Cash shop announced?Follow

Ultimately, micro-transactions have always been on the cards for FFXIV, as far back as December 2009 Yoichi Wada confirmed they would be a part of the game.

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I personally don't like how they were handled in WoW and I doubt they'll be handled any differently by FFXIV but there's clearly a demand there for them and S-E would be foolish not to capitalise on it. If the revenue generated from Store-only items finds its way back in to the pot to maintain wages for game content developers all the better. Remember, when 1.0 tanked and sales of games like FFXIII followed suit things were looking pretty ugly for the company for a long while, if this is the price some of us have to endure to continue playing their games for years to come then I can kind of begrudgingly accept it and leave the folks to their sparkly rainbow-farting unicorns.

What I think is funny is the "sky is falling" argument, and/or people who attack things like a cash shop even though there are games out there where this does work, and works perfectly fine.



A for-profit business, that has always been a for-profit business that offers a for-profit service wants to find ways to be better at being for-profit? Wut? Who knew!?



It is your opinion. It is your perception of the situation. Your opinions and perceptions are fine and you've the right to them, but don't go laying them out as "facts" when they very much are not facts.



Retainers = Affects in-game performance. An extra 2 retainers means possibly two more Ventures simultaneously, more item storage, and more space to sell things on the market. It affects in-game gameplay.

Vanity Mounts/Clothes/Minions = Does not affect gameplay or performance whatsoever.



I see the opposite happening. They tried retainers, which are in-game bonuses that give you better gameplay. People cried out against it so they said "ok ok ok we'll just do vanity cr*p instead."



Latest != Coolest for many people. "Coolest" is highly subjective. What you find "Coolest" someone else might not find "Coolest". I might like, say, the Behemoth Mount more than whatever they stick up on the shop and choose not to buy it. I can rest easy, however, knowing that my mount will be the same (it just looks different) and will have the same functionality. In fact, I still use my Company Chocobo as my mount, despite there being the Behemoth, Coeurl, etc mounts that many people find "Cooler".

Edited, Oct 22nd 2014 9:44am by Lyrailis

Not too often I find myself clicking green arrows on this guy's posts, but this is one of the few, lol.

What he said in this quote is spot-on, to be honest. The problem these days, is that the economy all over the world is slipping down and down and getting worse and worse. People want to be penny-pinchers and refuse to pay a cent more than they have to, but yet the developers need to make money too.

So.... people might complain about a $14.95/mo when their competition is $12.95/mo. But, the problem is, SE knows that $14.95 is probably not going to cut it. They could go for awhile on that, heck they might even be able to maintain being In the Black for that, but there's not enough room to really grow (didn't someone say above they have... FOUR... battle coders and ONE guy doing FATEs?) to bring this game to its true potential.

For it to grow, they need........ MONEY.

But, if they raise the monthly subscription price, people will complain and quit the game. They obviously don't want that. When people complained about Retainers, I always wondered: What if they'd have raised the monthly price to $16.95 and simply gave out the 2 retainers as part as a normal update? How many people would have preferred that? At least with the way they did retainers, it was a choice. You could pay less if you wanted, but had less access to the game. There are other games out there with different monthly subs (a Bronze/Silver/Gold type thing).

So now they're trying a Cash Shop, hoping that there are enough people out there who won't cry over the occasional cool item for $10 or even $20 and don't mind dropping a few $ to help people out.

Also, something that I read earlier in this thread irks me a little: Someone said that WoW did a "bad job" with their cash shop. Yes, okay the Lv90 Boost is kinda a "meh" thing, but otherwise it is exactly the same thing as SE wants to do. In fact you could argue that Retainers are worse than the Lv90 Boost, because Retainers stay with you forever, while the Lv90 boost only cuts off some 'boring' leveling time. Either way, everybody seems to forget the millions Blizzard raised for Charity (Hurricane Sandy, Japanese Tsunami, etc) with a couple of their cash shop items (they gave the entire proceeds to said Charities).

The point here is that SE needs more money to grow, but few people want to spend a dime more than they absolutely have to (because of how the economy is) but yet many people complain when an update falls short of its mark when it comes to expectations. Maybe if they were able to grow, hire more people, then maybe their updates would be more up to their expectations.

I think people need to wake up and remember they are paying for a service run by a For-Profit company. They're doing this because it is their IRL job. This isn't some charity to give people free entertainment. It costs money to develop and run an MMO and in the end, they need their paychecks too. You can't expect everything to be free. You want an awesome game that you really enjoy playing? You need to support it and stop complaining and calling them "greedy". I'm not saying to throw money at it willy-nilly, but the least you guys could do is give them a break when they try to raise more money to expand the game.

On principle, I wouldn't buy Atma or Alexandrite from a cash shop. But I'd be very, very tempted.



We already have a flying mount in the game, the Ahriman Mount! Maybe two, if you count the Bomb Palanquin (I don't have that one yet). In regards to the Ahriman Mount's flying, I must quote Shania Twain (because why wouldn't you?) "that don't impress me much."

Some people actually give a damn about cool. I'm not one of them.

If using a cash shop gives a player the ability to be a more effective player than me, I have a problem with that.

If using a cash shop gives a player the ability to be cooler than me, congratulations. I've got things I need to get done.

Why not just wait and see how things play out?

Actually, when you stated that you didn't believe the cash shop would affect your gameplay, I found that statement interesting.

I thought to myself, "Why I can think of a way it affects your gameplay, by diminishing the amount of gameplay you'll get with your subscription!" So I wrote a modest post explaining why I thought gameplay wasn't spared even if someone wished to ignore the cash shop.

It wasn't an expose as to why Hyrist was wrong. It's just continuing the discussion where you left off.

And then Cat pointed out that most of the initial items available in the shop were just things that were already in the game and didn't need much development, and I agreed with Cat. In a way, I conceded your opinion even before you came in and decried I was picking on you, albeit with an ominous warning that future updates might take up development time.

I have a feeling if I hadn't even quoted you for the gameplay statement, you wouldn't even have noticed the conversation.

Whenever cash shops(and subsequently F2P) have been discussed here, most people try to rationalize paying their subscription fee by saying things like "I'd rather pay a single monthly fee and have access to all of the content. I don't want to have to fork over 5 bucks here and 10 bucks there whenever something new is introduced, I just want to play a flat rate for everything". If the items introduced in the cash shop are not obtainable by any other method than paying additional fees, I'm curious to see how that perspective evolves.

Why can't popcorn be paleo-friendly?

Edited, Oct 22nd 2014 4:10pm by FilthMcNasty

Come to think of it, some of the "cash-shop" items in FFXI that came with physical objects actually DID provide the occasional advantage in the game. Tidal Talisman, which came with the Leviathan pendant, gave you a once a week warp to Nashmau from Whitegate (or Jeuno to Kazham, but no one ever used that.) That cut off a 20 minute boat ride for Einherjar.

I paid $75 for that in-game item.... and now you can get there just by teleporting via crystal.

Ah well. At least I still wear the pendant sometimes.

Edited, Oct 22nd 2014 4:36pm by Catwho

I'm only happy when I can say "I told you so", and since I spent most of our F2P debate trying to prove that cash shops can be non-invasive, I hope SE leans toward the 'cash shop lite' model instead of the 'nickel and dime' stigma that it usually carries.

Like I pointed out in the previous convo we had, there is a way to do this that doesn't make SE look like they're 'milking'. Maybe the Slepnir mount being offered in the cash shop is the normal version and EX Odin will drop a version that's bigger and badder... who knows.


You didn't buy it for the bling effect? Doinitwrong

On Cash Shop matters, I usually states that to me, CS a a "shortcut for effort": I mean that is a viable solution for people who prefer give some $ instead of spending time in the game, to gain same item.

The reason I am ok with that, is because not everyone have full day and full week to dedicate to the game, and someone that spent 100 hours grinding some item, is not better or worse than someone who purchased it.

But, all of the above was when the CS argument were on F2P games. As long as XIV is a subscription game, the incoming opening of the CS makes me think the game moved to a dangerous "grey area".

If the items there are all vanity, it really does not matters to me, P2P or F2P. Some harcore players are upset by the "lazy" people buying their hard-to-get-in-game items, but the lazy spent $$, most likely earned working hard, I don't see them more "lazy" than the unemployed kid playing videogames 24/7.

The real challenge will be the future. Any addition to the CS will be something that can trigger or not the rages. You also can see the actual subscription as a sort of CS: you buy some items (the veteran rewards) paying a given amount for some time.

I think sometime we all lose the main point of playing a game: we play it because we have fun playing it. Cash Shop and other things, are just few of all things of the game we evaluate to decide if we still have fun playing it.

I will not stop playing a game because Cash Shop have inside the item X. I stop when the game will be no more fun to me.

...and right there is the flaw in your argument. Nobody is forcing you to buy this stuff. It so far is strictly vanity items. There is absolutely no reason at all to complain about them selling something that is not only completely optional, but also gives no in game benefit beyond making you feel like a special and unique snowflake. Now, if they start selling pay to win items (something I don't think they're dumb enough to do) then you might have a reasonable basis for complaining, but not until then.

Edit: Oh come on ZAM. XIV lags less than you guys these days.

Didn't there used to be a duplicate post preventer?

Edited, Oct 24th 2014 12:51am by Catwho