Stop with the FOMO

[Avoidy]

Yeah it's "weird" that seasonal events don't give you the opportunity to get older seasonal items from past seasonal events of the same kind. It would've been nice if the moonfire faire event had had all of the vendors from previous moonfires, for example. In this way, seasonal events would age like wine, getting better every year by offering more. But alas, to get those items you missed, you'll need to wait a year and then buy it in the cash shop. This is just one way that the game was made worse in order to promote the cash shop.

"Make a bad system so you can sell people solutions" is a standard tactic seen in free to play games, but one would not hope to see it in a game that is simultaneously buy to play/pay for expansions/monthly sub. Once you see it, you can't stop seeing it either. For example, if you want to list an item on the marketboard, people can only buy that full amount. They can't select an exact amount and then buy from a stack of 99. This means you'll probably want to list your bulk sales in numerous slightly smaller chunks, since most people wouldn't buy a full 99 stack of something expensive. But your retainer can only hold so many items at once, and now you just filled him with your divvied up 99 stack! Forget the fact that most games with a marketboard simply let you list as much as you want without a middleman, or let you just drop a 99 stack on the board and then players can buy 6 or 7 from that stack. We need the retainer here, and we need him to be as restrictive as possible. Why? So he can fill up, and you can feel pressured to buy another retainer. "Force a nonsensical problem, sell the solution." You'd expect to see this sort of thing in Maplestory or BDO but it's here too. I could do this all day. You're at the aesthitician getting your hair done, but oh! This new color doesn't match your eyes. Surely he can change your eyes, right? It's like putting in contacts. Oh, wait, nope. Sorry. For some arbitrary reason, this minor 10 pixel sized change will cost you 10 dollars in the cash shop via fantasia. And if you realize you don't actually like the way you look once you're out and want to revert back? That'll be another 10 dollars. On and on with this. The leveling process for most jobs is a mind numbing slog with a boring start, and maybe this would get fixed, but if leveling were quicker or more engaging then how could they sell you skips. Post-ARR is a known slog, 87 shitty fetch quests in a row, that puts off thousands of new players every year, but if it were ever truly condensed or summarized to address this issue in a meaningful way then how would they sell skips into heavensward?

I put "weird" in quotes at the start because I was being facetious; it's not weird at all. It's completely normal for the kind of company that controls this game. Square Enix is like EA, but Japanese. People just turn a blind eye to all the crap because Yoshi is a good spokesman and a nice dude, but SE loves quadruple-dipping in the XIV community. "You're telling me these people will buy the base game, buy any new expansions we put out, pay a sub, AND buy from our cash shop? Holy moly." Even the most egregious free to play games with the nastiest cash shops blush at this because they'll usually offer the product for free to get people into the cash shop, but Square's out here selling you the base product and letting you stay only if you pay monthly, and on top of that there's a cash shop with items in there going for like 35 dollars and stuff. Nexon and Pearl Abyss out here WISHING they had their players on lock this hard. You can't even bring this up without players coming out to defend all this, and their arguments will sound like the kind of copium you hear on f2p game forums. "It's pay for convenience!" tier arguments. Okay cool, I expect that in a f2p title but do you really want that shit in a game that's b2p/sub??? You get the game you deserve I guess.