Emote Monetization needs to Stop.

[Connor]

Oh it’s a standard, but as a reminder we don’t want to end up like WoW and their cash shop. The more emotes that are available from gameplay, the better considering we’re paying $15/mo + $5 for a hairstyle we’ve been asking forever + $7 for an emote. That’s a lot to ask for one person in today’s economy. Also, did I forget to mention that NONE OF THESE ARE GLOBAL FOR ALL CHARACTERS?

The only other MMO I’ve really played is ESO, but since that’s free to play I wasn’t sure their cash shop type stuff would compare to FFXIV’s.

I’d like to think there’s a middle ground between ‘egregious cash shop stuff’ and ‘extra stuff people can buy if they want to’. I mean, whales can/have propped up a ton of mobile games that may have died long before if they hadn’t paid anything lol. But then, that just raises the question of how much money do they need when we’re already paying subs lol. Mobile games are only reliant on whaling because they tend to be free to play, after all. Where did all the money from subs go? Lol

As for not having purchases apply globally I do agree that it just feels like aggressive marketing / a way to artificially increase sales / whatever you want to call it. Especially in terms of emotes and hairstyles; it makes no sense to me that you have to buy a hairstyle separately for every character you’ve created. Frankly I can’t really think of any ‘mog station purchase’ that would, by necessity, only be available to a single character.

Personally I’ve made some minor purchases on Mogstation, fantasia and the Macherie outfit from War of the Visions. Personally I’d say that kind of ‘collab’ gear makes the most sense to me as ‘Mogstation’ purchases. In that, it’s an outfit not really related to anything in the game and is mostly just a promotional thing. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense if it randomly appeared in the game anyway, so I think stuff like that is fine. But when it comes to a lot of the stuff that is there, there’s definitely a sense of ‘couldn’t this have just been something for the actual game?’ lol. Not to mention some of the crazy pricing lol

[VeyaAkemi]

The only other MMO I’ve really played is ESO, but since that’s free to play I wasn’t sure their cash shop type stuff would compare to FFXIV’s.

Oh no, I would consider ESO way worse than XIV in terms of cash shop, ESO is designed to be painful to play without ESO+ so it might as well be a subscription MMO, and their cash shop is not only full of FOMO, it's heavily lootbox focused, with scarcely any outfits being obtainable without lootboxes or purchases.

A better comparison for the feeling you are going for, I feel, is GW2, which is pay to play without any subscription, not even the option to subscribe exists, and while they do employ FOMO tactics and lootboxes, they also allow you to buy cash shop currency with in-game gold at reasonable rates, in fact those rates are automatically calculated based on total currency that exists in the game, meaning you can reasonably get anything you want without paying.