An Open Letter to Yoshida-san: Please Slice One Zero Off the Housing Prices

"snip"
The introduction of housing will help to unify the perceived value of gil in each individual World. Furthermore, it has presented an opportunity for us to consider the lifting of restrictions on transfers between between legacy and non-legacy Worlds.[/INDENT]
Personal Housing

While I cannot give a specific date on when personal housing will be implemented, I can say that prices will be completely separate from free company housing, and, naturally, far more affordable.

"snip"

So when you said this you actually meant affordable as a loose term meaning they will actually cost the same and be sold as the same in the same ward? Cool story.

I don't know where to place this to be honest, so I'll place it here.

Personal Housing/FC housing being 'same' thing in same wards is NOT acceptable.

Here's why:

1.On high-population Servers such as mine (Excalibur), you have honestly had FC's waiting just to buy their own plot of land for a FC house as the demand for FC housing is far greater than the supply. A problem SE created btw....because they aren't offering enough wards to supply the demand. So now, you've made it so these same FC's that have been patiently waiting to gain access to a house+ it's perks, now have to compete with individuals for the SAME limited content.
-Furthermore, the requirements for purchase aren't the same difficulty/commitment level for both groups of people. As a FC needs to first form w/ 4+ members and then achieve rank 6. And individual only needs to obtain level 50 and complete up to a certain point in the storyline. So it's easier on the 'requirement' end for individuals to be able to purchase a home than FC's. The only 'limit' on individuals is their personal ability to make enough gil to buy a home.

2. People CANNOT level their chocobo past rank 10, nor dye it without access to housing. Since the stables are tied to housing, anyone without access to a home, is forced to either ignore this content, pay through the nose for their own space, or join a FC with a house and potentially leave their group they are otherwise very happy with, albeit homeless with. This is probably the bigger issue. Chocobo leveling, and to a smaller degree dyeing, actually in a small way affects individual character development, and therefore it SHOULD be easily accessible to all, not just the chosen few w/ access to a home/stable.

3. The implications from SE were that personal housing would be 'affordable' and 'plentiful' ....and that it most definitely would NOT put a strain on the FC housing servers....and so basically, SE backtracked on ALL of these points.

The sad fact is, most people who were interested in personal housing, just wanted their little corner of Eorzea to call their own. They wanted to be able to garden and maybe raise a chocobo. But even these 2 things, could have been handled w/o forcing the housing.

-Personal housing should have been instanced ala FFXI. Attach a ward to each city (every city has that 'path to nowhere' you should have used it).
-Create 2-3 new crafting recipes that created pots/planter boxes for personal in-home growing. Pots=non cross breeding options, but you could HQ/+items grow in them depending on soils. Planter boxes= the ability to crossbreed 1-2 things at a time. So small scale, but still workable for individuals.
-Allow chocobo stabling at either the city chocobo porters or even just at Bentbranch meadows. You could of course limit the actions people could do from these points to still make FC housing Stables the 'better option' But at least allow feeding of T. Onions for level cap breaking, and chocobo dying....maybe still allow basic training, but only your own bird, and the exp gains are less than those of FC housing.

This would have kept almost everyone interested in personal housing options happy, would have lessened the demand enough on FC plots that actual FC's could buy land instead of being pushed out by individual buyers and would have even presented options in character development, via the chocobo porters/Meadows that would allow those happy with their basic inn room, the chance to still participate in the chocobo activities of the game.

Edit: And I say this as a FC leader, that has owned a mid-sided plot in the Goblet for months, and as a player who had little interest in purchasing my own personal home (the FC house+room is good enough for me). But I see the strain and issues it's causing and am still upset by the matter.

I completely agree that the prices for personal housing are completely unreasonable and outrageous. Especially after we were promised it would be considerably less than FC housing.

That said, from a server point of view, I can also see why they elected to put them all in the same housing areas.

However! There are better ways of implementing player housing than robbing them of every gil they possess.

For example, the current requirements are that we have one level 50 Disciple of War or Magic, and be a Second Lieutenant in one of the Grand Companies. Those requirements, by themselves, take a fair amount of work to achieve. So why not have a setup where you can get a 'special writ', or something, to permit you the right to purchase land at a special discounted rate? You've already put the work in to achieve the rank... why not get an appropriate reward?

The price of housing being outrageous depends on one thing only: should housing require effort to obtain?

If no, then yes, the current prices are indeed outrageous.

If yes, then the current prices are fine because with a little effort one can easily raise the gil needed to buy an S house.

The real problem here is the lack of available plots.

They just dont care about their players. Not til those subs drop and they begin loosing money!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by RiverTams

They just dont care about their players. Not til those subs drop and they begin loosing money!

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*Checks posting history*

Ah yes, another "I want FFXI-2" player spreading bile on the forums.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Alexander_Dragonfang

"Stubborn people learn from mistakes, smart people learn from history".

SE isnt learning lol.

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And they need to. I was amused when I opened this thread, saw how old it was, and saw how many supporters the OP had. Almost 800 forum posters at that point in time. Our current equivalent thread (Urgently Change your approach) has 130.

SE are fools if they don't see the difference between then and now. Even with the rebuild, folks are walking away from this nonsense slowly but surely. The excitement has worn off and now people are seeing that while YoshiP did improve the game over what it was, it's still falling short in a lot of respects to basic expectations from the community.

Price is fine. Availability is not.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Zephyranthes

Price is fine. Availability is not.

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Absolutely wrong on prices. Availability ties to this as much as anything.

When they release the next patch, it will still be woefully under-available.

Yoshi has already stated they have over 1.8 million subscribers, so if we run a little math and use 2 million as an easy number of subscribers and 60 servers (rather than the actual 64) as the server count we yield the following:

There are 7 wards, with 30 plots per ward. There are 3 different areas per server. This yields a total number of houses at approximately 700 houses per server (at aproximately 100 houses per ward added).

Each ward added to the game adds about 6000 houses to the entire system (100 plots x 60 servers). Currently there are in the neighborhood of 42,000 total houses in the entire game. (that's forty-two thousand)

So on the topic of availability, yes, we're talking in the neighborhood of 2.1% or so of subscriptions being able to get a house (42000 plots / 2,000,000 million subs).

Here's the worse bit. When the housing is upped for 2.4, that will cover (per their estimates of doubling) plots for 4.2% of the subscriptions.

Now for some simple monetary math. If the median price of a small house is 3,000,000 gil, and there are 42,000 houses then the total amount of gil needed to buy all the houses as smalls is 126,000,000,000 (One-hundred Twenty-Six Billion).

If we assume that monetary distribution in FFXIV is something similar to the real world, and that The Team expects that everyone has about 3m gil based on calculated means, then in reality, 20,000 subscribers (1%) would share something in the neighborhood of 2 Trillion gil (numerically, 2,000,000,000,000), or something on the order of 33% according to the Wikipedia article on wealth distribution worldwide. This would yield accounts with 100,000,000 (One-Hundred Million) gil each or so.

If we take the remaining 4 Trillion gil and divy that up among the remaining 1,980,000,000 people, we get a mean wallet size of about 2M gil. This means, that the mean wallet is not actually enough to buy a house on most servers based on the assumptions made here. Those of you with from 1-10M can probably comfortably consider yourselves upper-middle-class citizens of eorzea.

If we assume this wealth distribution is reasonable (20k "rich" players), this patch was only intended to be afforded by the top tier.

The ward layouts also bear this out:
20 small
7 Medium
3 large

This is actually a similar distribution to real-world wealth distribution:
66% small
23% medium
10% large

This picture i've painted, of course, assumes some very skewed stats, such as all houses only costing 3m. The mean cost of a house (all sizes included) is actually higher. If you factor 55 million for large and 24 million for medium. This would give a mean house cost of 13,100,000 (Thirteen million One-hundred thousand). This brings the total value of all housing up into the neighborhood of 550,200,000,000 (Five-Hundred Fifty Billion Two Hundred Million). Even that's not a true cost, as i've used the median house price, but just under half of the servers (31) have the highest prices at approximately 30% higher than the numbers used.

Lastly, it's worth mentioning that these stats all assume that all houses are available to individuals, which isn't the case. The vast majority of houses are still owned by groups (Free Companies of course). In my mind, at least, this further cements the lack of concern for the wants of the player base on the whole. (namely, our own spaces, our own spaces for our stuff, and our own spaces for our plants and animals)

At any rate, the grand take-away that i mean to illuminate is that housing is completely too expensive for the average player (those people making up the vast majority of the money which square dutifully rakes in each month through subscriptions). This housing system does not serve those players in any reasonable way. It does (and is) serving to create divisive lines between the player base over gil and time investment.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm sour about the release of housing overall, and i'm not currently able to personally afford any amount of housing above a free company room. As far as play style goes I'm a collector, engaged in the daily pursuit of acquiring one of each piece of green and blue gear in the game. The problem for me isn't that i don't play enough (on the 8 month run up to the patch, i was averaging 40ish hours a week in the game. That's all i could afford and still sleep and hold a regular real-life job ) but that what i do in game isn't worth much gil. My Free Company also owns a house, which we owe to the hard work of a number of our membership, and a long struggle to acquire it (we didn't get a house until a month or two after they first came out and the prices had bottomed out)

I feel generally betrayed by Square in this respect. Initially, when housing was first discussed, Yoshi made comments to the effect that a personal house was to cost approximately 3x the amount of gil a player made by completing the story of the game once through (something like 200k if you spent nothing and always took allagan currency, putting a house in the range of 450-600k).

Square's promise to double housing for the next patch is very depressing. As a person working in IT, i can only assume that the resource constraint is a side effect of what appears to be horribly inefficient tools for the content developement team (which is supported by a number of observations about timing, content delivered, and "dev" comments, but that's for another day), as there just isn't enough content in a ward to justify any huge about of bandwidth or storage requirement. When they double the housing in the next patch, under 1/20th of the player base will be able to find a free plot for a house if they can even afford it. This is pretty tragic compared to the demand for housing and the various promises put forth in that regard.

I personally would have no issue with the prices IF they had a LOT more wards.