With how much the players now love FF14 I would think they would embrace cash shops.
Counterpoint...Games have literally been doing for YEARS even before games were connected..we just called them "expansions"
Examples
Street Fighter 2 releases 5 versions of the same game
Blizzard releases expansions for Warcraft 2, Starcraft, and Diablo 2
Capcom releases Directors cuts and dual shock editions of the first 2 Resident Evil games..literally the first 2 games but YOU CAN USE ANALOG CONTROLLER
Doom 2 takes 2 fan made mod packs and sells them
Sega literally cuts Sonic 3 in half and resells it as Sonic and Knuckles
I could keep going but....in the end of the day what is the difference between micro transactions and all of those?
People getting pissy over nothing? Say it aint so.
Don't like em? Don't buy em. There are hundreds if not thousands of other armor and weapon appearances to make your transmog outfit from that you can obtain in-game and wont make you look immediately like every other person that buys this item.
If you place some special emphasis on being the most sparkly prince or princess at the ball, then... well... sucks to suck, I guess. Maybe try and rub some creative brain cells together and come up with your own unique look instead.
“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow
Words to live by.
People don't care because store content would have not been in the game if there wasn't store in the first place. The people willing to pay for them does, and help the game to be worth for Blizzard so everyone else can play it. As for myself, I pay with token and my personnal progression is the only thing that matters. How other people get their shit is not of my concern unless they brag about it and are toxic.
Both of these are posts from this thread about transmogs in the game shops.
That said, do you believe that FFXIV is "...milking the franchise as much as possible before all of the customers are gone for good?" Because their store is much, much larger than Blizzard has ever been with its store. Not to mention EVE Online which has a subscription tier that you can pay for with in-game currency (In fact, the WoW token system was largely lifted wholesale from EVE Online's) and an enormous online store.
I simply do not understand the logic in which Blizzard is milking their customers before they are gone for good when there are all kinds of games that are doing quite well that have the same setup. Help me understand why Blizzard is so terrible and others are not.
Or is this more about winning at social media? That, I can understand. I'm truly confused about how this is a sign of Blizzard's greed and evilness when it's not much of an issue for other games. Will this be OK when Blizzard's customers take them for granted? Because you've had little but praise for other games and do not consider it disqualifying to have a shop that is 50X bigger than Blizzard's. I don't get it.
Last edited by MoanaLisa; 2021-09-04 at 10:49 PM.
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
It's pretty much the same old and it's rather funny to see x people rage against the machine, but only if the machine is Blizzard and their MMORPG.
Same as people jumping to an Amazon title as they "boycott Blizzard" and such. They don't think further than what gives easy clout on social media, and are hypocritical in how they judge various monetization models depending on whether they're currently enjoying the game or not.
WoW's cash shop is benign. Players selling power for gold or real money was a thing long before the token, and would be forever after it went away. All its removal would do would be to fuck over anyone using it to pay for games and game time.
But people do not tend to think further than their own nose in these matters. If we started seeing the store from GW2 in WoW, I'd worry. As long as it stays at cosmetics and a boost that only becomes a max level boost at the end of the expansion, we're good. It's completely optional and you can generate what you need to buy from the store in-game to boot.
Last edited by Queen of Hamsters; 2021-09-04 at 10:52 PM.
I only asked the question because I'm playing in about five MMO's right now and enjoying them all for different reasons. They all bring different things to their players and they ALL are either B2P or subscription based. I don't see Blizzard's store as any sort of cancer on the game or a sign of their greed and desperation when they have done much less of this than others. Trying to understand. Like I said, the one thing I do understand is "winning" at social media. But I read the other forums and threads here about the games I play and there's NOTHING like the vitriol pointed at their stores as there is with Blizzard. It's just very curious.
The general thing is about the store itself. I think the games are fine so it's not that at all. It's more of a philosophical and logical thing about why is X bad and Y OK when X and Y are conceptually exactly alike.
Last edited by MoanaLisa; 2021-09-04 at 11:00 PM.
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
I still think Blizzard needs to put MORE on the store.
more Replica Tier sets please. Replica weapons too.
We're all newbs, some are just more newbier than others.
Just a burned out hardcore raider turned casual.
I'm tired. So very tired. Can I just lay my head on your lap and fall asleep?
#TeamFuckEverything
Yeah, it is a bit puzzling... Could simply be that WoW's community is by and large more negative. The "but WoW is a sub game!" doesn't fly when other games hailed to heaven and back double-dip. WoW's store has been all cosmetics since its introduction back in WOTLK, and we've had some of the game's most content-rich expansions since then, so nothing of the fearmongering came to pass.
Overall, I think some people (it's always the same group) are just stuck in "Blizz bad" whilst being blind or not caring about the very same shit, or worse, going on in other games and companies.
I'm not sure the people behind the dissonance can even explain it.
Perhaps Blizzard should just cut the Gordian Knot with players altogether and put a ton of transmogs, toys and mounts, along with other cosmetic stuff in the store all at once. Then there's one big storm and after that the complaints are irrelevant. They wouldn't stop but there wouldn't be this drip, drip, drip of rage because they add a couple of things to the store every six months.
For my part, I ignore the store but someone was nice enough to buy me the Batwing mount as a gift several years ago. I've taken some occasional abuse for that over the years which to my mind is childish, stupid and frankly cause to send accounts home for a couple of weeks. You can't write 'IT'S A FUCKING GIFT!" on the underbelly of the mount but whatever. I guess I should tell my friends not to gift me anything from the Blizzard Store so I can avoid stuff like /spit and the like. Fuck that. I mean just fuck all of them.
Alas, Blizzard has never done that. One reason why I have found other things to do in the game that involves only friends and guildies and why I spend a lot more time in other games now. Neither one of those solutions is anything but good by the way.
Last edited by MoanaLisa; 2021-09-04 at 11:10 PM.
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
They realy shouldn't imo, but with blizz losing so much around them, they need the last resort of fools who buy their fairy costumes or cashcows(litterally) to stay put and get some extra income.
Shop mounts lose value imo for being a shopmount, they are not earned in game, not interested.
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I have seen so many people try it.., but it's still a shopcrown and clashes most of the time, including yours sorry, the weapon clashes more tbh, but you want to show off I get it.
If only those that call themselves "not interested" could actually just live by their words and not cause a stink every single time for literally zero reason other than clout.
As for the fallacy of claiming that it's a thing now because they're losing money and everyone's a fool for buying (aka spending THEIR money)... Grow up, would be a kind suggestion here.
I'm mentally clapping at this. Too true. Several of the people seen in this thread have also complained about the game having a sub because "the game isn't worth the money". In some cases you can see them praise games with far more predatory monetization, or from far worse companies in terms of how they treat employees.
It's just a circus of cognitive dissonance, hypocrisy and "me me me"...
Last edited by Queen of Hamsters; 2021-09-04 at 11:38 PM.
I have never purchased a store mount or pet or any of the other cosmetics on the store, and I would 100% support far more things being added to it. The cosmetics available in PoE's MTX store, for example, are fantastic.
People on this forum constantly complain about wanting more "character customization", and about how developers and other people in the industry are underpaid, but you don't want to pay for anything. You want games with 40 hours worth of fully animated cutscenes, 80 hours worth of cutting-edge storytelling, thousands of lines of voice acting from big name actors, all wrapped up in a package that you can play for thousands of hours over and over again with constant updates, and you want it all for a single $60 box purchase.