Should players be able to sell Mogstation items?

[FallenArisen0990]

No, this should never be a conscience though in anyone's mind.

[Sarevok_Thordin]

I actually looked at my calendar to check if it was april yet....it wasn't.

[alimdia]

Fact: anyone outraged about RMT wouldn't do anything if they actually implemented this, just like people who were outraged by the idea of jump potions kept playing like nothing happened and realized the sky didn't fall.

Other games have this and none of your wild ideas of how bad it could get ever happened in those games.

[SaitoHikari]

Fact: anyone outraged about RMT wouldn't do anything if they actually implemented this, just like people who were outraged by the idea of jump potions kept playing like nothing happened and realized the sky didn't fall.

Other games have this and none of your wild ideas of how bad it could get ever happened in those games.

This.

Alimdia and I were official moderators of the NA version of a different MMO that actually wrestled with this issue, along with two other people that also ultimately migrated to FFXIV.

On one hand, we had the native Korean version where EVERYTHING on the cash shop was tradeable. On the other hand, we had the NA version which didn't let us trade anything from the cash shop until about halfway through its lifespan. Then we had the Chinese version, which was far and above the most populated and profitable version of the game (which I still greatly loathe because they're directly responsible for the sorry state of the game worldwide, because the developers designed a lot of systems with their version in mind and never adapted it to account for the situation in every other version. In catering to their version, they ultimately destroyed the game in every other region of the world). The Chinese version had actual legitimized gold buying.

- The Korean version had the most stable economy by far, though one should note that they allowed everything to be tradeable from the very beginning of that version's lifespan.
- The NA economy had gold buying out the ass at one point, but the localization team then went really hard on the gold sellers and buyers in a way we hadn't thought possible, and the botters were pretty much wiped out - at least for about a year or two. Long story. Anyway, our version eventually allowed some cash shop items to be sold on the market board, but not all. Our economy stabilized, though the bigger factor into this came from a design decision from a different version...
- The Chinese version also had a rather stable economy and allowed most (but not all) cash shop items to be traded through the market board, but everything was also inflated to hell. To curb this, the developers decided to make some huge gold sinks via enhancing fees for the strongest gear in the game, which was then transplanted to the other regions without the gold sink values being adjusted. That resulted in the Chinese economy having like 50x more gold flowing in their economy compared to every other version of the game. Not even an exaggeration.

Game economies are multi-faceted, and allowing mog station items to be traded among players for in-game currency is really a non-factor. All it does is allow the items to reach more people while wringing hands over 'principles!!1!1!'. If anything, the only reason it's already not the case is because SE execs think they'll actually lose profit by doing this.

Indeed, when the NA version of our previous MMO did this (in a super, SUPER limited way, the higher tier items from the cash shop that came out of that game's lootbox sort of thing were still not allowed to be listed on the market board, and the change wasn't retroactive for older items that had been taken out), the localization team at the time had told all four of us moderators that they had to fight very hard to convince the higher-ups to even make the lower-tier items tradeable, and that in all honesty, they would be lucky if they actually broke even on profits. Though I would argue that this also happened too late in our version's lifetime to really matter, as our version of the game had already lost like 50-60% of its population in the previous year for other actual bad gameplay design reasons too.

The people arguing that allowing Mogstation items to be tradeable is legitimized gold buying are being highly disingenuous. Allowing them to be tradeable just moves gil through the economy and allows the items to reach more people, while actual legitimized gold buying pumps more gold into the economy and will undoubtedly destroy it.

[XovanPrince]

Should players be able to spend real money to buy cash shop items to sell for in game currency... That is your question?

Why not it sell gil?

[Awha]

Should players be able to spend real money to buy cash shop items to sell for in game currency... That is your question?

Why not it sell gil?

Who is saying I don't /wink wink. This is all part of my master plan raise demand for Gil. All jokes aside people already do this, just have to jump through a few hoops and is not that secure you can get burned since the buyer has no real protection so you have to be careful from whom you buy the item from. Though word spreads fast when someone does do this so at that point it becomes a one off for that seller since no one will buy an item off them again.

Just a general reminder has nothing to do with the person I quoted or what they wrote. As people we may not find ourselves in a agreement, but that does not mean we have to be hostile towards one another.

Just wondering what makes FFXIV so different from say WoW that making cash shop times market permitted would cause major issues that have not fallen on to WoW.

[Iromi]

Well, since this game is P2P and has a cash shop like F2P games...might as well let us sell the items on the market board like the F2P games!

[Liam_Harper]

I'm all for it personally.

-You can't P2W, at best you can get Normal 8 man quality gear, consumables and vanity items with gil.

-It gives RMT serious competition since selling cash shop items would be a completely risk free method of coverting rl money to gil. You won't get scammed or your account banned. This is major, even if the RMT sellers offered better gil rates.

-It gives gil a purpose, thus activites that earn gil like maps, crafting, gathering or selling minions have more purpose. It doesn't devalue craft/gathering, it makes them more worthwhile.

-It would drastically increase profits for Enix, cash shop sales would skyrocket, increasing available funds to put into the game.

-No more complaints about heavy microtransactions, since everything could be earned with ingame gil.

[Seraphor]

That's not legitimised RMT at all.

RMT is other people making money from the game.
Being able to sell mogstation items would have the money goung to SE, and it would remove the market for RMT entirely.
Kinda like WoW tokens.

I have no idea why SE dont do this, it'd kill RMT and make them more money, while giving people a legitimate avenue for either obtaining mogstation items without forking out real money, or buying gil without funding dodgy third party operations.

It'd kill bot farming, as people aren't likely to employ bots just to buy mogstation items, and the gil value of those items would be comparative to their demand, allowing traditional market forces to regulate them, and prevent gil-buyers from screwing up the market, because the more people do it the less profitable it becomes.