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

[KisaiTenshi]

"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.

The reason people who play Subscription games object to the "freemiumization" of their games is because "Giant Corporation" sees free money at the expense of the subscription base.

A Freemium game has 10X to 100X the subscriber base of a subscription game, BUT only 2% of the player base will ever buy anything, and of those 2% maybe 0.5% will drop thousands of dollars on the game. This is just a cost shift. So instead of 1 million players paying 15$/mo to play a game, it's now 100 million players, with the original 1 million players continuing to spend 15$/mo to maintain their lead, and a quarter of them now spending on the cash shop to get ahead of others. So the remaining three quarters then cancel their subscriptions once they lose sight of the end game, and now big giant company isn't making 15 million dollars a month constantly anymore, now they're making maybe 5 million dollars a month constantly, and maybe another 2 million dollars every time they they put a new cash shop item out.

I would not trust a company like Electronic Aarts to give good value for money. I've been on and off again playing the "The Simpsons Tapped Out" game on my iPad, which is by EA, and it pulls all the same freemium crud MMO's pull, locked content, accelerated content for money, and because it's a humor game, it even self-references it.



In case people have forgotten, Zynga is failing royally, and they're the ones who brought freemium games to social games. Nexon however was the company that started it all in MMORPG's.
http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/201...c-napkin-math/

This worked for a little while. Being cheap, easy on the uptake and a no-brainer is a good thing.

But it is also REALLY BAD. Especially when the cost and difficulty of developing games continued to plummet and especially when the poster child has a billion-dollar IPO. Because when something is easy to build and sell — and appears to make money — a lot of people are going to gold rush the market and drive your margins into the ground. Now there are a million alternatives.

Which is the point... when you start freemiumizing a game, the game developer spends more time developing more ways to exploit the customer for money than producing quality content that people actually care about.

The entire PLEX type of system has effectively ruined the games they were introduced to, because it doesn't attract new paying players, it attracts more RMT, and more spam because now the bar is lowered to creating unlimited accounts and characters.

The only appropriate place for a cash shop in a subscription game is to curb abusive and exploitable behavior. Limit the number of characters, limit the amount of free customization (to prevent impersonation) of popular players/staff/celebrities. Sometimes even sticking seasonal content in a cash shop makes sense if the means to acquiring them has been permanently removed from the game.

[Charisma]

because it doesn't attract new paying players

Yes it does lol, i know a lot of people who hate Monthly Subscribtion payment methods, that would play a game with this system.

it attracts more RMT

How exactly would it do that? People would prefer the legal way to "buy" Gil, and RMT cant make it cheaper all the time.

and more spam because now the bar is lowered to creating unlimited accounts and characters

lolwat? This doesnt make sense at all.

[TouchandFeel]

@Ceodore

I still would find it unfair that those who would have the time to farm Gil in the game, whether or not they have a job and can afford the subscription, would get to play for free essentially while those who don't because of limited time due to RL responsibilities have to pay. All the system does is give those that get more from the game already,i.e. they get to play it more, even more value from the game because they get to now have all of that for free. As a paying customer, that would piss me off because it would make me feel devalued as a customer.

Equality and fairness is never achieved by rewarding those that already have more while in effect punishing those because they have less. In fact that is pretty much the opposite of equality and fairness.

A subscription, for the most part, creates an equal entry point for everyone. If you want to play, it'll cost X amount of money a month and then you can play as much or as little as you can or want. That seems fair to me.

[Tiggy]

This has been addressed repeatedly: the PLEX style system is incapable of creating inflation. The bots controlled by gil sellers who stand to suffer most from this system? THOSE create inflation.

Your right. I did address it earlier. With links to wiki and Forbes detailing how this is a form of inflation. So unless you're smarter than the people at Forbes (doubtful based on this conversation) then your wrong. Incorrect. Not right. Need more words? I brought brought proof and sources to support my assertion that it's inflation. You have nothing but hopes, dreams, and insults. You have no idea how debating works. You don't ignore hard evidence because it's inconvenient. You modify the argument. We aren't children where we put our hands overt our ears and go "nah nah I can't hear you so I'm right." We are adults here. Please act it.

[Gilthas]

These F2P advocates are relentless.

Introducing a PLEX system would basically bring to the game the worse thing about F2P games: that their business model is based on exploiting a small percentage of the playerbase so the overwhelming majority of moochers get to play for free. FFXIV already has a cash shop and people want things to get even worse?

I won't say that it'll never happen, I only hope that if this kind of **** is brought to the game I won't be too addicted to FFXIV to pull away.

[Fyce]

Fyce....let me ask you this. Are you saying that its ok to have inequality in players in the amount of time each player can put into the game but its not ok to have inequality in the amount of money person has? So if you have more RL time to play game than someone else, its ok, but if you have more RL money than someone else then that inequality is frowned upon?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.
Achieving something in the game will take a set amount of hours (on average, minus RNG). No matter how much available time a player has in his hands to spend playing the game compared to another, these two players will have to play the game the same amount of hours to do something.
Besides, the amount of time you have to dedicate to the game is more often that not a choice of life. If you choose to play more or less, it's you own choice, and the outcome it not decided by the game itself.

On the other hand, when you can buy some ingame currency with real money, you are skipping some steps to progress in the game. The amount of hours to play the game in order to achieve something with gils involved is broken with that system. This system will create an inequality within the game itself, which is not the case when two people have a different amount of time to play.

Another thing, you are just comparing two people, one with a lot of time, the other with a lot of money.
The world is not black and white. You'll have people with a lot of time and a lot of money, as well as people without unable to buy some gils and with little time on their hands. A PLEX system would further increase inequalities between these two kinds of players.

In FFXIV, being able to buy gils with real money will completly break some part of the progression system and the supply chain. It will create even more inequalities.
Yes, it will allow some people to play without having to pay for their subs (which include bots)... but the final outcome is way worse for everyone than this little benefit.

[Snugglebutt]

Adding officially sanctioned systems like PLEX will not reduce RMT and especially will not reduce RMT spam, it will increase RMT spam and I know this from experience in other games that use such services as the RMT sellers are forced to compete for your attention even more so they spam you more trying to get that attention away from their competition. Secondly the number of both player bots and RMT farming bots will increase, again I have seen this happen in pretty much all MMO's like this one which have such services since the sense of disparity between the have and have nots is increased, the ones who put in the hard work still stay at the top only then along side those who can afford to P2W, a lot of those left behind get even more depressed and resort to botting along side the RMT increasing the number of bots they use to increase and cheapen the cost of their services to compete. WoW for example has never had as many bots as it does these days after the introduction of the token system and it has more RMT spam than ever before.

Thirdly the RMT will control around 90% to 95%% of the PLEX system by buying up en masse the majority of the PLEX's which would be sold in the game for gil and then selling that gil on for even higher price...people will not stop buying gil even if price of gil rises and do not forget game time is not the primary reason people buy gil from RMT but if RMT sell it the majority of sales will go to them in game. Not as many people will be selling as many PLEX compared to RMT which will make the player selling such the outlier and RMT the main source. I have seen this happen in many MMO's that use such token systems like PLEX where can buy it with real money and sell in game for the games currency, the RMT control the majority of sales in game and the price of in game currency they sell goes up but not anywhere near the level which would make it unprofitable for RMT. People would still be buying it from them and the most of the PLEX sales will go to them too, you will just end up giving them another source of gil making for which they can sell on for a profit.

I was going to make a point about how it would be nice if a GM or Dev replied to this thread telling everyone in what those of us with common sense already know, that they have no intention or plans currently to implement such a system. Implementing such will cost them a lot of the player base they have built up so far and especially many of us who have been here since version 1.0...but then I remembered how pointless saying such would be, the reality is those for such systems have no evidence they have any plans to introduce a token or PLEX type system to this game and those who want such a system are simply relying on wishful thinking as they have no evidence such a system is incoming. So a Dev or GM has no reason to reply to this thread, the thread is pointless and lacks any evidence that such P2W/token/PLEX systems is either planned or that SE intends to implement such. Those of us opposed to the introduction of such have nothing to worry about though it is still possible to argue with those who want the system but we do not need to given those who want it have no evidence it will happen or that it is planned for this game.

[QiLymePye]

And that, my friends, is why I play devils advocate. I like the responses from Pacer and Fyce. Sometimes you don't have to get all bent out of shape because someone doesn't agree. Its all about putting your information out there and trying to persuade others to your argument. Thx guys for the info. I really have no idea what this type of system would do, which is why i asked the tough questions to these players, and I got good feedback without them belittling me and trying to bash my head in. I'm still sad that gaming has come to this in a way, I kinda miss throwing my game out of the window cause I died on my last life at the very end of the game and now have to start all over....well kinda. lol.

[Intaki]

It is not unfair that someone has more time to play games than someone else. It's called life.

I don't understand why people can't grasp this.

This argument works equally well for buying gil, just sayin'.

Thirdly the RMT will control around 90% to 95%% of the PLEX system

[Citation Needed]

exploiting a small percentage of the playerbase so the overwhelming majority of moochers get to play for free.

Who is being exploited in this scenario? The people who want gil that get gil or the people who want free play time who get free play time?

[Jon_00]

It's amazing to see the reaction this idea is getting. Lots of the WoW community, myself included, are happy that this kind of system is being developed - it's a win/win situation. Yet for some reason a lot of people on this forum aren't happy about the idea.