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

[axemtitanium]

A long time ago, there was a spirited discussion on the 1.0 forums about potentially implementing a PLEX/Chronoscroll-like system to FFXIV. Super briefly, PLEX is an in-game item in EVE Online (a space trading-themed MMO) which can be consumed by a player to add 1 month of game time to his or her account. However, it can also be bought and sold on the open market for however much the seller would like to list it for. The only source of PLEX is from purchasing it directly from the developers for the exact same price that 1 month of game time normally costs (i.e. every single instance of the item has been paid for by someone). There is no ToS/legally supported way to convert PLEX back into real money. This is an extremely brief overview; for a more detailed explanation, check the spoiler tags below.

I agree with Aenarion that the vast majority of objections to a PLEX-like system are borne from not understanding exactly how it works. I also agree that it is unknown how a game like FFXIV would react/change to its introduction and it may or may not be beneficial. It clearly works well for EVE because of its lack of server segregation. I have a vague recollection of cross-server trading in 2.0 said by a dev somewhere but I could be mistaken. If that were the case, a PLEX-like subscription model might be more effective.

Here's the basic rundown of how RMT works compared to PLEX. Under the current conditions, there are only three ways to increase the "total amount of gil in circulation" (i.e. the sum of all gil in all players' inventories, henceforth "tgil"): killing human mobs which drop gil, selling items to NPCs, and quest rewards. There is no other way to increase tgil in the game. There is also currently only one way to reduce tgil: taxes in market ward transactions. This is known as a "gilsink". It's also possible to reduce tgil by buying items from NPCs, but that introduces more items into the economy as well so it's not a true gilsink.

RMT has a negative impact on the economy because it relies heavily on increasing tgil, thereby devaluing everyone's gil. This is bad because it causes inflation, i.e., more money is in circulation so the average price of goods increases. The same principle applies in real life. If the US government decided to print $10 trillion extra dollars today to pay off the national debt, it has increased the total amount of money in circulation ("tmoney", if you will), causing rampant inflation of prices. This principle also why a movie ticket which used to cost $8 in 1995 is now $14 in 2012. Back to the game, we saw a similar inflation in market ward prices after the Atomos exploit went live since it created an easy way to increase tgil and was being done on a massive scale by many people. The takeaway point of this is that increasing tgil generally causes inflation (increases in prices) which is generally not good if it occurs too quickly. Conversely, any measure that does not have an impact on tgil will not have this inflationary effect on the economy.

PLEX, notably, DOES NOT increase tgil at all. In-fact, it may even decrease it. Here is how it works in excruciating detail. Players use real money ($) to buy an in-game item called "PLEX". This item goes into your inventory, just like any other item, but can also be consumed to increase your subscription time by a set amount. You can sell it on the open market for whatever in-game price you want to sell it at. There is no way to (legally) sell it for real money. The market will decide what price PLEX sells for in in-game currency, just like any other item. If the same market ward tax is applied to XIV's PLEX, then that would actually serve as an effective gilsink as well, especially if the PLEX item sells for a high amount.

As a player, you have several options under this system. 1) You can play the game exactly as you are right now, treating PLEX just like a monthly subscription. Every month, you pay your monthly fee to get 1 PLEX and then use it immediately. It's easy to automate this step so you don't even have to worry about lapsing your subscription. 2) You use in-game currency to buy PLEX from other players. You have effectively made playing this game free for yourself. You probably fall into this category if you're a producer in the economy and have a lot of disposable income from selling crafted items or farming mobs. 3) You use real money to buy PLEX to sell on the market. This is generally the case for people who have a lot of real money but not a lot of time to spend in the game. You will earn in-game currency and pay for someone else's subscription to the game.

A few things to note here. At no point does in-game money get injected into the system as a result of PLEX. It merely stimulates money to change hands, from producers to consumers, who thus have more money to spend on producers. Similarly, the number of "subscriptions being paid for" does not increase or decrease. The only change is who is doing the paying. Player A might be paying for 3-4 other players' subscriptions on any given month but the number of "paid for" accounts does not change. (This is the bottom line for the company running the MMO, by the way.)

How does this affect RMT? Well, basically it means they have to compete with PLEX-buyers for the same product (in this case, gil). Let's say you can buy gil from an RMT company for $10 per 1 million gil right now. This RMT gil was created using methods that increase tgil (which is ultimately good for RMTers and bad for players since it makes them more real money per gil sold, especially over long periods of time). On the other hand you can buy 1 PLEX for $10 from Square Enix, which you can sell on the market wards for ~10 million gil (made up numbers, market price will fluctuate). Magically, SE has undercut the RMTs by 10x making it astronomically less profitable for RMTs to operate in your MMO. Thus, they would have to work 10x harder or 10x longer to make the same $10 from a player who is interested in buying currency. Presumably, it would be so difficult that they would stop operating in the game because it no longer makes economical sense, weighing subscription fees to revenue. Will the RMTs be able to use PLEX to make their own accounts free-to-play? Of course they can, but that would involve spending their product (gil), which cuts into their bottom line. Will it stop RMT completely? Of course not, there will always be sweatshops that work their slaves harder and longer for money but the vast majority of them will realize that other MMOs are more profitable in real money terms (money earned per time spent).

Finally, a note on "fairness". While it won't hurt the economy directly, it does allow players with more real-world money to have access to money, which can be spent on "good" gear. However, I don't believe it will destroy interest in crafting or melding because if anything, the demand for this good gear will increase due to more people having money to spend on it (making a tidy profit for producers). If that's the case, what does it matter to you as a regular non-PLEX-buying player? You are free to spend the exact same amount of gil to buy that same equipment or produce it yourself to keep or sell. What exactly goes into any particular piece of triple-melded gear? Just money, not skill, so it's essentially the same as the current system where you don't judge someone who bought their triple-melded STR gloves as opposed to making it themselves. If Yoshi-P's comments are to be believed, the best gear is going to be U/U anyway. However, buying enough Garuda/CC/AV runs to get your desired drop would be prohibitively expensive using just profits from selling PLEX (8M gil * 20 Garuda runs for 40 totems = 160M gil = $160 at least, using numbers quoted elsewhere in the thread; Darklight drops are a whole order of magnitude more expensive, since DL bodies generally require upwards of 200 runs). The only guaranteed U/U drop I can think of is White Ravens which isn't really game-changingly good. In conclusion, endgame gear will be unaffected by the introduction of PLEX.

The back and forth discussion in the prior thread got heated until the inestimable Yoshi-P chimed in with the following (on November 6, 2012):

This is an interesting idea.

However, we are currently aiming to get a solid monthly subscription base for ARR. I previously mentioned this in interviews, but there are various types of business models and new business models still being introduced, so once we establish the proper monthly subscription base, we will look into other business models.

So with that said, we can't really say whether or not we will do it currently.

Respectfully, I think now is the time to seriously consider adding this option to FFXIV for two reasons. First, you recently announced that FFXIV has just surpassed four million registered accounts. I don't know what that means with respect to monthly subscriptions but FFXIV is definitely the crowning gem on Square Enix's quarterly earnings reports, time and time again. I think we're at the point where there's a "solid monthly subscription base" for the game. Second, Blizzard just announced that World of Warcraft will be implementing a system extremely reminiscent of PLEX. Whether you love it or hate it, WoW's popularity and success are undeniable and certainly enviable. It's the MMO Yoshida admonished the 1.0 dev team for not playing. FFXIV already takes generous pointers from WoW, so there isn't any shame in one more.

I think there are a number of readily apparent benefits to adopting a PLEX-like system, from both a business perspective for the company and a quality of life perspective for players.

1) It allows the players with more money to pay for the players with more time. For many working adults, playing an MMO is a hobby they enjoy in their limited free time. On the other hand, many younger players don't have a stable source of income and are forced to cancel their subscriptions unexpectedly, depending on real life events (which is ultimately lost revenue). If a time-rich player could buy game time paid by a money-rich player, SE can reclaim that lost revenue and keep a subscriber.

2) Players have been asking for a way to gift game time to other players through Mogstation. This is a simple way to do so. What could be sweeter than finding a game time item in your Mog Mail from a good friend?

3) It helps combat illegal RMT by cutting into their bottom line and making the game less profitable to operate in. There was a time about 4-5 months ago that I thought RMT was not a big problem in this game. I'd go almost a full week without getting a gilspammer tell. Today, I blacklist on the order of 3-4 spammers per day, more on the weekends. By providing a safe, legal alternative to RMT, you take away their customers and eventually, you make it almost impossible to turn a profit as an RMT.

3a) Quoting myself since people are skipping it.

How does this affect RMT? Well, basically it means they have to compete with PLEX-buyers for the same product (in this case, gil). Let's say you can buy gil from an RMT company for $10 per 1 million gil right now. This RMT gil was created using methods that increase total gil in circulation (which is ultimately good for RMTers and bad for players since it makes them more real money per gil sold, especially over long periods of time). On the other hand you can buy 1 PLEX for $10 from Square Enix, which you can sell on the market for ~10 million gil (made up numbers, market price will fluctuate). Magically, SE has undercut the RMTs by 10x making it astronomically less profitable for RMTs to operate in your MMO. Thus, they would have to work 10x harder or 10x longer to make the same $10 from a player who is interested in buying currency. Presumably, it would be so difficult that they would stop operating in the game because it no longer makes economical sense, weighing subscription fees to revenue. Will the RMTs be able to use PLEX to make their own accounts free-to-play? Of course they can, but that would involve spending their product (gil), which cuts into their bottom line. Will it stop RMT completely? Of course not, there will always be sweatshops that work their slaves harder and longer for money but the vast majority of them will realize that other MMOs are more profitable in real money terms (money earned per time spent).

4) By making it easy to stay subscribed, you make it easy to keep people subscribed. Most MMOs have peaks and troughs of subscriber numbers fluctuating in waves around major content patches. If you could easily maintain your subscription using in-game currency, there would be much less inclination to un-sub during the off-months. It's so much easier to get someone "back into the game" and actively playing if they can just log in whenever they want to check out the new content or seasonal event.

And I'll head off a few common misconceptions:

A) PLEX is not Pay-to-Win. Yoshi-P has repeatedly stated that the best gear and items in this game would always be from raids. He even went as far as saying that crafted gear was too strong in Patch 2.4 and that he wouldn't make the same mistake again in the future. At its level best, a PLEX-like system will allow money-rich players to gain access to mid-to-upper-mid tier crafted equipment, vanity minions/items, and rare glamour gear. In fact, the silly brouhaha over the fact that Eternal Bond items were being bought and traded for gil serves as ample evidence that those players did NOT manage to pay their way to a win.

B) PLEX does not cause inflation. Nor does it "damage" the economy. The addition of this new item with ties to real world currency is a value-neutral action. The real cause of inflation (i.e. average price of items on the market board increasing) is when there is too much gil in circulation and not enough gilsinks to remove it. Notably, illegal RMT money-making strategies generally involve exploiting gil fountains to massively increase the amount of gil in circulation, causing inflation for everyone. In contrast, PLEX would introduce zero new gil in circulation and may in fact have a very slight deflationary effect because it promotes the spending and transfer of gil between players (which is taxed through the market board, a gilsink). Again, see the Eternal Bond trading which has notably not wrecked the economy of any server I've heard of.

C) PLEX does not, by itself, increase or decrease revenue per player. Currently, every single player pays their own monthly subscription, in a 1-to-1 relationship. One player, one subscription fee, one month. Under PLEX, every single subscription every month is still paid for, but not necessarily by the player who used it. The same number of subs still exist but one player can take on the cost of paying for multiple players, if he so chooses, in exchange for gil at fair market rate. There is no situation in which someone can "get away" with not paying for their sub, whether through paying directly or using a PLEX. Conversely, no sub fees are lost in switching over to this system either. The dynamic merely changes to one player, one PLEX (paid for by anyone, but definitely paid for), one month.

Thanks for reading and hope you'll consider it with an open mind!