Had to make a thread about this since this has been an ongoing thing happening in pso2na. I've been playing pso2jp for many years and have experienced the game quiet thoroughly. Many players currently do not fully understand how important SG is or how to properly obtain more of it. Following that I would like to address the recent "sales" of the SG bundles that we have been getting in the past couple of weeks.
First I want to address some ways to obtain renewable SG in the JP version of the game. New outfits, body parts, outerwears all give 10 sg per piece after roughly a day with a max character limit of 30 coming out to roughly 300 potential SG per day. Daily login stamps offering SG. Casino offers 40SG for casino coins with a weekly limit. Buster quest medals also offer a weekly allowance of 80SG. PVP medals offer you yet another weekly allowance of 100SG. Loging into pso2es daily for 1sg per day and 100k exp ticket. Idola point exchange for another 100SG weekly allowance. We have the weekly rankings for time attacking in a party and solo, red box destruction, room visitation ranking, Challenge mode 1 and 2 rankings, Weekly PVP ranking all offering up to 100 SG for first place (as well as some other prizes). Lastly there is also bonus keys from campaigns or by getting lucky with your daily featured quests including Silver Magatsu (10sg), and Gold Magatsu (50sg). I may be forgetting other things but this should illustrate my point.
Next I want to address how to obtain renewable SG in the NA version. New outfits, body parts, outerwear's all give 10 sg per piece after roughly a day with a max character limit of 12 coming out to roughly 120 potential SG per day. Daily login stamps handing out SG. Weekly rankings for room visitations, red box destruction, time attacks party and solo up to 100sg for first place. The latter which has been broken for 2 weeks now as the TA has been synced to JP server and rolled over onto maps we don't have.
Titles are left off of these lists because they cannot be done multiple times over and once that dries up these are all you are left with. However JP does have many more titles available than NA which also give SG due to the content being further in.
The ways that you spend SG across the games are a little similar but this is where my major problems with the NA server come in. In the JP server there is no "Fresh Finds" tab. Instead we have a shop attendant which does the exact same thing but has 2 key differences. Firstly she has a shop dedicated entirely to meseta only transactions. Secondly all of these shops, both sg and meseta can have their stocks rerolled by paying SG. The items included in this store include the same type of items we see in the fresh finds shop. The difference with fresh finds is that it features old costumes and some small bundles with no preview windows (a thing the treasure shop does feature.) So now the player is forced into the position of obtaining the outrageously priced amount of SG for these outfits with no idea how it will even look and they are locked into a 24 hour window to do it.
Another thing that I should briefly mention here is that in the fresh finds shop they limit how many items you can purchase. So if you are a person with a lot of alternate characters like I am you've already noticed that because they decided to restrict trading on fresh finds items it's now impossible to account bind items from it. Not only do you have to pay a ridiculous price you have to then decide which of your characters you actually want to use it on! Imagine paying $20 USD to only be able to use a hairstyle on one out of 12 characters. Many of the outfit bundles here used to be included in AC scratches as well and could be obtained for as little as 200 ac scratch tickets. Many of these could just be sold on player markets for a range of Meseta often obtainable by anybody simply doing their daily or weekly missions.
Now this is where we get to the most egregious act in the game. These "SG Emote bundles" are by far the worst thing they have done. Listed price shows 760SG so let's do a little bit of math. Assuming you have no SG and you need to buy it to fit this tight 72 hour window to act. Current SG rates in AC are 1900 for 480SG next add in the 120 sg bundle twice for 500 ac a piece to bring you up to 720SG and 2 sets of the 100ac bundle for 20 sg a piece. Bringing your total SG up to 760 and the maximum AC spent up to 3,100. That's $31 USD which is half the cost of a AAA video game.
But that's not all; surely you've all seen in game that this is a "Discount". But it's not. It was released discounted. This is the same tactic Bethesda used in Fallout 76's atom shop. To quote Internet Historian regarding FO76 "They're artificially jacking up the price only to then give it a fake limited time discount in order to create a sense of urgency. That's illegal." Even when you factor in this "Discount" users are still expected to pay 2000 AC or $20 USD for these items. This is the 2nd round of this happening as well and I was hoping it would stop before this monetization got out of hand. It should be mentioned that these items were all scratch bonuses at one point in the JP server. They have since been reappearing in the 6 month long SG scratch in JP so even free to play users had a chance to obtain them.
Doing a small bit of research led me to this which states that things need to have a pre-established price before you can discount it. I'm not a lawyer so take it for what you will.
All in all, on top of gouging of combined with removal of methods to get SG, there are now usages of it which are likely illegal. I just want the NA version of this game to succeed and I'm starting to see it go down the same rabbit hole SEA pso2 suffered through. I don't wish to see this server fail like SEA's did
https://youtu.be/kjyeCdd-dl8?t=1404
I don't intend to follow up this post and can only hope the community as well as the NA team are able to see this.