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

[QiLymePye]

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.

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.

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.

[QiLymePye]

And can someone please tell me...What is p2w in "this" game? Im confused. You can't buy an uber-powerful weapon that slays any primal in one hit. You can't buy armor that blocks 100 percent damage. What would people be buying to win? Explain? A house? Ok. Lets say said person buys a house. They win? Do they watch credits roll and quit game and end sub? What do you win in this game? If you play for vanity, ok? Is there a top prize only given to one person who has all vanity items? You buy coil runs. Who wins in that situation? Does the person doing the coil wins? Does that mean everyone else can't do same coil? Does that mean I lost because someone bought a coil run? Many of you don't understand what P2W means. It means you "must pay" in order to win or beat the game or to advance in the game. That's what the term means.

Ask yourself this question: "I don't pay, can I win and succeed in this game?" If the answer is yes, then "ITS NOT P2W". Come on people. This game is far from p2w. You don't have to spend RL money in this game to be successful, so no, its not P2W. Now if watching someone buy a coil run hurts your ego, then that's all it is, an ego buster.

[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.

[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.