This is just appalling

[Vhailor]

Personally speaking, I just shake my head and utter a mental "what a f*cking moron" whenever I see someone wandering around in an overpriced trinket from the Mog Station. There's not a lot else I can do, beyond not purchase the items myself (or give up on MMOs entirely).

Some might call this overly hostile, but I disagree. People purchasing this crap are the reason why SE continues to put it up there. They're the same people who buy overpriced DLC for other titles, too. They're the reason why AAA titles are becoming more and more infested with nickel-and-dime schemes. Considering I find this whole paradigm distinctly unpleasant, referring to them as "f*cking morons" in my head seems perfectly justified.

Edit:

That's the way all businesses operate. I'm certain that if you had a business, while you would be concerned about customer satisfaction, you would also be concerned about your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly profits. Because you would have business bills to pay. You would have to pay to rent the space your business occupies. You would have to pay your employees. You would have to pay for supplies your business may need. You would have to pay for electricity and water. I could go on. Businesses that don't make any money slowly go out of business. Or are bought up by larger businesses. You can't expect SE to just have one source of income (subscriptions).

If SE was really all that concerned about their "business bills" then I suspect they'd make more of an effort to, y'know, not release terribly-planned pieces of content like Diadem or Hunts. Or that they'd do a better job assessing balance before releasing Heavensward, which featured a dead-on-arrival AST which wasn't viable for months on end, or before releasing Stormblood, which will feature a dead-on-arrival WHM.

Intelligently-run businesses think long-term as well as short-term. The Mog Station is a result of short-term thinking, along with the vastly overpriced DLC companies love to release for other AAA games these days. Long-term thinking would suggest that companies should be quite careful about not pissing all over their reputation. Consumers have long memories. Rip them off one too many times, and they'll avoid going back to your stuff for years on end - even once you've changed your practises.

In short, it's not as simple as saying "businesses need to diversify, so let's excuse every sh*tty idea they have in the name of capitalism."