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

[Fyce]

-Snip-

You have to ask yourself why you are playing the game.
For the vast majority, the final answer will be "for progression".

This is not a competitive game, so there is nothing to win "against" another player per se. But this is still a massively multiplayer game where people play and progress at a set pace.

By having the possibility to buy gils with real money, you can then afford some skip in the "progress... process". Some parts of the game become bound to the amount of gils you can buy, instead of being linked to a set number of average hours of play.

This create inequalities between the players who buy gils and the players who don't.

Since this MMORPG is very much a "theme park" with a lot of aspects to it, not everything use gils as a "source of progress". But you still have the housing, the relic (hi materia IV!), or even buying coil runs (with loot), etc. The most important being crafting and buying mats.

So, by allowing the purchase of gils with real money, you give some players, not everyone, the power to skip what can be cosidered the core of the game: progression, thus, creating inequalities inside your playerbase.
Since this is not a competitive game, progression is the only way a player can relate to another and compare himself with. It doesn't matter if these inequalities directly affect other players or not by influancing a straight "win" status. It's just more subtle than that in MMORPG, FFXIV in this particular case.