Dev Tracker - Discussion

It’s funny because I just mentioned that in the post above it if you just scrolled up.

Still you can’t predict nor confirm veridical projections of income from addiction alone.

Furthermore, I believe we all remember when they decided to sell wardrobes for monthly subscription the rage quit fest went on for a week or so then all bought them with a huge smile on their faces asking for more.

A monthly subscription model to get extra “fixed” Gil on the side won’t break the game, they kind of did this with ambuscade to keep subs alive...

Ability to earn via Ambuscade, is quite different from selling.

As far as wardrobes, they're following the standard handbook for "making money on an MMO"

Rule number 2 of ALL mmo is make too much inventory, to sell more space.

Not to mention it would invalidate their entire ToS to allow paid unbans, making any ban they hand out wrongful to begin with.

Ambuscade is a way for SE to keep subs active.
So is wardrobes
So is login points and free logins and stupid weekly RoE
Whispers:“So is monthly bonus Gil if they feel like it”
Actually the whole “monthly updates extravaganza” can fall under subs maintenance and up keep.

Drug cartels would beg to differ. Casinos would beg to differ. Hell, *** HBO would beg to differ. Addiction has been quantified and used as the basis of business for hundreds of years if not longer.

If SE was truly running its business purely on the results of addiction, then they would have had more mini-expansions for a charge like A Shantotto Accession, etc. along with things like these new mounts being obtainable from a cash shop. They've run a business built on our addictions just enough so that they can't ever be called pushers. Hell, they didn't mind us throwing our lives away at Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden until it generated bad press for them.

tl;dr- plenty of people make a living off of other people's addictions. Its one of the oldest business models out there. Be certain of the fact that they WANT you tripping out to DTs when your internet goes down and you miss an Omen run.

1 or 2 other MMOs have "Jail Servers" where they specifically let cheaters all play together and do whatever the hell the they want. So the precedent is there. It's probably a tricky undertaking though. Admittedly I don't know all that much about it, but I do know a lot of people would not only happily pay (amount of money) for an additional "strike" and/or pay double sub fee to play on a server where you can openly cheat with no consequence (at least for a while).

Not so sure you really understand the meaning of the word “quantifiable” but I digress.

The straw man in all that is you’re so adamant that the sole reason how they build their business empire (without providing any evidence) is an immeasurable factor that fails to even predict future growth to any legitimate business model...

Some even went on to paint supply:demand as “addiction” lol.

You have your reasons to call it addiction and I have mine to play this game for it’s social aspects and enjoyable experience (to me that’s smart marketing and a healthy business model that lasted for 15 years and became the highest profit to them) what’s your evidence?

P.s all the mentioned examples (cartels and what not) reminded me of The infamous debates back in the day when people tried to explain their homophobic tendencies by equating beastality and pedophelia to lgbt... kinda gross I know but perfect fit for a straw man.

They built their business empire by having truly amazing games that revolutionized gaming and built them a devoted fanbase. Even XI in it's early days was an amazing game that took a lot of people by storm. XIV was a flop that cost colossal amounts of money and was only made viable by completely taking it offline, spending additional colossal amounts of money, and turning it into a WoW clone. It can't even keep subs consistant now.

They are 'maintaining' their empire by throwing things at the wall and slowly losing what they've made. It takes a long time to piss away that much good will, but trust me, they're working on it.

If you were to say squaresoft was revolutionary and inspiring company in 2002, I would certainly agree without a second thought. They lost much of what made them great, their best devs and creators are aging out and their merger did nothing for the quality of their products. They're replacing game quality with addiction, but they don't have the marketing potential or market share to sustain that model.

Blizzard is 5 years younger, also went through a merger, and has twice the employees but 40x the yearly revenue and 6x the net worth. Pretending SE are gods because they keep this MMO online is laughable.

You'd have to be high to not see all the businesses that do lol. Just type addiction into a search bar and you'll see plenty of ways to monetize. Hell just look up the semi current lootbox controversy

Apparently you use “quantifiable” to mean something else?

And trust me, no matter how high one gets.. on this forum with the quality of debates that gets presented every now and then... you’d definitely sober up in a matter of seconds.

Perhaps you forgot you had a second part to that statement... whether people quantify it or not successful businesses have been built upon addiction. Though I'm sure EA has been pretty good at quantify it given how much they'd been changing up where their profits come from

I didn’t know I needed to be that spesefic when discussing a major company, but if it helps .. yes Square Soft was part of the discussion.

And a small hint, I’m not that interested in getting validation, I simply like to debate/analyze same as you.
Yet the futility of it all (and I say in it general), makes me refrain most of the times From doing so.

Far from it, second part affirms that you can’t gather data and project veridically a business model off just “addiction”, that’s a fallacy if only stated that way.

since we're going down this trail-

if you want to know how SE quantifies our addiction, they likely do it based on active hours of gameplay. So they, if they so desire, can monitor if average hours/day of a toon being active increases or decreases over time, thus "quantifying" addiction. They can then further "compartmentalize" that addiction if they so chose by judging where the most characters are active at one time doing specific content. This in turn would factor in where future development dollars are spent, fueling our addiction.

A casino purposely will place frequent win-rate,low dollar-amount, slot machines right at the entrance to the slots area to lure in players. Then, once they get that dopamine rush of a 5 dollar win on an auto-slot, they move in to the 10 dollar buy-in slot machines with a lower win rate. Seeking that same dopamine rush, the gambler keeps playing but she's now further in past the cheapo gimme machines.

A drug dealer will monitor what potency his product needs to be in order to maintain customers coming back while still maximizing profits. He won't sell an overly-potent product for no reason when he could cut it and thus sell more at the same price, assuming the final potency is enough to keep his customers from seeking another dealer. Factors like competing products can force this businessman to improve the quality of his product, but barring outside forces, there is no reason once the dealer has reached the minimum amount of addiction necessary to thrive.

Is what SE is doing right now really that different from the last example? They aren't actively seeking to increase the player base outside of former players (again, playing on that addiction sense, pulling at our heartstrings of nostalgia for when we were younger), they're really only looking to keep the playerbase they have paying every month. So they've sought out the minimum amount of actual content that keeps us paying. The result was Ambuscade paired with 1 long-term project annually.

There's nothing else in the MMO market that works like FFXI regarding so many things that they really don't have competition. I know myself and the majority of long-term players that I know don't plan on seeking another game when FFXI finally does die- our online gaming experience will die with it. That gives SE incredible power over a large segment of their customer base. Keep it on life support, throw us a cookie now and then just to keep those subs active, and rotate in an extra 5% droprate in some random event monthly.

Sounds like we're getting a hell of a lot more baking soda than we should be.

Using your own narrative, SE would’ve pulled the plug long ago...
The amount of “active” players over the years wouldn’t even be worth their time let alone care for any development.

Aside from the technical issues that they will face to separate logs based on who is “active” and who is “afk” (also who is real and who is automated) it would deter them from using such method as an indicator, even using chat frequencies isn’t an indication let alone commutable in a decent timeframe.

Even if magically they “could” it wouldn’t be called “addiction” and certainly wouldn’t constitute as an indicator for success.
Subs and direct feedback on official forums and social attachment to linkshells is more verdical to implement into their business model than anything else.
Heck even linkshells community was a thing before they turned it off... and now they’re looking into more “edgy” ways to connect people together in the last dev post.

It’s a social game, people log for various reasons and more often than not it’s not because they have the urge to “play”.. but that’s my own Projection.

As for the examples you used.. I’ve said it before but eh:
You simply can’t equate two different categories (one is legitimate the other is illegal) and call it a “good” example.
That’s a fallacy.

I can't believe this is even a discussion. Of course this game could be quantified as an addiction, you pay a sub and play for hours and hours a month because something in the game gives you that rush and you keep seeking it. Every mmo is addicting. It's the entire business model. They clearly consider what will keep us playing longer, or we would never see any time gated content introduced.

Of course it’s a discussion..
MMOs got a social component to it and that alone is enough to blur the lines between what’s addictive and what’s not.
I’m sorry that you feel the urge to log and get a “rush” from game, but saying it’s quintified as addiction (what does that even mean?) is wrong for the various reasons discussed above.
You completely reversed the argument... unless you wanted to say “qualifies” instead of quantified, which is a different topic.

Is there a TLDR anywhere?

Katriina goes crazy and fights the entire thread for the last 3 pages over what an addiction is and how apparently no one has every marketed it. Some gave up others continued. Someone else hates botters for the couple of pages before that. And then we actually had some dev tracker discussion

Blatant lies.
Yet..I’m not expecting someone with an ego that is inversely proportional to their Logic to understand..
TL;DR:
Devs expressed their intentions to do a mass ban, some “cheaters” freak out over someone expressing “their” hatred towards cheating (and why he quit the game because of it) granted it’s somewhat exaggerated then cheaters blame game design of being “addictive” for why they “cheat” and convinced themselves that that’s how economy works then I ended up being the crazy person for simply disagreeing with their view.

This thread reminds me of ye good ole days. We've got drama, botting, and insulting others IQ, but where are the NM's to claim?!

You merge a developer with a publisher and drop most of the publisher except for the IP, yeah they're going to turn it to ***.

Then again I wouldn't cite sheer popularity for success, but I can see why one would.

Yes. 180m 3 char = 60m per char. It may seem a lot for soloers, but its not a lot by today's endgame player standard.

I make roughly 50-60m a month playing VERY casually. I can only play on Friday and Sat, so I would log on 1-2 days per week doing ambuscade VD for about 2hr or dyna D.

Last month I farmed about 220k hallmarks just by doing VDs with a casual lifestyle. Obviously we farmed hallmarks a bit more efficiently than avg players. We tend to try to push VD kill speed below 5-6 min, and in general takes less than 20 min to gather a pt of 6/6. You will never see me sit in town shouting for a brd for 40 min etc, and queue line is almost always short. So it's possible to spam A LOT of VD in 2hr.

You can probably argue that botters aren't playing, so in theory I can probably farm 120m a month instead of 60m if I bot AND play. However I am already nearly capped with HQ and +3 at this point without botting. Besides raetic daggee hq which is never on ah anyways, or wsd DM augments, there is nothing I can buy in game that would make my cor a stronger dd at this point.

So bot or no bot, it's pretty much the same in the end. Botting may get you there faster, but for people that's been active it's the destination that will eventually come.

When it comes to Endgame though, the real advantage of a player once that destination is reached is still team work skill, ffxi common sense and being familiar about the job. And those-simply-dont come with Gil.

So my argument is still the same. Botters have the advantage of reaching the destination of capped hq a bit faster, but none botters aren't far behind. Ultimately the player that performs best are the one with every little things that adds up to a job's performance: skill, knowledge, experience, team works, niche optimization etc. And you do need to be actually playing the job to gain those things.

If leaders don't value the skills that I listed above, then I would leave the ls, personally. Not worth playing with people who doesn't care about members who put the effort into better performance.

Who dafuq keeps pc running all night for a month just to get 180mil while afk when you can farm that in 1-2 days.

Yeah, he doesn't really understand how much potential there really is. He's assuming JUST sparks for one account, which is about what you'd get in 30 days.

Cap every 6 hours = 120m + 12 gain monies, yeah thats close enough.jpeg

That's give or take what a Dragoon sparkbot would pull in from an adoulin zone.

168m(assuming 1m per hr for gain exp) a month is also very doable if you merc, or trio box vagary/delve.

At one point in my life I made 10m per hr from aeonic merc. So that's 17hr of gameplay, 17hr a month isn't a lot for most people.

I just don't do anything except ambu these days, and only do group play on weekends, so my income is comparably low for being too casual. But I wouldn't be surprised if endgame player thats more active make gil 3x faster than me.

Either way, what I said isn't changed a bit regardless of actual bot gil gain. Even if I bot, what would I gain? Toss another 300m for DM hoping a wsd +10 magically pop? They may not. At the cost of keeping a pc on 24/7 I don't see it being worth it.

I'm already sitting on a DD slot pretty much every ls event. So it's not like people care that that I gain 5 wsd from dm or not, lol.

I don't really care who bots, who sells, who buys, or at what price. This thread is for discussion of dev tracker entries.

man id pay for my first chars to be unbanned.

[Mod Edit: Fixed quote because OCD - AnnaMolly]

I buy from you because i'm too lazy to keep trying to HQ for myself. I also never SELL anything to my linkshell, they supply the mats and i do the crafting. NQ or HQ, the item is theirs for no charge !!!