Quote Originally Posted by Avatre View Post
I'm not denying that it would take a long time to get to that cost for Fantasia, just showing that there are people who are using multiple a week(I personally am sitting on 6 Fantasia on a retainer- 1 from my very first time buy them, and 5 I bought during a sale a while back just in case I wanted to change things up - I have used 4 total - once to change my appearance slightly when I was Elezen, once to go to Au Ra, and 2 to change to dark skinned and then back because I didn't like it as much).
Oh I've used more Fantasias than that. I was fickle for quite a while. Though on the upside, all of my alts (and I have quite a few) get like 8 Fantasias on character creation, which is fun. (Side note: having alts is a good way to get over Fantasia addiction!)

The thing is, buying lots of Fantasia or dye is really on the player. If you financially ruin yourself on this sort of thing, I'm sorry but you only have yourself to blame. The types of microtransactions that ruin people and which I'd argue are unethical are the ones that are intended to tap into people's addiction centers. Is it possible to be addicted to Fantasia? Sure, but I don't think Square Enix is trying to do that. Having a gambling model, on the other hand, is very much an attempt to do that.

I'm not proud of it, but I did briefly work on a free to play game with some friends while I was unemployed years back. (It was a Farmville clone, which should give an idea of when this was.) The guy designing it was very much designing the game specifically to attract and exploit whales. This isn't something that happens innocently, companies target these people intentionally and ruthlessly. FFXIV doesn't to this point, and I think that's a very important distinction.