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.

[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.