Quote Originally Posted by DMKA
It bothers me to know that I'm paying for it when I don't feel like playing, because the monthly fee makes me feel like I HAVE to play every day or I'm just throwing money away.
12.95/month
43.1 cents/day
1.8 cents/hour

This isn't too bad.

Now let's look at another game... saaaaay FFX. I'll assume you paid 50 bucks for it when it first came out. You probbaly go back to it and play a lot. You might even have several 100+ hour saves. So let's assume you've played 300 hours. So $50 bought you 300 hours of joy. That comes out to 17 cents per hour. That's 9.4x the cost of FFXI/hr

Let's go the even more extreme route and look at FPS like Doom 3. It was 65 bucks when it came out. You can probably beat it in 20 hours. You may have done some time trials and played through it several times. However, I doubt that you played it more than 65 hours but even so let's assume you played Doom 3 for 100 hours. That comes out to 65 cents per hour. That is 36x the cost of FFXI per hour.

These games run out of content and fairly quickly. You can have easily done everything there is to do in the time frames I used to do the math with. I've got a play time of nearly 200 days. That's 4800 hours and I've not even scratched the surface of the content in FFXI.

Now granted the math above is a little unfair because almost nobody plays FFXI every hour of every day. However, I would guess that an average of 3 hours of gameplay every day (You could say 2 every weekday and several more on weekends which is the case for most). This still comes out to a measly 14 cents per hour of game play. Hell... any hours you aren't playing this game you can play other games. You aren't exactly burning money. In a very realistic sense you are actually playing for 24 hours of every day.

When you list something on the AH or leave your character outside and logged on with a bazaar they are making money for you while you are away from the game so in that respect the game is still playing itself when you are away. You don't leave FFX on overnight and wake up with a lot of money on your file.






I've said all that to say this. The cost per month for FFXI is comparable and even lower than the cost of most other games especially if they are bought right when they come out. You might not be sure you'll play FFXI that much and you are afraid to make that commitment but look at it this way. If you do enjoy the game you will easily be playing it often enough to cover the numbers I mentioned above and therefore end up paying less than what you would spend per hour on offline games. If you don't enjoy the game it sucks and all but after playing for a good 3 to 4 months you'll know if you like it or not and you can cancel your account then. You will have gotten as much time as any offline game though in only playing 3-4 months I doubt you would get as much enjoyment but hey. 12.95/month isn't very outlandish.