That's insane and a bit scary. $30k just for gearing at that?
If I was a retail player knowing this was going on, I think I would've just quit by now, mostly out of disgust for everything involved in those circumstances.
Then again, I know gil selling is rampant in XIV and RMT basically goes hand-in-hand with selling clears, making money, possibly market board manipulation, and people poorly writing erotic words into a chatbox. I think the one saving grace here is that we don't have some "XIV token" equivalent for real money to translate to, thus basically legitimizing RMT.
It's a little difficult to explain since the gearing rules are different, so I'll break down some of the major gold sinks for raiders in WoW:
1) Raid BoEs. These are items which only become bound to you once equipped so if you get one as a drop in a raid, you can just sell it. This gear is sometimes fantastic for prog but is on a weekly lockout so people who get the right ones can sell them for incredibly high prices. They talked about removing this in Shadowlands but it's such a big source of gold for players who get lucky that the playerbase pushed back and it's still in AFAIK.
2) Splits. WoW has personal loot for raids tailored to whatever your class can wear. Personal loot can be traded to other people who took part in the raid for a certain period after you complete it. So world first raiders will literally put a single member in with a full raid of 20-30 non RWF raiders who share their armor type and have everyone trade their personal loot to the RWF runner to maximize the chances of the RWF person getting all the pieces they need in a lockout. If the RWF raider doesn't get all their pieces, then they switch to an alt, grab 20-30 different people, and do it again. Everyone who takes part in splits gets paid in gold for their participation.
3) Consumables. There's no omnicrafters and the economy is run by the Chinese. Because no one who actually plays the game for fun really crafts the good shit, the prices you spend on raid consumables can really start to add up.
4) Misc. Depending on the expansion there can be other costs. Artifact/legendaries/etc (basically the WoW equivalent to relics which are usually pretty good gear unlike in XIV) can often cost the gold equivalent of hundreds of USD if you buy the materials to turn in for the quest off the auction house. For every alt a RWF runner has, they have to buy this shit if they're using the legendary whatever for that xpac. Adds up quickly. Not every expansion or patch has this but Shadowlands had a ton of it.
Basically being cutting edge requires large and continuous expenditures of gold.
I don't even know if major clear sellers even take gil these days, Ultimate clears cost actual money because everyone kind of knows gil doesn't matter much in FFXIV after a certain point. Xeno outright admitted he paid his crafters real money at one point for his early prog. I believe Ultimates a year or so ago cost about 1.1k for someone to pilot your character to the clear. Ucob I know cost over 1k back when it was the big thing in Stormblood to early ShB.
Gil doesn't go nearly as far in FFXIV, and after awhile no one really cares about gil. I don't think XIV token would be as effective as it is in WoW Token is in WoW.
Yeah basically this. Crafting is also mostly deterministic and straightforward to progress and you can be self-sufficient if you want. I haven't crafted in WoW in a long time but last I checked certain recipes for the good shit(tm) are RNG drops so even getting a crafter raid ready in a single profession can be a massive undertaking.
EDIT: Looks like Neverland and Aether Group 3 have finally cleared TOP 'legit' and posted POVs. One of the AG3 POVs I saw had the task manager pulled up at various points to show that they weren't using any addons. JP seems pretty split - lots of congrats and shit but also plenty of JP spergs showing up in the comments reeeing about how the clears aren't real unless the groups show all of their prog from start to finish in VOD form.
I don't have the patience to put in time reading a lot of moonrunes right now but I get the impression that the JP scene might unironically be imploding over this whole thing.
Anyway the final gimmick of the fight is a constantly recharging LB3 and it's unironically one of the coolest things they've put in this game in a long time.
