Your Cost per Hour of Playing FFXIFollow

Hey all,

The point of this thread is simple: What is your cost per hour of playing FFXI?

I have played for 355 days and 16 hours, for a total of 8,536 hours.

I've played over 100 months, and even though there have been discounted months here and there, I'll go conservative and call it $12.95 per month... for a total cost of $1,295 (not including expansions, but the cost of those is easily negated by occasional discounts).

So, if my math is right... $1,295/8,536 hours... my cost per hour of playing FFXI is...

15 cents/hour!

Pretty good value, I'd say... what is your cost/hour of FFXI?

I do! Just not as often as I used to. I go through long periods of working like a crazy person, followed by a few days of unwinding, during which time I try to play some games.

Dinged 99 on pld tonight!

lol, my playtime is something like 1240 days played. I never logged off so it just accumulated indefinitely for years.

Dang Vlor! Even afk you've been online 3 1/2 years! I'm only at 221 days >.> Its hard to calculate mine, I started in like 06 but I've since taken several breaks some up to a year at a time. So my 221 days is spread over 7 years o.o

Edited, Feb 22nd 2013 9:05am by TikkaofLakshmi

Depending on how old you are, how long you've been playing, and how much education you have, it's very likely that some people have spent more time playing XI that they have been in school. I know it's true for me.

(Ballpark figures should that I have spent about 20,000 hours in school to get my college diploma. I am quite confident I have more than that in playtime in FFXI, if I added up all my various characters. 20,000 hours is roughly 840 days of playtime)

And then people wonder why we're so serious about this game...

Back to the OP: I'm at about 0.05$ an hour from my estimates. MMOs are by far one of the cheapest form of entertainment I know! (And I've said so for years)

Edited, Feb 22nd 2013 12:18pm by Docent42

My cost/hour would have been lower, but I didn't play much at all during the first year after FFXIV launched.

This definitely points out the minute financial impact of paying a monthly subscription fee. Sure, free to play is free to play, but even if you don't buy anything from online shops (I never do), you still pay a price in terms of gameplay disadvantages. For example, in Guild Wars 2, I've got a ton of chests that I'll never be able to open, because I'm not going to buy keys for those chests through the online shop. In FFXI, I can open any chest I find without needing to pay real money.

My philosophy on this matter has always been, a little from a lot is better than a lot from a little.

Considering the context is the free-to-play, pay-to-win model of access, my guess is that F2P games tend to have more content updates than FFXI. So with the F2P games, there's more content, even though some of it isn't accessibly unless you pay for it, thus "a little from a lot". With FFXI, you could access everything in the game for the flat rate of subscription, but it has seen relatively little new content given the age of the game, thus "a lot from a little".


This is a terrible argument for anything. It's a fairly meaningless statistic that's simply meant to sound extraordinary. It's fun to compute, but ultimately doesn't convey any truly useful information. If you really wanted to compare subscription based MMOs fee structure to F2P, you should take whatever amount you pay for a monthly subscription in FFXI and find out what you would be able to access in some of the more popular F2P MMOs if you spent the same amount of money each month for it. Would you still get the same amount of enjoyment from the F2P and spend as much time logged into it? If so, would the answer be the same if you spent less money each month on the F2P game?

My guess is that it's at least partially psychological, in that people who play the game make an actual investment toward it. With a F2P game like Guild Wars 2, there's no investment required beyond buying it. Not once does the gamer even consider playing more often to justify the investment (not that this is a conscious thought gamers have, but I believe it's a factor, on some level).

Also, there's just something about F2P games that make them feel a bit different than P2P games. I think the problem is that the games seem incomplete for those who don't run to the cash shop to buy extra items/level access/etc. That kind of game seems like a turnoff to more hardcore gamers who'd prefer an actual merit-based reward system as much as possible. Hardcore gamers are more likely to form the nucleus of communities that give games staying power.

Started 12/19/2004, paid basically non-stop from the first month after that until 2010, so 72 months, only paid about half of the last three years, but accounting for the time I had two accounts open it'd basically work out to full years, so 108 months, approximately. Accounting for leap days that gets approximately 78888 hours, at ~$13.95 (basically always had at least one mule per account), so $1506.60 (which is about how much my new computer cost after the extra ******** work ).... /hour? that can't be right

No idea what my actual playtime is, though, since the last time I posted itwas last january, where I was around 700 days of play time, though I have no idea whether that was just Theytak, or if it included my other characters too...