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

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Originally Posted by Sayura_

Exactly. Though I think the leader should get to have 1 FC house and 1 personal house.

I think they're smart enough to know they could have just limited each person to 1 house and made housing affordable but the reality is they don't have the server infrastructure to handle that many instances of housing.

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id be happy to contribute to SE servers with a housing microtransaction up to 50 EUR , thats more realistic for me than affording it with gil :D

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RMT traders are served with immediate bans and their gil removed from circulation

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So wrong.... just so so so wrong. Many RMT are active and many people have bought RMT gil. Its sad when the producer/director is completely blind to the current RMT issue.

You can browse bot forums and see them just laughing at how stupid the combat against RMT and bot derived gil is, they're loving it because SE don't seem to be doing anything about it.

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Originally Posted by Naoki_Yoshida

avoiding a situation in which the wealthiest players could easily buy up all available plots of land.

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Which is why a limit should have been set on how many houses can belong to any one FC (1 at a time).

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Originally Posted by AmnesiaHaze

id be happy to contribute to SE servers with a housing microtransaction up to 50 EUR , thats more realistic for me than affording it with gil :D

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Oh god... INB4 Housing @ da "Mog Station" cash shop ( > . > ;

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Originally Posted by LoLo

no one came into 2.0 loaded

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300k is a ton when you consider new characters come into 2.0 with NOTHING. Legacy players laid the foundation the economy, while the new players were leveling legacy players were loading up the AH and making bank. And they are the ones that got to take the most advantage of the pre-patch philo items. Potash used to be 70k per on my server, now it's 15k. Guess who made the most money off that? Definitely not the people who just made characters in the last 2 months.

And I am blaming the devs. I don't think legacy players did anything wrong, I would have done the same thing, but my point is that small, fifth-class plots would 4-6 mil on every server if everyone had to make new characters at launch, and that's on the devs for not doing that.

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Originally Posted by viion

So wrong.... just so so so wrong. Many RMT are active and many people have bought RMT gil. Its sad when the producer/director is completely blind to the current RMT issue.

You can browse bot forums and see them just laughing at how stupid the combat against RMT and bot derived gil is, they're loving it because SE don't seem to be doing anything about it.

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This is VERY accurate. Every RMT company has large amounts of gil on every server that is being added into "the economy" by SE. They rarely ban the bots as I have seen the same ones over months. I also know they did not ban people who purchased ilicit gil. The RMT issue is not under control, it is not being handles, and I am almost 100% positive their "Special Task Force" for RMT/Botting is about as real as a unicorn.

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Originally Posted by Razzle

Oh god... INB4 Housing @ da "Mog Station" cash shop ( > . > ;

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giving people a choice would benefit all dont you think? the only reason i can think they making it so expensive must be to keep people inside subscription

when enough people give SE real cash maybe it would lower the prices for gil houses too because real money is what could fund house servers

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Originally Posted by KV-1

300k is a ton when you consider new characters come into 2.0 with NOTHING. Legacy players laid the foundation the economy, while the new players were leveling legacy players were loading up the AH and making bank. And they are the ones that got to take the most advantage of the pre-patch philo items. Potash used to be 70k per on my server, now it's 15k. Guess who made the most money off that?

.....

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How is it a ton when you can finish the storyline brand new without ever farming and come out with more than 400k? that 3 million was made by farming and hard work in a broken market system called the market wards, I was shocked that I even made that much. To have that taken away was a bit of a sting cause that market wards had more lag than the sims 3 after installing all expansion packs.

Anyone who can make money in that laggy mess deserved every bit of their gil, true talk.

So Yoshi, you said "physically impossible". Does that mean that SQEX Montreal is out of rack space and raised floor space and you need to convert more of the building into data center to expand the game servers? I'm left wondering what else that could mean, because you didn't say logistically impossible.

The prices need to be the same across ALL servers. There is absolutely no logic behind this. If you want things to be priced based on how wealthy a server is, apply it to everything and not just housing. Legacy servers have more money because the players have been saving it for THREE YEARS. You already removed literally 90% of it. Now it's time to DROP the issue and find another way to deal with the fact that you as a company are totally incompetent with dealing with RMT besides continuing to penalize ALL of the people who have been playing this game for years, not to mention the new players who started on legacy servers who were assured that they would not be at any more disadvantage than what starting as a new player on an established server would naturally entail. FAIL.

Easy solution they can only buy one piece of land and not buy every single plot of land that way gives everyone a fair chance and if need to expand then allow them to in say three months time. Looks like most people with all this stupid amount Gil will just buy all the small plots of land anyway just to screw people over

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Originally Posted by PallasLloyd

You already removed literally 99% of it.

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No they didn't, you're in need of some elementary math education it seems.

Just to throw it out there, if Yoshi is still even reading this. I would really be a lot more comfortable with the prices on my server, if upgrading were a possibility after we bought the smallest house/plot of land (that doesn't mean I agree with the Legacy server prices because I absolutely don't). Instead, my FC invests what is a ton of gil to them to get the smallest, and then... well don't use any hard to obtain items, or expensive ones.. cause those ones are destroyed if you pick them up... oh and no gil back when you actually upgrade, so you lose all your initial investment. What's the incentive to buy the small plot of land instead of saving the however many million gil and putting it towards a bigger house?

It would take my FC, if 8 of us (not always that many on for a given night), if we only did 20k a day, every day, 7 days a week at the expense of anything else... over 2 months of steady grind to make 10m gil to buy the cheapest house on the cheapest size plot, and that assumes that the prices have dropped to their minimum amounts, and that there's a house available at that price.

That's f'kin ridiculous. We've had people putting aside gil on the side for a month already thinking we were 50-75% towards a house only to find out we're barely a drop in the bucket. Definitely feel punished that we joined a legacy server even though we're all new players.

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Originally Posted by Dark-Saviour

But....
You knew this was coming....

.... but the thing that's been eating at me through all of this and what has made me so negative is specifically the concern expressed above; we keep running into issues because not enough investment is being made into the hardware...

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What are you talking about???, Yoshi meant that wealthiest players could monopolize and buy all land in one go, that has nothing to do with a hardware limitation. He states that they will be adding more plots of land but still they needed to put a limit so wealthiest players wouldn bully the ones with less wealth.

Honestly, and I know this wasn't as possible from a design standpoint:

Yoshi's big mistake was doing FC first. They should've held out to do personal and then reveal FC after. Hitting everyone with daunting prices and ages to go until personal is even worse than having everyone just wait till personal, it crushes their souls in a way. I'm not defending Yoshi, or peoples reactions, but the fact is if things were going to be this tough it shouldn't have came first at all, that's the big mistake.

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Originally Posted by Naoki_Yoshida

Fundamental Pricing Stance

Our fundamental stance toward housing prices was that we wanted to ensure that plots would be evenly distributed, avoiding a situation in which the wealthiest players could easily buy up all available plots of land. Please understand that while we will be adding servers and expanding housing areas as soon as we can, it is simply physically impossible for us to accomplish this easily, in a matter of one or two weeks.

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Hmm. Make it so FCs can only buy one plot, isn't that already the case anyway ?
Problem solved.
Why the lies again ?

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Originally Posted by LoLo

How is it a ton when you can finish the storyline brand new without ever farming and come out with more than 400k?

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Look at it like this then: lets say you make 400k from completely the story.

Small plot on new server: 4 mil

Small plot on legacy: 40 mil

On a new server it would take 10 people completing their story quests to buy a small lot.

On a legacy server it would take 100 people completing their story quests to buy a small plot.


So if legacy players aren't responsible for that MASSIVE disparity in prices, then what is? Why does it take 10 times as many new players on a legacy server to buy the same size plot?

I understand many are angry, but take a deep breath and relax, this is just a game, is not like we are talking about a real house and you are living under a bridge or something.

For me housing is more like a Vanity thing, will it make me improve my end-game raids? No, Will it make my leveling easier? No, so it has for all intends and purposes no real benefit.

So relax, the prices will come down for sure, meanwhile enjoy the new content.

Cheers

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Originally Posted by Dashuto

Honestly, and I know this wasn't as possible from a design standpoint:

Yoshi's big mistake was doing FC first. They should've held out to do personal and then reveal FC after. Hitting everyone with daunting prices and ages to go until personal is even worse than having everyone just wait till personal, it crushes their souls in a way. I'm not defending Yoshi, or peoples reactions, but the fact is if things were going to be this tough it shouldn't have came first at all, that's the big mistake.

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I agree. Most people just want to be able to take part in housing. If they had released accessible personal housing first, less people would care about insanely priced FC housing because people could just play with their personal ones. But by releasing FC housing that only like 20% of players can take part in at the start, the other 80% feel like they are missing out on a huge part of the patch.

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Originally Posted by KV-1

Look at it like this then: lets say you make 400k from completely the story.

Small plot on new server: 4 mil

Small plot on legacy: 40 mil

On a new server it would take 10 people completing their story quests to buy a small lot.

On a legacy server it would take 100 people completing their story quests to buy a small plot.


So if legacy players aren't responsible for that MASSIVE disparity in prices, then what is? Why does it take 10 times as many new players on a legacy server to buy the same size plot?

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Why would someone finish the story and just sit on 400k without trying to make money? I don't really understand this mindset. Every Final Fantasy before (even console FF games) this one required people to farm monsters, sell items, or craft to make gil to buy additional items that aren't given to your for free via a quest or storyline mission. So why is it now that people expect to just do quests and never work on money gathering?

400 k for completing the story is way off , im soon to hit 50 on all battle classes and all i got is 40K on my character , teleporting and repairs cover most of my income

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Originally Posted by LoLo

Why would someone finish the story and just sit on 400k without trying to make money? I don't really understand this mindset. Every Final Fantasy before (even console FF games) this one required people to farm monsters, sell items, or craft to make gil to buy additional items that aren't given to your for free via a quest or storyline mission. So why is it now that people expect to just do quest and never work on money gathering?

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That doesn't answer my question as to why there is such a huge disparity in pricing.

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Originally Posted by AmnesiaHaze

400 k for completing the story is way off , im soon to hit 50 on all battle classes and all i got is 40K on my character , teleporting and repairs cover most of my income

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My first play through I got about 300k, and I did buy a few nice things and this was also before the repair cost nerf, so 400k is probably about right.

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Originally Posted by KV-1

That doesn't answer my question as to why there is such a huge disparity in pricing.



My first play though I got about 300k, and I did buy a few nice things and this was also before the repair cost nerf, so 400k is probably about right.

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Why would a new player play on a legacy server and not expect items to be prices higher on a legacy server?

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Okat so 15 mins for 5k gil. Now you need to make about 100k a day to stay on track for your house in a few months. So now you have 20k and hour times 5 hours. There you go, set aside your first 5 hours of play EVERY day for you and everyone in your FC because they will gladly give you 5 hours of grinding each day and hand the gil straight over to you each day so that in a few months you can all enjoy a small house. Incidentally, have you seen what the small house looks like, so worth the second full time job for you and every member of your FC...so worth it.

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I make 200k average a day, and it takes me about an hour every day, give or take. If I could grind for it, I could add 50k/hour depending on what I did for it. Talk about a 2nd job, I can contribute worth 10 member's FC contribution, on my own.

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Originally Posted by Vaala

We've had people putting aside gil on the side for a month already thinking we were 50-75% towards a house only to find out we're barely a drop in the bucket. Definitely feel punished that we joined a legacy server even though we're all new players.

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This this and more of this. I joined Balmung because I had several friends who played before the overhaul. We've been having loads of fun and putting money aside thinking "Alright! Housing!" and then they post this and everyone is immediately depressed. One of them has already cancelled her account over this because she was excited and wanting to decorate and all that and now we'll never be able to afford anything worth buying so she's moving on to other games. At least they are -willing- to lower the pricing they just need to lower it even more.

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Originally Posted by KV-1

That doesn't answer my question as to why there is such a huge disparity in pricing.

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Because our servers have much more money floating around. This is not a difficult thing to understand. The presence of rich players drove up the amount of gil in circulation, making it easier to get gil by converting materia or crafting two-star armor or selling Titan or what have you.

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Originally Posted by KV-1

My first play through I got about 300k, and I did buy a few nice things and this was also before the repair cost nerf, so 400k is probably about right.

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I had about 240k after completing the story. This was with taking my gear upgrades, doing all dungeons and buying no gear off the AH. As I understand it, you can make considerably more if you take the Tin/Bronze/Silver pieces instead of the gear rewards, however I wouldn't really expect all players to do this, nor do I think they did. 200k-250k is usually the quoted price for a 1-50 story person as I have also seen people who only made it with a little over 100k.

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Originally Posted by Sunarie

oh and no gil back when you actually upgrade, so you lose all your initial investment. What's the incentive to buy the small plot of land instead of saving the however many million gil and putting it towards a bigger house?

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Agree. The size of the small house is actually insulting for the price. 8million gil for a house that fits maybe 5 people and can never be upgraded.

Let the rich people pay gil for the premium locations and let everyone start with a plot of land building it together as a FC from the ground up using DOH/DOL.

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Originally Posted by LoLo

Why would a new player play on a legacy server and not expect items to be prices higher on a legacy server?

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I'm not talking about items, I'm talking about housing. No one ever said housing was going to be more expensive on legacy servers, I thought it would be a set price for a plot of land on all servers. As did most people.

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In each legacy World, there are more than ten players in possession of over one hundred million gil.

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In other words, 10 players that can cover not even ONE THIRD of the initial price of the best housing? Come on, get real here. It wasn't necessary to price it so even the richest players couldn't afford it for 3 full months.

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Originally Posted by Sunarie

I had about 240k after completing the story. This was with taking my gear upgrades, doing all dungeons and buying no gear off the AH. As I understand it, you can make considerably more if you take the Tin/Bronze/Silver pieces instead of the gear rewards, however I wouldn't really expect all players to do this, nor do I think they did. 200k-250k is usually the quoted price for a 1-50 story person as I have also seen people who only made it with a little over 100k.

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Yeah, I always took the pieces because I geared through dungeons mostly, so that would explain why I made so much.

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Originally Posted by HunkyJimpjorps

Because our servers have much more money floating around. This is not a difficult thing to understand. The presence of rich players drove up the amount of gil in circulation, making it easier to get gil by converting materia or crafting two-star armor or selling Titan or what have you.

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I would be interested in a thread that compared auction house prices for various items across all servers. Gil on the server doesn't equate to gil in circulation.. and unless the prices of everything on the AH are 5x's that of other servers then that point is a bit moot. People already in the have-not group don't have the ability to make up the price difference.

A 2.1 feature becomes available in 2.2, great planning.

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Originally Posted by Dark-Saviour

But....
You knew this was coming.

You knew this was coming from the start.
Actually... You knew this was coming pre-2.Ø...

I just...
Why?
Why has it not been decided that the data centers should be upgraded to handle the game and all of its features in full?
Why does this continue to be such a limiting factor, and how long is this going to keep cropping up?

I wasn't likely to get FC housing anyway due to the rank requirement and the fact that, even at 'reasonable' prices, it'd be probably beyond a 1-person FC, but the thing that's been eating at me through all of this and what has made me so negative is specifically the concern expressed above; we keep running into issues because not enough investment is being made into the hardware...

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I can tell you why. They were remaking a failed game. They didnt anticipate this kind of warm reception. its why there were overloaded servers at launch. They are having to readjust all their plans to adapt. And no company can win for losing.

"OMG game failz! not enuf servars, game iz dying!"
or
"OMG game failz! They are closing servars cuz they had too many!"

Personally it looks better to have to make more servers than it does to have too many and have to close and merge them. One is a problem of success the other is a problem of dropping numbers.

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Originally Posted by Sunarie

I would be interested in a thread that compared auction house prices for various items across all servers. Gil on the server doesn't equate to gil in circulation.. and unless the prices of everything on the AH are 5x's that of other servers then that point is a bit moot. People already in the have-not group don't have the ability to make up the price difference.

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It's anecdotal, but I remember fairly early on, tome mats on Excalibur commanded about double or three times the price of those on a friend's non-legacy server. The difference has narrowed recently as the gear/level disparity narrows and supply increases, but I know a lot of new 2.0 players who were able to get in on the ground floor and build up a nice nest egg by selling tome mats to legacy players.

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Originally Posted by HunkyJimpjorps

Because our servers have much more money floating around. This is not a difficult thing to understand. The presence of rich players drove up the amount of gil in circulation, making it easier to get gil by converting materia or crafting two-star armor or selling Titan or what have you.

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Exactly. You could make a TON of money early on in 2.0, especially before the philo prices dropped.

What I'm saying is that now it's much harder, philo items have gone from 70k to 15k, crafted gear prices cut to 1/4 of previous prices, Titan runs go for like 300 instead of 700k. Unless you were on the money making that happened early 2.0, the housing prices are just insane.

By making such VERY high prices SE just wants to MOVE OUT great amount of money from the game. And I agree, that such prices can handle only the BIGGEST FCs and they will buy all houses.Most of other FCs will not be able to see these new part of content- very stupid, SE. Once again you cut out thousands of people from game's content. And I agree, that SE knew about server-hardware limitation- why wasnt made expansion work before the patch to make much more lands for housing? Fail... again

I think no matter how this was implemented, it would have been wrong for a lot of people.

I'd much prefer they spend more effort on new primal battles, reintroducing NMs (non-fate), etc. not furniture for my house.

It's something to work toward. If housing is so important to you, there's always The Sims.

As for hardware - they weren't anticipating the game to be as popular as it is. This you know. Bear in mind that SE was on the brink of dissolving and pretty much everything was riding on ARR. It was well-received and now they are working hard to keep up and keep it going. Upgrading/Adding data center capacity is not an overnight thing. Besides costing 100's of thousands/millions of dollars, in many cases facilities need to be upgraded to support additional servers (power, HVAC, etc.). It isn't as simple as just plugging a new one in.

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Originally Posted by Dark-Saviour

But....
You knew this was coming.

You knew this was coming from the start.
Actually... You knew this was coming pre-2.Ø...

I just...
Why?
Why has it not been decided that the data centers should be upgraded to handle the game and all of its features in full?
Why does this continue to be such a limiting factor, and how long is this going to keep cropping up?

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Think of it this way! You have diablo 3.. everyone is psyched up about it a lot, but then the game come out and guess what ITS A HUGE DISAPOINTMENT. If you have invested in a TRUCK LOAD of hardware... well it`s there doing nothing and not paying for itself because everyone left the game because it sucked. Well have yo played FF11 and FF14 (not 2.0) I played 11 and it sucked... just sucked big time...

So if you invest too early in a lot of hardware and your game doesn`t live to expectation if you ordered the hardware your job is on the line.

Big company learn from these....