Dev Tracker - Discussion

I really like this statement. Games like XI are very few and far between because companies recognize that they're niche and by extension less profitable. FFXI's devs have done a lot to maintain its appeal to our tiny niche for decades, when they could have instead evolved to be as bland as any other game in the genre.

It's supply and demand. The supply of games like Final Fantasy XI is almost nonexistent. The demand is low as well, but clearly not as low as the supply. I think they're well within their rights to charge good money for a rare specimen of a game. If they were charging too much but there were alternatives to choose from, we could choose those instead. But we don't.

Yeah folks asking for FFXI to be Free To Play instead of subscription have no idea...

FTP games inevitably end up way more expensive then subscription based games as the developers end up hinging gameplay on pay to play / pay to win micro-transactions. The "monthly" cost becomes 0, but then the necessary microtransactions to participate in high end gameplay come out to be $30 USD or more a month, sometimes hundreds.

Take an event like sortie, it's a once a day recharge on the entrance item for 60min. A microtransaction enabled event would have the same daily timer, but instead the drop rates of everything would be quartered and then they would have a "loot boost" that would put the drops rates to what they are today. That boost would cost you 50 unicorn farts per use, and you get those unicorn farts by spending magical diamonds, only purchasable in the store. Or they would have the entrance item be on a three to five day recharge, with the unicorn farts enabling it to be done every day.

That is the kind of abusive mechanics you get with any "Free to Play" game. They inevitable always turn into Free to Play, but Pay to Win / Pay to Progress, because the company needs the consistent month over month cash inflow. Subscription games always end up cheaper in the long run because the monthly costs are known up front and no incentive for abusive mechanics.

I hope we need Kupo Farts for Prime Weapons.

A really good example of microtransaction hell is Lost Ark. Really nice looking game with good play mechanics. Going through the story and leveling up is pretty painless, then you get to "end game" and all hell breaks lose. See the game has a per-character weekly limit on currency earned and that limit is stupidly small, so you end up needing six fully leveled and geared characters to farm the currencies so that one of them can participate in "end game". Making it worse, the FTP limits on upgrading stuff are atrocious, but can be bypassed by buying a specialized currency from the cash shop. Bypassing those limits is mandatory to participate in "end game" content, and by mandatory I mean your going to be booted from that content if you are not "keeping up".

This is how gear upgrades work, the base item is cheap but insufficient. You use one currency to "roll" on an abysmally low chance for an upgrade, earning this currency is capped per-week. You can use a cash-only currency to buy more of this upgrade currency for more chances at upgrades. You need many upgrades for the gear to be usable in end game content. With pure FTP it would take you well over a year worth of capped weekly farming to upgrade gear that is obsoleted in six months.

The developers have very cleverly created an environment where the players are pressured to spend money to participate in high end play, but don't have to pay anything to sniff flowers and goof off. The amount of time / money required to do end game content is pretty insane with top tier folks spending thousands per year.

Diabolo immortal incorporates every single pay to win microtransaction system ever conceived. A guy once went in and analyzed every system and found that there were over 50 different currency systems at work all at once. This youtube video pretty much summarizes every single type of abusive micro transaction system game designers have come up with to date, and makes it pretty evident that any free to play game ends up being far more expensive than a subscription based model because you constantly need to input money get any kind of reward out of the time you invest in basic content.

Modern "Free to Play" games reminds me of this scene from Wolf of Wall Street.

That's really eye-opening. I knew it was bad, but I didn't realize just how many ways they con you.

Because FFXI is such an equipment-focused game, I watched that video while imagining the variety of ways in which FFXI could easily have fallen into every one of these traps. Indeed, I wouldn't doubt if the mobile reboot planned for FFXI would have been exactly Diablo Immortal's model.

Whenever someone tries to toss their pity at me because the mobile XI was cancelled, I always tell them how on the contrary I'm very happy it was. Honestly, I'd be OK if this was it for FFXI. Because if they did try to revive it for their own agenda now, they'd figure out some way to butcher it.

i personally hope ffxi dies a slow painful death making all of you suffer as much as possible.

literally insufferable watching you post "LOL IF YOU CAN'T AFFORD IT DON'T PLAY"

who *** cares, the whole point of the argument is that the effort put in by the people selling you the product for $13($20) is far less than any other $13 subscription from any other game producer on the planet and you all *** know that.

instead of just admitting it though you make up some weird *** arguments and move the goal posts to africa.

shut the *** up with your shitty rationalization of how you spend your money, you're doing it because you invested and you're addicted. if you were a new player you wouldn't make the same choice. man up and admit it. i'm paying for ffxi because i'm invested, i'm not delusional enough to think that i'm getting anywhere near the UNBIASED VALUE for my money as i would be paying for a similar service though

I personally get more hours of enjoyable content from my FFXI sub than any other available mmorpg out right now, If that wasn't the case I wouldn't be paying for it and playing it.

Reeeeeeeeee all you like.

One of the best parts in the video comes just after 20:40 where he lists and explains how every different currency system in the game exists and interacts with one another. FFXI's subscription model is good. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Paying for Wardrobes sucks, but at least they and the expansions and add-ons function over the entire account. Learning that some games don't even give players that courtesy makes me appreciate XI's model even more.

This video makes me angry for all the right reasons, and actually makes me feel slightly less annoyed about FFXI's extra wardrobe's system. At least you know what you're paying for. That video has another video attached that explains there are two types of legendary crests and how the one you buy from the shop is the only one that will let you sell the items you get, but the other (that doesn't let you) looks exactly the same, and can also be bought with real money.

That is some deceptive, manipulative BS right there. I played the original Diablo, but I wouldn't play Diablo Immortal no matter how "fun" it is. Had I installed it, I would have uninstalled the second I saw that beginner's bundle. The gaming industry has fallen so far into this trap and South Park predicted it years ago. The players with gambling issues are the main victims in this, these games are made purposely to take extra hundreds, if not thousands from them without a care in the world.

Why don't you shut up reprobate?

He's addicted to the dopamine rush he gets from bashing a 20 year old video game.

There was actually an addendum to this where an even more insidious monetization scheme came out in the woodworks that he hadn't realized because it was SO hidden, so ingrained deeply in the game's very core mechanics and covered up by every other sub system, that only by paying money would you ever even know it exists. Non-paying players, or those "filthy free to play" players, would be forever completely oblivious to the fact that it even existed, or that they were getting scammed by it. That is... unless they ever tried to actually sell their drops on the market board.

This one is only 6 minutes long. I highly encourage you to watch it if you watched the first. It's short, and it's a bit of a mind blower.

I mean, Diablo Immortal was created with the Chinese market in mind, right? Predatory freemium models like that are commonplace there and for some reason players vastly prefer it over premium models, from what I understand.

It's just mind-boggling to us because we aren't the original target demographic. Western players are just a bonus cash cow.

The Chinese market is either ignorant or been trained to think this is the best way to go. They are probably smarter with their money, too. Just because one market prefers a certain way of doing things, doesn't make it the right way to go, otherwise Blizzard would only release it in China, but this is a game with the world's market in mind. These practices are extortionate and I'm glad some countries banned it.

Western players are just as happy to get exploited as Chinese players. We have more player and media pushback, but it's ineffective all the same outside of laws.

The Netherlands and Belgium are the exception, not the rule.

Just as happy to get exploited? I don't think so, lol. The players who spend crazy amounts of money on free to play are in the minority, but they spend more for it than if the developer had released with a one-off price for the whole game. These people either have money to burn and/or have addiction issues so they can't help themselves. The average person would spend very little, or zero, on a mobile or f2p game.

Yet these monetization models targeted at addicts are becoming more common in the F2P genre specifically because of how effective they are at extracting large amounts of cash. Blizzard has other games with loot box-esque models too. Hearthstone, for example, is their flagship online CCG. It's designed to be similar in theme to magic the gathering, but the way the card packs are monetized encourages repeat transactions as set after set is released. This is kind of the nature of card games so I can't find too much fault there, but they intentionally made it so that players cannot trade cards amongst themselves. The only way to get a specific card that you don't own is to either buy more packs and pray to the RNGeesus gods OR to disenchant other cards into a form of currency call dust (destroying them outright and removing them from your collection in the process), which can then be used to craft the card you want. The tradein ratio is pretty ***, and it's easy to destroy dozens of cards just to get a single card you don't own (rare cards cost exponentially more dust to create).

The system is designed to force microtransactions well beyond what should be necessary for a seasons worth of gameplay, and they release 3 sets a year (possibly 4 sets starting next year according to a news article I found a few weeks ago), so you have to pay the upkeep over and over and over to continue playing. They also have a seasonal battle pass system that gives bonus progress and unique rewards, and they have a plethora of cosmetic hero skins are card backs and other junk in the cash shop as well. So while it's yet another technically free to play game, if you actually want to have a GOOD deck, let alone two or three (god forbid you may want some variety), you're spending a sizable sum of money. Someone did the math and found that even if you spend three or four hundred dollars per expansion you still don't even get all the cards from that set, so it's just another example where free to play is more expensive than subscription.

Blizzard isn't the only company that's going "Free to Play" but "Pay to actually have fun" model with many of their games. Even with the lack of content updates we've been getting I still feel like the monthly sub for FF11 is one of the better investments compared to so many other things I could be choosing instead.

Quick search, via gamesindustry.biz:


Per Statista.com:


Since the above talks about new gamers; per androidauthority.com:


Averages are probably skewed because of whales, but that applies to both markets. Spending is only 6-10 bucks per month for Chinese players and over $17 dollars for US players. Though Statista says US players spend more, considering COVID, differences between income and cost-of-living I'd wager the spending values are similar in general.

Related: western multibox FFXI players spend significantly more than that per month for many years, even though it isn't even a freemium game. Premium games are also in the $70 range these days, which equals roughly 4 months of freemium for US players. So at the very least we "premium players" are likely spending even more than non-whale mobile players of any market, even if the model isn't predatory. Whales get suckered, but that's a different topic altogether.

So yeah, I'm pretty sure you're wrong.

Get help, nerd.

It's not that we want to pay less, it's that we want them to deliver more. If you look around the industry at other services being offered, SE was already behind and will soon be taking another step back.


There probably are some of us who are broke and/or cheap, but I think most people would gladly pay more money if we knew that SE was investing more of it into bringing us content.

I really want to play D4, but this is making it hard for me to want to give them any money or get anything from them without worrying it'll turn into this years later.

It's amazing to me how "far" we've come in the decade or so since D3 came out. I remember when it was released, people were whining everywhere about how you had to be online to play it and how the real money auction house was a money grab. Now, most people don't seem to care much about online only and the monetization schemes have become so much more predatory than they were then. I guess the RMAH and the endgame balancing at the time was the writing on the wall for where they were going.

Too many people "played it anyway"

Every time you do something anyway despite disliking it/something about it you're part of the problem.

Gamers are pushovers. As a whole, the audience has allowed the evolution from DLC to microtransactions to loot boxes to battle passes to whatever you would even call the abomination that is Diablo Immortal.

Despite the "Don't you guys have phones?" controversy, despite the workplace harassment, and despite the awful predatory nature of the game itself, enough people are playing it to rake in about $50 million USD per month. It's not even like there aren't other (arguably better) options out there for dungeon-delving ARPGs.

Reality is that games like Diablo Immortal make all the money. For every person outraged that the games are set up that way there's enough whales/dolphins to counterbalance and propel the games to the top of its company's financial reports.

Activision publishes massive franchises and games: Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Destiny.

Activision's leading profits come from games like Candy Crush.

It's not a shock that they continue to make them and market them. They're here to make money and make the things that people want that will make them the most of it, not to make things that we want. We tipped the fulcrum on "I better just play indie games if I want a more fair experience" long ago.

And make no mistake. If it weren't for the fact that XI were an aged dog with a very niche audience and community, it would have been monetized more as well.