Suggestion: Make Mog Station items tradeable via Market board

[rsod]

[post deleted]

[Doozer]

How is that not RMT, exactly? It's buying an in-game item with real money and then selling it, presumably for gil. It's essentially buying gil for real money in the end, and I seriously doubt SE would ever go for that.

And just because other MMOs do it doesn't mean it's a good idea. It also doesn't eliminate RMT, because I know in Guild Wars 2 there's still a huge amount of spam from gold sellers. Because the two-way conversion means you can buy gold from them to convert to gems to buy gem store items. Seems a bit roundabout, but I'm sure it's cheaper in the end doing it the RMT way. If anything, it could just help RMT flourish, because people would likely be able to get Mog Station items with gil for less real money.

[Jojoya]

It's still RMT. It doesn't even replace third party RMT. Third party RMT still exists in those other games.

Third party RMT would remain a preferred source since those prices are fairly consistent and guaranteed at time of purchase. The MB is too unpredictable when it comes to who will buy and how much they'd be willing to pay for the higher value items.

It's also not going to give gil more weight. It's going to give it less as even more gil enters active circulation, either from players who already have hundreds of millions of gil spending more of it or from the increased farming you think would happen. The latter is actually unlikely. RMT exists because players lack time for gil farming and would rather pay real money for it. Those with the time should already have plenty of gil.

It could become an administrative nightmare for SE as it would likely increase payment fraud attempts, with items and gil changing hands multiple times before the chargeback on the original purchase is received. They would also have to go back and code all items and the MB to allow for the items to be marketable.

If SE was to do anything, it would be better to introduce something like the WoW token that can be sold for gil, exchanged for Crysta and administered via a delayed system that would reduce fraud related problems. Original purchaser gets their gil and the token holder gets Crysta to buy exactly what they want from Mogstation or use it for game time/paid services.

[ItMe]

- Because of previous reason gil will have more weight in game and more people will be interested in spending more time in game to farm it, which will hold interest of people who would otherwise pause their gameplay.

Why not just cut out the middle man and let players buy things from the Mogstation with Gil?
Especially if the idea is to make Gil have weight, instead of just moving the Gil between players as we buy from each other they could make the Mogstation a gilsink.

[Kes13a]

The problem with using WoW tokens as an example is that I firmly believe the prices are set and maintained by Blizzard. all it is, is buying gold direct essentially. The pricing and guaranteed sale time pretty much screams manipulation by them. which is fine, its their game.

Another thing, I dont think the average wage in the US is anywhere close to $20 an hour

I dont see much game value added by allowing gil to be purchased through SE, or by allowing items to be bought then sold for gil. all that tends to do is boost prices, not lower them. boosted prices mean the rmt market bots have easier paths to gil because they buy out and relist at a higher price... slowly driving the price further and further up, which means people need to.. buy gil. it works out to be a rather vicious circle that ends up in no way favouring the general player who just wants to play and buy the odd items.

[DrWho2010]

Mogstation sales are the only monies that 100% go back into FFXIV development. You want to cause harm to the funding of the game? all because you're too poor IRL and want to whine about it? yeah no.

[Jojoya]

The problem with using WoW tokens as an example is that I firmly believe the prices are set and maintained by Blizzard. all it is, is buying gold direct essentially. The pricing and guaranteed sale time pretty much screams manipulation by them. which is fine, its their game.

Blizzard set an initial NA cost of 30,000 gold for the WoW token when it was first released. They do have an algorithm that controls how fast it can appreciate/depreciate (think it was something like 1.5% per hour) based on supply and demand.

As more players list tokens for sale and fewer buy them, the gold price goes down. As more players want to buy but fewer are listing, the price goes up.

The price had dropped down to 19,000 at first then rose steadily. Think the NA price peaked around 300k back around the start of Legion before falling back down. Google search shows the current price in NA at about 117,000.

I'm not certain why you see that as a problem. It prevents players from manipulating the system for real money profit (though there's still a small potential for it if prices become volatile).

Median wage in the US is actually about $20/hour (half of wage earners make more, half less). Average is about $12 an hour. Those making less than the median aren't likely to be playing video games unless they are single or have additional financial support from sources other than wages.

It's not bots that are driving up prices on the MB. It's normal players who think what they sell should be worth more. Bots are more likely to drive prices down because the time spent crafting/gathering means nothing to them.

Mogstation sales are the only monies that 100% go back into FFXIV development. You want to cause harm to the funding of the game? all because you're too poor IRL and want to whine about it? yeah no.

If you're referring to the OP's proposal, it would actually increase Mogstation sales because the items would still have to be purchased from Mogstation before they could be sold on the MB.

Player A buys mount for themselves. Then they buy 2 more to sell to other players for gil. That's 3 sales for the Mogstation instead of the single sale since the 2 players willing to pay gil weren't willing to pay real money.

If you're referring to the reply from ItMe, then yes it would hurt Mogstation sales because there would be no need for anyone to pay real money when the game already gives away gil for little effort.

[Waaltar]

It seems like way more trouble than it is worth.

SWTOR does this and the results are complicated. What happened is the cash shop stuff is mostly dumped on the in game market for cheap. They use gambling packs though so it's partly a result of whales buying huge numbers of packs and dumping most of the items while they chase one or two rare items. But even the stuff that was only available for direct purchase was usually available for a reasonable number of credits given that all subscribers got a monthly allotment of cartel coins and some players were always just going to buy something to sell for in-game credits. In fact the direct purchase stuff tended to show up reliably precisely because if you wanted to spend your cartel coins on something that would get you a reasonable amount of credits, it was a safer bet than a gambling pack. So when I was playing long term and consistently I barely spent money other than my monthly sub and occasionally some additional coins and I had tons of stuff just for in-game credits including really nice mounts that SE would make more than a million off of.

So in FFXIV, the value of some things would become very low in in-game gil. Dye is an easy guess. People would buy dye to sell it for in-game money or they'd sell the extras when 'all they needed was one dye.' They might end up with more total sales this way or not, hard to say. SWTOR basically added money inflation every time they added content to help the pack buyers make credits selling things on the in-game market.

There actually are a few items in the SE cash shop that are also sold on the market board. I have some Thorne Dynasty Mantelshelves for displaying the stuffed tabletop housing items. They were from a iirc Valentine's event more than a few years back. They cost $5.00 on the mogstation when not on sale. I bought a few when they were cheap and I can't get them to sell. It's $5 in real life and I can't even get 1 million gil for them. If I put them up at 500,000 they'd still take months to sell probably, because they haven't added new housing in a while.

The thing is there are some players with huge amounts of gil, but lots of long term players get into the low millions or 10s of millions and then don't much worry about it. And way more people only want to play for a few months so they never get much in game cash or they buy it. So just buying cash shop items and selling for gil would probably not get you a lot of gil for your cash. It'd be less complicated for them to sell gil directly themselves. I'd have no problem with that, given its limited role in the game, and that it would help support content and other nice things like glamours, and it would make crafting and gathering more and more profitable as more and more money came into the game economy.

But honestly, especially since they don't have a test server, I see no reason to risk it when the model they have is already very good. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

[MsMisato]

Why not just cut out the middle man and let players buy things from the Mogstation with Gil?
Especially if the idea is to make Gil have weight, instead of just moving the Gil between players as we buy from each other they could make the Mogstation a gilsink.

its source of income that goes directly to FFXIV unlike the subs revenue which SE can divvy up between it other in house projects after server costs and such are taken into account.