Quote Originally Posted by Zojha View Post
Both fruit! Both food. Both having certain nutrients whose tables you should certainly compare if you want to optimize your diet.

It is very clearly a double standard if people consider selling a bundle okay, but offering each piece of the bundle separately an outrage, because the features offered are identical in both cases - the only possible point of complaint can be the pricing. That's not debatable, that's plain fact. And it's a fun fact, as you could actually save money in the latter case by not buying the pieces you like, thus making it the far more consumer friendly option - in fact, if you look at most bundles, people would prefer to be able to buy the items in a bundle separately, because they dislike large parts of the bundle and pay for something they'd rather not have. Case in point: NPC haircuts and outfits in the mog store. Same naturally goes for expansions - someone might not like crafting, so not having to pay for it anyway as part of the bundle would be beneficial the them.

What I am pointing out is that people keep saying it's bad when cash can buy you ingame benefits, when in fact, that is a common and very much accepted practice. Every expansion does exactly that and therefore, it logically cannot be bad if it happens outside of expansions as well. Except people are not logical nor coherent and therefore apply the double standard that in some cases, buying ingame benefits for money is okay, whereas in other cases it is not. Why? Because.

Therefore, the argument that the cash shop is fine because it doesn't provide ingame benefits logically argues that expansions are bad and need to either be free or abolished entirely. That's just logical deduction. If that's not what you want to say, you need to provide a different argument to justify why the cash shop is okay. And if that's what you do want to say, well...your opinion, can't argue with that, can only disagree.
I'll just repost this here

Quote Originally Posted by Zafrei View Post
One is considered a game, the other is considered nickle and diming xD

Having said that, I'm okay with the principle of a cash shop - I've bought from mog station - but when it becomes the primary source of income (*cough*eso*cough*) then developer resources focus on it as a priority and stuff that would otherwise be packaged in a game, gets shut behind the store. Then of course come the lockboxes. FFXIV has the right balance though exactly as it is now from a consumer point of view, in my opinion.
The fact that one is considered a "game" in its own right (or as close to it as possible) cannot and should not be understated. Then of course there's the question of where development resources should go - game content, or store? There's a clear difference if we're not splitting hairs.