bizarrelygreen5177: "Just to annoy you specifically"

I strive to become this kind of petty lol

TheJoYo: the most annoying part is you can't even install the game without an active sub once you buy the game. So even when I am tempted to resume playing, when I get to the point where I can't even install the game to see if it will run properly I hit a feels bad moment. Uninstalling the 100mb installer is a lot easier than pulling out my credit card just to start the download.

Meanwhile I can start a new character on WoW or ESO any time I want without having to pay again.

SilverMoonling: The unfortunate fact about the free trial in ff14 is that one of the major reasons it has limitations on features within it is due to bot prevention. Square Enix is not huge on the whole gil selling culture and this is stated as much within the ToS. You can and will get banned for purchasing gil for real money, and they frequently ban accounts that are selling gil. If you have a free trial account with less restrictions, or basically make an easy way to create free accounts through a weird purchasing loophole, that leaves something for gil sellers and botters to exploit. Heck, the reason why free trial accounts can't participate in PVP anymore is because... People were botting in PVP using free trial accounts.

It actually took A WHILE before Square actually started doing something about botting as well. People had complained about it, but they thought it was a non issue due to botting being specifically within the NA and EU servers, they don't run into this issue in JP. It took Yoshi P actually coming to the NA servers for the first time before they actually DID something about botting issues.... Because he got a tell trying to sell him gil within ten minutes of being logged into one of the NA servers.

TLDR: People using bots to exploit features and selling gil is a major reason as to why we can't have nice things.

sirsquid577: Something that could work is every player gets a character they create that's marked as 'free trial'.

tylerjones9479: I'm one of two players in a trio who pays for the game, our third friend is free trial only and has 700 hours because he does every crumb of content he can get his hands on

VeshSneaks: What I'll say is they 100% have a way to cut you off from that stuff already. If you pay for an extra retainer, but then let that subscription lapse, you just lose access to them. They're still there, but they're greyed out in the retainer menu. Plus the mechanism they have to wall those things off from trial players in the first place could just be... turned back on. It's 100% because people will pay just to keep their account active. The fact you can lose your house, and everything that was in the house, if you let your sub lapse, is insane.

Icycrits: This is an incredibly good point at 2:36. Even if you are an ardent FFXIV defender that thinks "well they're a business, they have to make money!" it doesn't take away from the fact that this free trial is essentially training free trial players to never give Square Enix a dime which in turn hurts the game.

Why subscribe to the game and maybe pay for an expansion and a monthly sub or two for a raid tier if you know you can just wait a couple years for them to eventually add it to the free trial?

Moreover, the limited features when it comes to socializing such as not having /tell makes it less likely to have less interactions with the community which makes people treat the game more like a single player game. Which means, they play the story, then they leave. I know it's probably to curb bots and bad actors, but perhaps there's a solution to that without hurting potential player retention.

jamesevarts3: swtor is really good for that

pedroxas8345: This was a massive “feels bad” moment for me too, so I completely agree. I’d been taking the base game MSQ at my own pace because I basically had unlimited time on the free trial, and the moment I realized I’d have to start paying, I suddenly felt pressured to rush through everything. That honestly made the whole initial experience a lot less enjoyable. At least I had an earring with bonus XP, haha, not worth it

Merusdraconis: Yeah, I think it's a weird decision, especially now that the free trial goes up to Shadowbringers, that there's no way to roll back to the free tier. It's utterly bizarre that when people are really loving the game and excited to buy it for real, fans will tell them to NOT buy the game until the very last moment. And people who played the game during ARR or Heavensward, when it was clunkier, don't get to see what they've done with it. It's a real problem!

TurinTurambar200: There are unfortunately simply irreversible things that subscribing unlocks, which can't be locked back away of your in a free trial. For example, if you start an Free Company, or buy a house, or have retainers, or have over 300k gil in your inventory, at least some of that literally can't be rolled back. This isn't even to think about all the other things like what happens to jobs a trail character can't access, gear they're not supposed to have equipped, areas they're not supposed to have access to.

XIV also isn't an alt friendly game due to the sheer length and mandatory nature of the MSQ. If you fully lose access to a character that spent time as subscribed and have to start a new trial character, which some people have suggested, that'd be just defacto starting a new trial account anyways.

People are thinking of the trial as if XIV is a f2p game and subscribing is the "premium" version when that's just not what it is.

All in all, addressing this issue, while it would be nice of them, would be a bunch of time and effort spent on figuring out a way for players to spend less money on the game. There's just zero incentive to do so.

alestrius: I think the problem with reverting a player to f2p status after subbing isn't even necessarily coding issues (though I'm sure there's some of that that would be surmountable if not for what I'm about to get into), but rather, the consequences of reverting.

If someone has retainers, sure, that's easy to just block them off and treat it like someone who's stopped paying for their retainers on a paid sub.

But what if that now-F2P person was in an FC? Do you kick them? What if they're the leader of it, and leader cannot be transferred (since it cannot be transferred until 30d have passed), do you disband the FC entirely and kick out every member?

What if the player has a house, do you evict them immediately and open it up for new buyers?

What if the player has farmed a few million gil (or even any amount over the 300k)? Do you just delete that gil?

What if the player has progressed beyond post-ShB? Do you remove all progression, including things they cannot access on the free trial (minions, mounts, etc.)?

What if they've sent or received mail? Do you delete it? What about if it has items attached?

What if they're leveled beyond the free trial level cap? Do you de-level them?

What about when they want to run content that they could run the day before just fine, but suddenly they're no longer allowed to do? (Which, yes, is predictable, but is still going to feel bad.)

No matter what the answers to the above questions are, there will ALWAYS be a Feels Bad moment for someone who has subbed and removed their free trial limitations. Making someone pay a sub, in my eyes at least, is arguably less of a Feels Bad moment than something like deleting the progress they were able to make in that month, though your mileage may vary. (Also, before someone says "remove all the restrictions entirely!" -- a bunch of those got added after the free trial was created because it was being abused so badly by bots. Not exactly a great idea to give them free rein again.)

In an ideal world, none of those things would be issues, and YMMV on whether you think potentially having items/gil/levels/an FC/a house deleted are a worse Feels Bad than Cannot Play At All, but I don't really think there's a perfect solution to the problem. Though if some smarter person than me has a way to solve all those problems, I'm certainly open to hearing it. :p

coatgoat5462: A free/member split in FFXIV would go such a long way in keeping some servers alive, but there probably is a reason why the Trial version has its own download client. The amount of coding, min-maxing what you can and cannot keep, the warnings they must send you; it'd be something I hope they implement one day, but it's a lot!

P.Lorenz: But what would happen if you are say... level 95 and the free trial ends at 80, do you get deleveld? Do you get synched down until resub? What happens when you are in a Dawntrail area and you are restricted to ShB in free trial? Ofc there are always some ways to workaround that but as you said, more hassle to "fix" those issues than just restricting it from the start

bplup6419: The spaghetti code is impossible to untangle

Magemischiefmayhem: 1:11 to be fair, yoshi, the current head of xiv since arr, is on the gamers side for most things, (his main voiced struggles is how to please and balance gamers who like opposite things like hard or easy content) so if he could do tha to the subscription he most likely would try, but eorzea runs on spaghetti

MediArgentum: That's because it's a TRIAL, not F2P mode :D

Commander_Strider: Maybe characters made under paid can't be played unless you pay. But you can make a new free character

Ferrivia: i think that basically this is the reason why SWOTR has 3 account states, F2P, Subbed, and F2P After a sub

so that they don't have to find ways to remove this

Win32error854: FFXIV kind of can't do this, I think. The appeal of the free trial is that there is a LOT available for free, but that certain core features are locked until you subscribe. Taking away the ability to whisper or kicking you out of a guild would suck massively, but they're not going to include those things into the free trial. The way Josh describes works for some games, I used to play the Old Republic, and subscription there was more of a boost to certain things, fairly easy to disable if your sub ran out.

Sdorgo: Eve-Online reverts you to a free alpha account if your sub expires, which just locks majority of the skills and thus access to the majority of the ships/game functions. You can still keep playing with ships available to free accounts. I wish it was the same in FF14.

chuckles471: It's a free trial, the game was never meant to be free to play. People think they are the same but the are not. "Feels bad" is mostly applicable to FTP when it comes to progression, in a Free Trial if the game becomes "feels bad" because you are trying to play it FTP, then it's by design.

They don't want FTP players, it's server load for very little pay off. They don't want people farming low level content in the down time between updates letting their sub run out. They want you to stay subbed, and being able to be one few MMOs that can still do that, I don't think they would want to let go of that.

Plus anything that makes it more awkward for bots is a plus in my book.

satockery5323: To be honest, I have never felt in any way "punished" for paying a subscription while others get the free trial. The game I play at endgame is vastly different compared to the game I would be playing with the free trial. A lot of it just isn't what I'm interested in at this point, because I am so used to playing at endgame. That's just me, though, and I don't disagree that the free trial should still be accessible.

That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if something like this is in the works. Yoshi-P (director/producer) is always encouraging players to take breaks from their subscriptions, and the upcoming expansion is going to entirely change the framework of endgame content. I imagine they will take this into account at some point.

trinkeslato9598: Remember, you cant even update the game if you dont have an active sub if you have purchased the game. Free trials can do that at any point

rythiancross: The simple thing to do is have the features that paying gets you as what the base game price is and it tells you this unlocks these features. So it still allows the free trial and as square enix you also keep the bot prevention

steveaustin4118: It's a trial to tempt you in to paying once you pay you no longer need the trial

edgarlarios4718: Maaan... Imagine having millions of gil, then your paid period ends, and you basically lose it all and go back down to the free trial gil cap... Heeeeeeeeck no.

May 25 2026

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