Quote Originally Posted by HyoMinPark View Post
I wouldn’t really say it’s gated behind making gil—gil isn’t that hard to make. It’s gated more behind lack of housing due to SE’s stubbornness to shift away from wards and towards instanced housing that everyone can access. Crafting recipes are gated behind desire to level crafters; same with gathering.
Aside from the hyperbole idea that people roleplay as Farmers/Fishers and Miners and enjoy paying 15$/month for the most simplistic minigame. Sure an extreme minority only find pleasure in gathering and crafting /alone/ but that doesn't actually change the value of certain items/events/ scenarios. You could never sit there and and smile to SE if they decided to say "Hey instead of 4.2, we'll do patch 4.169 and add 20 new items to the cash shop. We'll do Patch 4.2 in another 3 months." So that you could turn around and say "Oh! That's a huge load of content added. I like the cash shop items a lot so this is a really big patch!"