FFXIV Criticisms

[Mordin Solus]

personaly atm id say the whole "positivity" part of the community is its biggest detriment since you can't call out any1 for sucking when they are even doing it on purpose.

Had a guy throw out the oh its my first time in the 2nd 24 man pirate raid as an excuse for "sucking". Basicly he would get a mechanic on him and just not do anything. he would stay on the boss dpsing it (he was a rpr) and hit the whole party with the mechanic which considering it was ozma then made 90% of our party die. I obv call him out on it and im the bad guy and oh its old content why you complaining yada yada.

Honestly wish they made all those fights be min ilvl so people were forced to learn to "git gud".

Im tired of level skip people and others that get carried through fights never having to learn shit cause the rest of the overgeared party just makes it a cruise control for them but considering SE keeps making changes to previous hard trials to make it simpler (lahabreah fight in hw notwithstanding) i doubt thats their plan...

[Ghost of Cow]

There are so many examples in this thread alone of you or Val just...making something up to be upset about that is just not reality. Here's another one. I don't even know what you're talking about regarding "being gated because of community chosen strats" ....what? lol

You know, it's not mandatory to lead every post this way. Just sayin'

Did somebody come up with some strat for an Ultimate that you dislike or something so you invented this strawman to complain about? Also not sure you want to make this argument about the hardest content in the game, if that is indeed what this strawman is about, to pretend that the hardest of the hardcore raiders only use a single stat that turns out to work only with FF14. That's the case for every single MMO.

It's a very bizarre thing to try and pretend is unique to this game.

"The game is gating me because of something a member of the community did"

We've discussed this thing many times, it's a side effect of how the fights are designed.

In WoW - just for example - I can jump into nearly anything by being a decent player and generally understanding the fight I'm going into. In XIV it's not usually that straightforward, there's a lot of "person 7 stands exactly at X13, Y36 or else we blow up" or party member pairings that have to be planned out beforehand, etc. Often these strats come from - and are even named after - youtubers, so they're very specific and referenced by PF groups.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just means that coming in late and not knowing those specific strats beforehand - strats that largely can't be altered or done on the fly - means that interacting with groups is that much harder. Bonus points if you get people in the group who have used a different strat, because you generally can't mesh strats. I've seen groups break up over that very thing - two sets of people who have both cleared but used different strats, and it just didn't work out.

It's why I generally don't bother pugging in XIV, it's just so...rigid and structured? (As everyone calls them, a dance)...and people have weird expectations. People were whining about wiping in the new EX the night of the patch, heh.

- - - Updated - - -

Since you're not the other guy, I feel like I can bring up WoW, and in WoW, there's pretty much always something to prog. So to me WoW always has a lot of content whether it be PVP/Raid/M+, so it suffers way less from this issue.

Yeah, M+ alone is a fantastic game mode for people who like progression.

That said, WoW also has a lot of side content that people often forget exists in these discussions. Pet battles, transmog farming, various faction reps, heritage quests, um...probably other stuff I'm forgetting.

It's a shame that I just prefer XIV as a product overall (Setting, characters, locations, music, etc.) because honestly as a "game" I prefer WoW in a lot of ways. I could always play both - I have in the past - but eh. It's a weird conflict to have.

[Moralgy]

Yeah. As much as Yoshi-P touts "oh you don't have to play FFXIV all of the time, you are free to leave and go play other games!", there is a real penalty for leaving. You lose all of those millions of gil invested into buying and furnishing a house and all of that time spent trying to float up items, and it is very difficult and time consuming to try to get another house again given that you can only place one bid per week but there are 12 bidders on every plot.

Well you dont really have to play, just log in to keep it. Technically ur right, but technically so is he rofl.

[Yarathir]

The "housing means XIV isn't play when you want" thing is really inane. It's just the price of scarcity and something you sign up for when you get a house. You know there's a limited quantity and that therefore there is a system in place to make sure that long-term inactive players do not get to hold onto houses that should rightfully go to active players clamoring to engage with the housing system.

Yoshi-P didn't put chains on you. You did that yourself.

And I say that as someone who dearly hopes that instanced housing will one day become a thing to solve these woes.

[Grinning Serpent]

In XIV, beast tribes are capped by daily progress and you only progress their story once per level. I've done all the beast tribes except the Endwalker ones, I know what they're like and I enjoy them, but they aren't really content to me, I can't spend hours thinking about them, it takes me at most 20 minutes to finish them for the day and move on.

Renown in WoW is what BTs ought to be like. I basically skipped WoW from a couple months into Legion until Dragonflight, so I never saw the Renown thing until I encountered it in DF. It's like the old Reputation grinds, but less punishing and just overall less shitty. It's great. It also integrates into the WQ system naturally, as well as the "fly around and find random shit" system. You get a limited batch of daily WQs that get you rep with one faction or another. You can find random knick knacks while travelling around that reward a small bit of rep. You can buy contracts from crafters to get a little extra rep with a specific faction when you do any WQ. You still have rep-gated rewards, but owing to the renown system, they are much more granular than they used to be, and the renown system is frankly a vastly improved presentation of the system than the previous reputation systems. Then Forgotten Reach added additional ways to get renown, and then the 10.1 patch or whatever (I stopped playing last month) added a new faction. Presumably the next interim patch will add a way to accelerate rep gains with that faction, etc.

BTs are just so fucking archaic. Daily resets, you permanently lose rep progression if you can't log in on a given day, etc. It's very much old school "fuck you if you can't log in every single day" design and I have no goddamn idea how the fuck it's survived so long. I don't think they're *bad*, but we just have examples of much better ways of doing the same concept.

I know that was only one of your examples, but that's how I feel about most of the casual content in XIV, I don't hate it or think its poor quality, but I like things I can sink my teeth into and get my fill, only Savage/Ultimate meets that hunger for me. I hope you can understand where I'm coming from.

I don't think XIV is bad because it doesn't specifically cater to me or at all, it is a good game, but I can't be the only one that feels this way, so I think that specifically for hardcore raiders, XIV doesn't do enough to satisfy me which is a flaw in my opinion.

I think XIV's rigidity of design works against it, in terms of giving meat for non-sweaty players. In WoW, you have entire huge ass communities built up around rolling the dice for mounts, pets, transmog, etc every week. You might need to grind old reputations or something.

In XIV? Want the rewards from that old savage? Throw up a PF and you can probably have farmed multiple sets of gear in an afternoon and you get the mount every single time you kill the tier end boss. I don't think making things RNG heavy like in WoW would fix it, either. I think it's just simply a limitation of the game's design, and I don't think there's a plausible way of fixing it.

But that's a *large* chunk of potential "casual" activity removed from the playing field. I stopped playing WoW because I got hooked on other games, but I'm sure I'll go back eventually, simply because there's just so fucking much to *do*! And I didn't even touch M+, raiding, etc - and had no real interest in it. People say XIV is good for casual players, and to an extent I think they're right, but I feel like Dragonflight is pulling a "hold my beer" moment here. I really dislike dungeons and raids in WoW compared to XIV (hence not bothering with M+ etc) and the community... ugh, feels like it hasn't changed in 20 years, which is kind of disturbing to think about. But from the perspective of "casual shit to do," WoW has an absolutely *insane* amount! To the point that Wowhead even wrote guides on how to go through each expansion in turn and start unlocking access to all the goodies, mounts, etc.

In my opinion it isn't that XIV goes out of its way to respect your time, but more that there is just too little in the game to do to feel disrespected. I don't think its very fair to say that unless you've 100%'d the game you cannot feel like its lacking. While there is a lot of content that is good, a lot of content, especially in the earlier stages of the game like ARR, is just outdated and boring and thus I have 0 interest in going back for it.

This also doesn't account for players that don't unsub and do things as they release, even if you didn't no-life, I personally feel you just hit a wall way faster in this game than WoW. You can tell me to unsub, but I like playing the same game a lot and I don't think that's a bad thing. I've never forced myself to play a game I don't like, but I also can't justify paying monthly for a game where there's little to do, which is why I unsubbed in the end. If anything players that hardly ever break their sub should be rewarded, not told that their loyalty is unneeded and they should play other stuff, it just feels like a cop out from putting more in every patch.

WoW has had similar issues, sometimes even way worse, but it can get away with suffering from this because I don't have to pay money to play it, I haven't paid real money for WoW or any of its addons since the token came out, that's insane value. If there was an XIV token, I'd def still be playing the game.

This is really good. I agree pretty much wholeheartedly. Like I said, I hadn't touched WoW in a while so I just assumed it was kind of even with XIV in terms of shit to do - but it really blew me away just how much stuff I could do if I wanted to play WoW that evening, without really touching "end game" stuff. It always bothered me. I'd log in because I just wanted to play XIV, but there was nothing to *do.* People would just say "Yoshi-P says to take breaks!" and that's all well and good, but what if I want to fucking play XIV? His team has made a great game, it's just that it so often felt like there was nothing to *do.* I even made an alt on Dynamis, completely started over, and I still ran out of things to do in short order (especially since I wasn't interested in doing the more grindy things like perfecting my chocobo racing or verminion collection again.)

I was paying sub for WoW but next time I go back I'll probably put more effort into learning how to make gold and manipulate the market. Being able to play for free by buying a token once a month sounds like a pretty good plan. I agree, I wish XIV had a token system as well.

Besides, if you can buy gold directly from the dev (and trade gold for game time), it's effectively a death knell for RMT - why would people buy from a sketchy site if they can just buy a token/gold straight from the dev? As long as gold/gil cannot be used to buy power (and they can't), there isn't much reason I can see to not do it, other than SqEx might worry they'd lose subscription revenue by doing so (they might, but most people I know have like a few million gil at most and are mystified by the idea of me having several tens of millions without putting any real effort in... so I doubt it would be a serious concern if the tokens were like 80+ million.)

The game has done a great job in modernizing and streamlining itself, even in the few years I've been playing. But there is still a ton of stuff that feels like a product of archaic philosophy, it just happens that these issues are usually things only a tiny minority of players like myself care about, so there's no pressure for them to be consistent in fixing it.

That is the exact problem and it's why I have trouble getting hyped for future XIV updates. The writing is on the wall - they will continue to float down the river and continue being the credit card for the rest of the company, even though at least in my opinion, there are several elements of the game that they "need" to put serious work into.

[Granyala]

Yeah. As much as Yoshi-P touts "oh you don't have to play FFXIV all of the time, you are free to leave and go play other games!", there is a real penalty for leaving. You lose all of those millions of gil invested into buying and furnishing a house and all of that time spent trying to float up items, and it is very difficult and time consuming to try to get another house again given that you can only place one bid per week but there are 12 bidders on every plot.

Yeah but as long as the houses are as limited as they are, I understand wanting them to reserve housing for active people.

[Arlette]

This subforum is so wild in that it will both criticize FFXIV for not having enough optional end-game content to do while simultaneously pretending WoW does (lol) and also favorably arguing that the WoW Token is good.

I mean its so disingenuous at this point that people are referring to past WoW expansions' events as the content while attacking FF14 for not having anything to do lol

My god. The oozing contrarianism.

[Caerrona]

Eh, ff14 just needs to add actual content outside of the 1-2 real bosses an expansion.

Everything else in the game is for grey parsers and ERPers/pedophiles.

[KrayZ33]

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just means that coming in late and not knowing those specific strats beforehand - strats that largely can't be altered or done on the fly - means that interacting with groups is that much harder. Bonus points if you get people in the group who have used a different strat, because you generally can't mesh strats. I've seen groups break up over that very thing - two sets of people who have both cleared but used different strats, and it just didn't work out.

It's why I generally don't bother pugging in XIV, it's just so...rigid and structured? (As everyone calls them, a dance)...and people have weird expectations. People were whining about wiping in the new EX the night of the patch, heh.

it IS a bad thing. All the mechanics that require a very specific setup are garbage.
Everything requires you to have a rather exact position. M1 M2 H1 H2 etc. aren't just terms you use to count how many melees you have, no - you actually play positions and movesets you can't adjust, because when you do, the group will wipe.

It's tiring the shit out of me tbh. Especially since you can have like 500% of the damage required, it won't help you if one players messes up his positioning.

If the fights were 4 minutes long, it wouldn't be that much of a problem, in fact I'd even prefer that because that's easier to learn... but having to slog through 8+ minutes just to get to the "difficult" point of the fight (and difficulty is entirely movement/positioning related, not heal or DPS related) is kinda silly. Every boss fight almost feels like it's Sylvanas.
P7(? - The tree thingy) for example was especially horrible. The whole fight basically only had 3 mechanics worth mentioning and they were at the 8+ minute range and one slip up from some dude or girl would immediatly lead to a wipe.

I like doing stuff with my group of players, but we have 2 rather bad players that are not able to remember the positioning part and get confused, and it really shows how problematic that boss-design ends up being.
People can argue with me about "how that person is not supposed to be in savage" but that's just a weird point of view because the player gets overhelmed by markers and visual effects and the requirement to remember a 8-10 minute long *script*, not by actual DPS/Heal mechanics or whatever.
And the thing is - when you do 6 minutes of dumb and easy shit, you start slacking off and when the "hard" script kicks in, you forget "what H1 is supposed to do when Debuff X is applied to me and T2 has Debuff Y" - because it's different from what "H2 is supposed to do when T1 has debuff Z while M1 has to move to the right corner". So when finally one of the "usual culprits" ends up doing everything correctly, another player will mess something up.
Everyone is on edge to do the correct dance because no one wants to repeat the 8 minutes of boredom that comes before it.

And I'm sure I'd never have beaten P8S-2 without a guide telling me what the debuffs actually do. I'd never even have considered to merge the Ifrits for example.

[Ghost of Cow]

This subforum is so wild in that it will both criticize FFXIV for not having enough optional end-game content to do while simultaneously pretending WoW does (lol) and also favorably arguing that the WoW Token is good.

I mean its so disingenuous at this point that people are referring to past WoW expansions' events as the content while attacking FF14 for not having anything to do lol

My god. The oozing contrarianism.

I mean, "WoW has nothing to do." is another one of those weird memes that lives in this subforum. It's just as untrue as the rest of the weird tribal nonsense that permeates this place.

[AtomR]

That's probably a fair criticism from what I remember when I played FFXIV in September 2021. But to be honest WOW suffers from the opposite problem. For fights to be hard and feel epic they seem to need to have them have multiple phases each with entirely different stuff to remember and keep track of and that makes the fights unwelcome for me. I think they could just meet in the middle.

[MsSideEye]

This subforum is so wild in that it will both criticize FFXIV for not having enough optional end-game content to do while simultaneously pretending WoW does (lol) and also favorably arguing that the WoW Token is good.

I mean its so disingenuous at this point that people are referring to past WoW expansions' events as the content while attacking FF14 for not having anything to do lol

My god. The oozing contrarianism.

I mean, let's be honest, the people being disingenuous here aren't worth the time, effort, or acknowledgement here. It's better to just add them to your ignore list and move on, since chances are they're so far down the rabbit hole in their own heads nothing will get them out of it.

[Ghost of Cow]

I mean, let's be honest, the people being disingenuous here aren't worth the time, effort, or acknowledgement here. It's better to just add them to your ignore list and move on, since chances are they're so far down the rabbit hole in their own heads nothing will get them out of it.

Lots of irony floating around here, but I guess you did say it best:

You're going to run into people who will tear into anyone who dare besmirches their game.

[MsSideEye]

Lots of irony floating around here, but I guess you did say it best:

Normally have you on ignore too, but here's the thing.

Most of the people who I've got on ignore, including yourself? Have come in here mostly to whine and talk smack about a game that doesn't do every little thing they want it do. Val and Serpent, especially, have shown time and again that XIV could be a gift from the great gods themselves and they'd STILL undo their flys to piss on it. The entire REASON I even joined the forum in the first place was to tell off some poster who had their heads so far up their own anus that they were trying to spin the story of the game being told to us as the EXACT OPPOSITE of what it was.

Are there times where I can get a little hot headed and will rip into someone regardless? Yes, because I'm human and we all like to defend things we cherish.

But as you well know, being someone who does it themselves, there are going to be people who hate things to just hate it. Or to just go 'Wha, it's bad' to get a reaction out of someone. That's why I told @Arlette to just ignore people like you, people like Val, and people like Serpent. Because no matter what we do or what we say, you're going to be more happy we interacted with you and gave you something to argue back against.

So enjoy that bit of interaction, Cow.

It's the last from me you're ever going to get.

[Arlette]

Normally have you on ignore too, but here's the thing.

Most of the people who I've got on ignore, including yourself? Have come in here mostly to whine and talk smack about a game that doesn't do every little thing they want it do. Val and Serpent, especially, have shown time and again that XIV could be a gift from the great gods themselves and they'd STILL undo their flys to piss on it. The entire REASON I even joined the forum in the first place was to tell off some poster who had their heads so far up their own anus that they were trying to spin the story of the game being told to us as the EXACT OPPOSITE of what it was.

Are there times where I can get a little hot headed and will rip into someone regardless? Yes, because I'm human and we all like to defend things we cherish.

But as you well know, being someone who does it themselves, there are going to be people who hate things to just hate it. Or to just go 'Wha, it's bad' to get a reaction out of someone. That's why I told @Arlette to just ignore people like you, people like Val, and people like Serpent. Because no matter what we do or what we say, you're going to be more happy we interacted with you and gave you something to argue back against.

So enjoy that bit of interaction, Cow.

It's the last from me you're ever going to get.

It really does astound me how they can both simultaneously do nothing but post the most niche complaining about things that usually aren't even true if you actually play the game, but then sit there and also try to sit on a high horse and pretend that they aren't the worst offenders of the thing they are whining that you've criticized them for.

I made my account similarly like yours, although originally I delusionally thought perhaps there were more than 4 people on this subforum who obsessively hate every single thing about the game and yet devote hours upon hours complaining about it to each other in their little circle of self-agreeing hatred.

I remain convinced that they saw a lot of the almost universal good press that 14 was getting across the internet since Shadowbringers and, whether out of some weird tribal obligation to try and take down the game because WoW was a joke at the time (And still kind of is imo) or because they just wanted to be contrarians, decided that they must dedicated their online hours to hating something on a subforum of a website that nobody besides them, and the 4 other people they are constantly spinning around in a circle with agreeing about everything, actually visits.

And for a lot of people it seems they've stopped engaging on this subforum explicitly because of them.

Because every single patch or expansion announcement or new piece of information, you'll have Val, let's say, show up and type out an essay about how Yoshi-P coughed at one point in the presentation and therefore he personally insulted Val's family and is currently at Val's house hurting Val's pets or something completely out of pocket. Or Grinning Serpent or Cow showing up and criticizing 14 for all things that WoW does exponentially worse and then praising WoW at the same time.

And nothing you say to them will ever matter because there is no genuine interest in discussion. And I can already preempt what one or more of them are going to say, "WELL YOU DO IT FROM A TOXIC POSITIVITY ANGLE" which is just bogus because for both of us I explicitly remember talking about fairly significant criticisms we have of parts of 14 but it gets drowned out because the 4 or 5 of them pop into every single thread here spreading the most insane nonsense possible about EVERY facet of the game that the conversation then is instantly and always shifted to whatever niche, made up, untrue, thing they've decided to whine about this time.

I mean for fucks sake, the main thread of the subforum, that was around since 2011 when the game was first announced, got closed last October explicitly stated by the one and only mod of this subforum, because of that kind of behavior. And it started almost exactly at the same time of the big exodus out of WoW during Shadowlands.

Just the sheer gall of them to also then criticize the 14 Subreddit or something and say its a hugbox when this place exists lol.

[Ghost of Cow]

Normally have you on ignore too, but here's the thing.

Most of the people who I've got on ignore, including yourself? Have come in here mostly to whine and talk smack about a game that doesn't do every little thing they want it do. Val and Serpent, especially, have shown time and again that XIV could be a gift from the great gods themselves and they'd STILL undo their flys to piss on it. The entire REASON I even joined the forum in the first place was to tell off some poster who had their heads so far up their own anus that they were trying to spin the story of the game being told to us as the EXACT OPPOSITE of what it was.

Are there times where I can get a little hot headed and will rip into someone regardless? Yes, because I'm human and we all like to defend things we cherish.

But as you well know, being someone who does it themselves, there are going to be people who hate things to just hate it. Or to just go 'Wha, it's bad' to get a reaction out of someone. That's why I told @Arlette to just ignore people like you, people like Val, and people like Serpent. Because no matter what we do or what we say, you're going to be more happy we interacted with you and gave you something to argue back against.

So enjoy that bit of interaction, Cow.

It's the last from me you're ever going to get.

You can put people on ignore all you want, it's your default response to literally anyone that deviates from "XIV is perfect" in this subforum. (This is also like the third time that you've pulled the "I have you on ignore but I'll reply this one time and never again!" on me.)

The stupid thing is, most of us have had perfectly good discussions about parts of the game - good or bad - and it's only when a couple of you come barging in with, "No you guys are just trolls!!" that everything goes to crap.

The only person that's overly critical about things in general is Val, and he's that way about every game so I just kinda give it a pass since it's not hating on one thing or another. The rest of us are just here talking and for some reason you just can't allow that.

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I remain convinced that they saw a lot of the almost universal good press that 14 was getting across the internet since Shadowbringers and, whether out of some weird tribal obligation to try and take down the game because WoW was a joke at the time (And still kind of is imo) or because they just wanted to be contrarians, decided that they must dedicated their online hours to hating something on a subforum of a website that nobody besides them, and the 4 other people they are constantly spinning around in a circle with agreeing about everything, actually visits.

I've played XIV since ARR dropped, I give it constant kudos for things. It's still probably my favorite all-around MMO that I come back to and get other people into whenever I can.

The problem is that you're so invested in the game-vs-game crap that you can't even have a simple discussion on something without turning it into the same shitshow of WoW-hate every single time.

Other games exist, it's fine for people to like them, to compare them, to prefer one over another for one thing and prefer the other for something else. It's only in the world where you think that the games are warring religious factions that this is something bad.

[Grinning Serpent]

Yeah but as long as the houses are as limited as they are, I understand wanting them to reserve housing for active people.

Ain't there some guy on JP servers that owns multiple whole ass wards?

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Val and Serpent, especially, have shown time and again that XIV could be a gift from the great gods themselves and they'd STILL undo their flys to piss on it.

The more refined and better a product is, the more likely flaws and errors are to stand out. If you're reading an essay and it's full of misplaced apostrophes and typos, you aren't going to notice a dangling participle or someone changing tenses three times in two sentences.

But if you're reading an essay that's cogent and well-written, you are *definitely* going to notice they wrote their instead of there, and what's more, you're going to wonder how that error slipped in (and escaped notice on proofreading) when the rest of the essay is so well done.

A poorly made game will be played and abandoned. People won't even talk about it, except maybe as a footnote somewhere. It's the games that are good but have significant flaws that get lots of discussion. This has applied to WoW at several points in its life (often thanks to Blizzard not exactly being the most even-handed developer), and it applies to XIV too.

FFXIV is a great game. So that makes questionable design decisions stand in stark contrast to the rest of the otherwise excellent game.

If you want a concrete example comparing our lord and savior to the great satan: WoW has fucking phenomenal outdoor zones and activities to do. Dragonflight is the latest and greatest example of this and shows a clear iterative process, but even going back to Warlords of Draenor, there's stuff to do and see in the zones. You're always being sent out, every day, to go do stuff in the open world. And it's not spawned in on command for you, it's interacting with the open world. Go find this monster, who wanders around in this area, and kill them while riding that clefthoof you tamed a few days ago. It's not exactly gripping, but it's something. It means you're briefly not camped in a city or dungeon or raid for a little while.

On the other hand, WoW has really fucking shit dungeons and raids. FFXIV is just flatly better, without reservation. I do think EW has gone too far with mechanical rigidity (I especially think the 2 minute meta and the excessive prevalence of body checks is a huge detriment to design space and feel), but even with those flaws it still absolutely dogfucks anything WoW has on offer, past or present.

We can then compare and suggest, maybe FFXIV should try to incorporate some of WoW's gimmicks to freshen up their outdoor zones and give players to spend a lot of time in them that isn't robotically following hunt trains or gathering, and maybe WoW should look at how FFXIV dungeons and raids are done and take lessons from them (I think WoW dungeons and raids are usually fine mechanically, but the UX is just absolute shit compared to FFXIV.)

[Granyala]

and also favorably arguing that the WoW Token is good.

Ever since I became a working adult, many moons ago, I really do not care about the subscription fee for my kitten.
Even when I was mostly inactive for months, only logging in once week for my custom deliveries.

I guess it's mostly kiddos that like the WoW token because pocket money is sparse. :'D

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I mean, "WoW has nothing to do." is another one of those weird memes that lives in this subforum.

Every MMO has a time when you will be raidlogging.
Games simply aren't real life, if you hardcore it, you will end up running out of meaningful stuff to do.

Personally, I never minded the ebb and flow of content. Gives one time to play other stuff.

[Ghost of Cow]

Ever since I became a working adult, many moons ago, I really do not care about the subscription fee for my kitten.
Even when I was mostly inactive for months, only logging in once week for my custom deliveries.

I guess it's mostly kiddos that like the WoW token because pocket money is sparse. :'D

It depends, some people like the feeling of in-game currency being worth something "real". (See how useless gil is in XIV)

On the other hand, the WoW token killed my desire to make gold in-game because now it had a real, set value. You made 5000g? Oh, that's like 92 cents, congrats.

[Grinning Serpent]

Ever since I became a working adult, many moons ago, I really do not care about the subscription fee for my kitten.
Even when I was mostly inactive for months, only logging in once week for my custom deliveries.

I guess it's mostly kiddos that like the WoW token because pocket money is sparse. :'D

It's not really about the money so much as principle, to me. I feel like if I'm only logging in every other week for a few hours here and there, charging me $15+ a month is just ridiculous. Given that tokens also quickly put a lot of RMT activity out of business (because why would you buy from some shady Chinese org if you can just buy direct from the developer?), it sure seems like an obvious solution to me.

I suppose you'd need Blizzard to cough up the data, but even with WoW tokens, I'd be willing to bet a fair bit of money that their subscription totals remained quite healthy anyway. It takes a considerable amount of effort to earn the gold necessary to buy a token (you need to understand how to play the AH and be willing to put in the effort to do it!), and most players especially on the "casual" side just aren't gonna do that.

I also kind of like the idea that you could, for example, form a map group to funnel gil into someone that can't afford to spend real money on continuing their subscription. I've bought game time for guildmates and even some randoms (along with fantasias, mounts, and other random goodies) many times throughout the years I've played XIV. Being able to just give them the gil to buy a game token, instead, takes out the kind of awkward "buy game time card on storefront, take phone screenshot, send screenshot with codes to recipient" steps involved in "gifting" someone game time.