Hating the new mog station restrictions.

[EaMett]

I wanted to gift a friend a leveling boost for an alt. Went from me being able to do that anonymously through the mog station to me needing to send the money over PayPal which really sucks and isn't anonymous at all.
I wish they at least allowed players who've had long-lasting subscriptions to use the same CC they use on the sub to send people gifts. Not a perfect situation, but it should at least provide a workaround for some of us.

That being said. Their making store items harder to obtain without a care in the world is oddly refreshing in this microtransaction gaming era. It's unfortunate that it's also incredibly frustrating.

[Shibi]

I wanted to gift a friend a leveling boost for an alt.

Level and story skips are both giftable. You just need to be friends with them.

[EaMett]

Snip

Nice!! That definitely wasn't there when we were trying to do it. 3 of us looked everywhere. Maybe it was just too close to the announcement and things weren't set up just yet. It's good to know that at least these ones are still giftable.

[Xelanar]

Square Enix: a gazzillion dollar company incapable of checking if a character being gifted a mount or emote already posesses the corresponding action prior to the purchase.
Sounds like an unsolvable problem to me. If only the required information was stored somewhere accessible. Like in a database...

[Themarvin]

Gifting emotes and mounts was a key part of this community.

Hosting an IRL FFXIV trivia night? Perhaps at a con? What better reward than a store mount for the first place?

Hosting a discord giveaway, or one in an RP venue? Cash shop gift.

Anniversary with the Eternally Bound coming up? Hey babe have a chocobo carriage I know you've been wanting it.

Just, let us give you money dammit. I had an event planned for someone I care about, there's a store mount she's really been wanting that I wanted to give her. And now I can't give her that.

I know SE listens to the community, so I wanted to add my voice to the chorus: Let us buy gift codes.

"Oh but what if they already have it?" then the receiver can re-gift it, or they can contact SE, or any other measure that so far has been working. But don't stop the entire community from being able to give each other gifts on that.

This way they can have sales on items, before they could not without have to face people buying up cheap items and alot of them, for then selling them cheaper when the sales stop and go the RMT way on it and if you can earn 1-2 dollars on an item and still sell it for a good value under the normal value, then it is no good.

With this system we can have actual sales and discounts without having RMT too much involved with it and the hassle of having to be friended with a sneaky person for 72 hours before being able to receive, also leaves you with scams... and it also leaves you a target for being suspended for having done activities that is against the TOS.

[Wolwosh]

Hey love I bought you a few jet black dyes <3 just doesn't carry the same weight and surprise as hey love I bought you the peacock mount <3
Guess i'll never buy anything from the mogstation again since all I did on it was gift someone a nice present that lives far away for their BD ^^"

[Packetdancer]

It's a fairly solid bet that the cash shop is handled by the publisher (SQEX), not the dev studio (CBU3)... as I've noted in other threads, there is a separation between the two, much like Sony and Naughty Dog, or EA and Bioware. The fact that SQEX doesn't brand the studio separately (and that Yoshi-P has somewhat more influence with the publisher than many dev studio leadership teams have) makes it easy to forget that.

And sadly, based on my own experience with publishers in game dev, a publisher caring more about the hassle of chargebacks in a cash shop rather than a game's community is very on-brand. And that's not on-brand "for SQEX", or publishers in any one region; that's just in general.

What's more irritating is that, as many folks have said, this won't really do much to make a dent in RMT. The only thing I've ever seen that shuts down third-party RMT is introducing first-party RMT, like EVE Online's PLEX or Wildstar's CREDD: an in-game object redeemable for game time, which can be purchased outside of the game for real money. Which is a cursed solution in some ways, but does generally kill off shady third-party RMT.

Changes like this are at best a mild inconvenience to RMT folks, while also being a huge hassle for the actual community. Making changes like that is a huge mistake... but a publisher choosing to make it?

That doesn't surprise me, though I wish it did.

[Amarande]

And sadly, based on my own experience with publishers in game dev, a publisher caring more about the hassle of chargebacks in a cash shop rather than a game's community is very on-brand. And that's not on-brand "for SQEX", or publishers in any one region; that's just in general.

Yeah, especially these days when payment processors seem to be very keen on throwing their weight around in general, to the point sometimes of trying to act as de facto overlords of the digital world (by threatening to withhold services from companies that don't go along with their dictates). In fact a going concern among tech circles is whether or not the Internet is already too far gone in that manner (i.e., that Apple, Google, and the handful of payment processors now essentially 100% dictate the business activities of modern digital business, and not always in a way that actual paying customers are keen on seeing).

What's more irritating is that, as many folks have said, this won't really do much to make a dent in RMT. The only thing I've ever seen that shuts down third-party RMT is introducing first-party RMT, like EVE Online's PLEX or Wildstar's CREDD: an in-game object redeemable for game time, which can be purchased outside of the game for real money. Which is a cursed solution in some ways, but does generally kill off shady third-party RMT.

Or, the 800 pound gorilla of them, the WoW Token, which is what I expect that a similar solution in XIV would resemble if implemented.

Having at least done some endgame in all but two (Vanilla and WoD, if you're wondering) expansion cycles of WoW, I'm going to say it's indeed way too cursed in a PvE raid oriented game with static challenges - in fact, in WoW's case, it has pretty much made the game effectively P2W (and perhaps in the most pernicious possible way, since Blizzard can attempt to argue that it's not actually P2W by blaming the community) for practically anyone who doesn't have a static or absurd amounts of free time. I'd really rather not see XIV devolve along that path, as we can already see what would lie at the end: the already often vexing experience for late comers to endgame content being further aggravated by a large number of raiders no longer freely offering help as, with the ability to derive real-world consideration (even if it's just their sub) from ingame currency, they opt to treat help as a service that is expected to be paid for.

PLEX is probably the only one that really works out decently, but that's because of EVE being a PvP-centric sandbox game. I'm sure the model still has some flaws there but IMO it does fit sandboxes far better than it does PvE based titles.

[Iscah]

Hey love I bought you a few jet black dyes <3 just doesn't carry the same weight and surprise as hey love I bought you the peacock mount <3

You clearly don't have friends who are into glamour.

[JamieRose]

He clearly has no idea how much Jet Black dye costs on the market board.

(Half a million for one)