Quote Originally Posted by Packetdancer View Post
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.