Leviathan.Celebrindal said:
»personally, I just question the person that chooses to pay for a game as entertainment/distraction, but then pays real world money to avoid playing that game. I won't go so far as to say 'you wrecked my game!' I just think if you don't have time to play the game, why are you playing it at all?
Interesting topic, in game theory you could call this conflicting fun perhaps.
Basically, MMOs kind of hold this carrot on the stick in front of you. Once you have that carrot, its gonna taste
sooo good, trust us.
Then you use that to get the next and the next and so on.
However, players realize pretty fast the primary dopamine rush you get is when you obtain the gear. Farming for it doesn't give a huge dopamine kick in most scenarios.
So you can get the dopamine kick much faster and much quicker by shelling out gil to buy it.
And pretty soon you realize it takes you 10 hours of shitty half afk farming to get x amount of gil, but for like 10 bucks you can buy the same amount or whatever, and even if you are earning minimum wage, that's still only like an hour of your time instead of 10...
Its easy to see how someone craving pure dopamine kicks, and not the game itself, can fall into that trap. And this is what many video games out there prey on, and what RMTs in ffxi prey on.
Typically, you see individuals who fall into these traps also posses a lot of other particular traits. Gambling and addiction issues, stuff like that.
The running theory in many circles is that these dopamine addictions rise up in people unable to get their dopamine the usual ways. Human interaction, cuddling, sex, the usual sources by which humans obtain those positive rushes in life.
Unable to obtain those for whatever reason, they turn to synthetic sources of it. Gambling. Addictive loot based games. Loot crates. Drugs. Alcohol. Etc.
Often times its been found that when people with addiction problems find community, love, affection, and human interaction, their addictions fade away and become much more manageable, supporting this theory a lot. Humans naturally will gravitate towards more 'normal' and healthy sources of dopamine rushes, of course.
If you are interested on the topic, I recommend Kurzgesagt's videos on Addiction and Loneliness on their Youtube channel, and they provide further links to studies done on the topic that are quite interesting!
If I were to summarize though:
Players who RMT and then spend gil to merc drops probably don't deserve anger, but pity. There's probably some unhappy reasons they are acting in such unhealthy ways :(