems that affect every player, and the health of the in game economy is one of the biggest issues to take into consideration, since once you plummet this kind of system into chaos, returning it to order is almost impossible. If you think otherwise, then you are very mistaken.

[Hyrist]

I'm not going to posture or make grand statements to include the visions of others.

I'm going to be simple, concise and stick to my personal opinion.

While Final Fantasy brand has a strong pull with me, and I do enjoy the majority of what this game has to offer me.

The moment it implements a system like this, it loses me as a customer. I was given the promise of no pay to win, I was given the promise of a subscription model game. The instant that's taken away from me, FFXIV won't see a dime from me.

Period. End of story. I've tried that pay model multiple times and I find myself detesting it every. Single. Time. I can only be burned so many times before I become shy of it, and I've breached that point. It's to the point that the subscription model and all it implies is a selling point to me. They renege on that, it becomes a deal-breaker.

[Mugiawara]

And as fun as it is to argue with a bunch of hopelessly lost people, the most hilarious fact of the matter is that I don't even need to! If SE wasn't already seriously considering implementing this model already, the fact that Blizzard is taking the plunge is going to turn a lot of heads. Especially heads above Yoshi P.'s.

If you really, truly don't want this system to make it's way to FFXIV then you better find your favorite deity and pray real hard that it fails astronomically in WoW (it won't, by the way), because if it doesn't then you can be pretty sure that it's going to become industry standard.

Have fun with dead game part 2.0.
XIV CANNOT make anymore mistakes. They will be diggin' they own grave and there's no saving it at that point.
And to hell with WoW. It's incredibly tough to go against WoW.
I personally find it boring, shouldn't take 4-5 hours to level to 5.
If SE feels like taking a fall then by all means, but a lot of people will be up and gone with this.

[Intaki]

XIV CANNOT make anymore mistakes.

Indeed! Good thing a PLEX system wouldn't be!

[Mugiawara]

Indeed! Good thing a PLEX system wouldn't be!

I think I speak for a lot of us when I say: "If it ain't broken, don't fix it."

[Ceodore]

I think I speak for a lot of us when I say: "If it ain't broken, don't fix it."

It's not even a question of if it isn't broken, it's a fact of don't make the break worse if it is.

I bet you can't prove a single instance of this happening (because it never has).

Guild Wars 2, TERA, AION, just to name a few. All games that have had their economies ripped apart by an in game cash to game currency system and declined because of them. Guild Wars 2 was rumored to bring WoW down, and failed miserably. TERA had the same rumor, and is now also barely heard of. AION doesn't even need to be mentioned. All economies with cash shop items that can be sold between players, where their economies were ruined and now fail to bring in new players. There are also several other smaller titles out there that have never even made it off the ground because they had these systems from their launch, before an economy could even develop. So, burden of proof again, lies on you.

[Intaki]

I played all of those games, and more, and I can say with considerable certainty that they "failed" (quotations because I have a feeling your metric for failure is pretty silly and wrong) on platforms of more than just economy. Wildstar for example had a great economy on its more populated servers, with CREDD cheap enough for the average player to earn, but pricey enough to be worth paying money for. It failed because of poor endgame execution, among other things. Guild Wars 2 (which I would frankly consider a success still, if not a blowout one) also suffered from that. Aion wasn't designed for the western audience it got released to and suffered, and Tera had very little going for it beyond a bunch of slut suits and good combat. To point at all these games and try to finger one facet of one facet of the entire gameplay experience as the culprit of failure is utterly laughable.

[Ceodore]

I played all of those games, and more, and I can say with considerable certainty that they "failed" (quotations because I have a feeling your metric for failure is pretty silly and wrong) on platforms of more than just economy. Wildstar for example had a great economy on its more populated servers, with CREDD cheap enough for the average player to earn, but pricey enough to be worth paying money for. It failed because of poor endgame execution, among other things. Guild Wars 2 (which I would frankly consider a success still, if not a blowout one) also suffered from that. Aion wasn't designed for the western audience it got released to and suffered, and Tera had very little going for it beyond a bunch of slut suits and good combat. To point at all these games and try to finger one facet of one facet of the entire gameplay experience as the culprit of failure is utterly laughable.

However to rule out their economies and the effect a cash shop to in game currency system had on them is idiotic. Guild Wars 2 started out big, but its player base has been steadily declining as the conversion rate of cash shop currency has increased. Tera's economy is the sole reason veteran players (like myself) don't return after a few weeks hiatus. The second they went to cash shop, the economy went straight south. You can't even think of purchasing any of the regular gear from its market because of how high the inflation went up, and this sky rocket happened precisely the same time that they introduced cash shop items that can be sold to other players.