Archmage Callinon wrote:
I'm not sure how you're going from "there aren't enough ways to make money at 50" to "buying gil is a-ok."
I'll grant you there's a problem making money at 50, especially with the math presented there. The game has practically no currency generation from vendor trash and presently no repeatable quests outside of leves (which are on a strict cooldown).
That probably deserves some fixing as it's an issue with the game's design.
That does not make cheating and account stealing ok.
Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of gil is going to come from stolen accounts and exploits. So by buying gil, you are supporting and financing those practices.
I'm not saying that making negative money just playing the game is acceptable, I'm saying that buying gil to solve that problem is not.
I haven't finished the entire thread (
Edit: now I have!), but I will say that I don't think he's advocating for RMT or gil/gold/currency buying.
What he has said (so far) is that the current environment pushes more and more people in that direction. Honestly, I see exactly what he is saying. At level 50 and doing dungeons for a week, I've gone from 140k (when I hit 50 from all the quests) to around 115k. That's just within one week. I could see the trend just as he can.
I don't know about him, but I wouldn't buy currency no matter how desperate things got: I simply would not resub. This isn't very healthy for a game.
Thankfully, the development team seems to be quick to react to community concerns (though you wouldn't know it from the bots spamming in the three main cities) and are now reducing repair cost.
If the reduction in repair cost is dramatic and they implement adequate daily quests within the next month or so, I don't think the FF14 RMT business will be as lucrative as the bots would have you believe.
It's actually interesting to see. My FC mates (as well as myself, admittedly) have either vocalized in chat or said something like, "Wow...what am I going to do with this gil? There doesn't seem to be any use for it."
Oh how we were wrong. And it would have been nice to continue to think that. Still a possibility with this next maintenance. Yes, gil is just something extra that I can use to purchase items to enhance my character (food), buy vanity gear, or freely teleport around the world without a concern about my virtual wallet.
At the same time I thought, "I got really excited when I was doing KSNM and saw a venomous claw drop. Maybe it isn't so bad to have a steep curve like this."
Then, I asked myself again (making most of you think I'm crazy by this point), "But I actually enjoyed doing KSNM. I didn't really have to pay for repairs on my gear in FFXI...and even when I have played games that have had that (WoW, GW2 I think), it never was a really big pressing issue on my mind."
There is a really nice area that satisfies a majority of players, I think. It's somewhere a little steeper than WoW's market but cheaper than FFXI towards the end of ToAU.
Anyways, a trend in this thread I'm seeing is that anyone who brings up an argument tangential to RMT (but not about supporting RMT) is blasted for no reason. You should read some of the points: there is logic in them. If you would like RMT to disappear, then game design needs to improve to accommodate otherwise. In short, more of the account bound gear, more ways to earn easy gil to sustain yourself on food and repair bills at 50 without resorting to making new characters will equate to less RMT problems.
Edit: Ah, someone beat me to it:
svlyons wrote:
Archmage Callinon wrote:
I'm not sure how you're going from "there aren't enough ways to make money at 50" to "buying gil is a-ok."
What is being said is that the game itself is creating a market for buying and selling gil.
The more I think about it, the less I like gear durability. If you wanted to play FFXI without needing much gil, there were ways you play it while spending little to no gil. You could simply run every where you went, and avoid paying for things like airship and ferry rides and chocobo rentals. But in FFXIV, you can't just avoid gear repairs. I suppose you could minimize what you have to repair by only wearing a weapon and nothing else. But that hardly seems like a good solution. Fancy gear is a big part of why people play RPGs. They shouldn't be discouraged from wearing gear because they're better off not having to repair it.
