This is just appalling

[Naunet]

Blade & Soul adds substantially more to their cash shop and promotes a very heavy grind style of gameplay whereas FFXIV has only a handful of truly unique items.

BnS is free-to-play.

The fact of the matter is that the prices are absurd for what you get in FFXIV. Pretty much every other AAA MMO offers better cash shop deals - either through cheaper prices, being account-wide, the ability to earn cash shop currency from playing the game, or a combination of all three.

I don't know why people are using f2p or b2p games as comparison, b2p games don't charge you monthly so they need the cash shop to make up for that lack of mandatory subscription, f2p games don't even ask you to buy games or expansions on top of lack of mandatory subscription.

The cash shop is here to stay, but it's rather abusive they are using f2p prices when that's not their business model.

They're not even using f2p prices, because many f2p games have better deals than what we get here.

What i would wish they did was adopt the Gw2 cash shop system where you with ingame currency can buy gems to buy items from the cashop. This would on one hand allow all items to be earned ingame and fix inflation as the rich gil hoarders get something to spend their fortune one.

I would prefer a system like WildStar's Omnibits, which leaves us to spend our Gil on actual in-game things. Omnibits are a currency you earn whenever you do things that would grant XP (works at level cap, as well).