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

Wow, one house was purchased on Durandal in the Uldah area, Ward 1. It is a small size house.

The house is open to all and they crammed as much furniture in it as they could. It was purchased by a Japanese FC and they have a giant Odin head statue outside ^^

Congratulations guys!

So, apart from Yoshida-san's post that came down to "shut up and deal with it", this matter is now going to be ignored by the dev team?
I have to say, I was and still am very disappointed about how this is being dealt with.

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Originally Posted by Reinheart

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How upset are the JP players Reinhart? I can't imagine that they're the happiest as they were some of the dedicated customers like the rest of us Legacy but they get screwed the hardest. I know some very rudimentary Japanese, so I can't really follow the conversations.

I'm always thankful for your translations and you're right, we get seriously amped up once we read them. This is a big slap in the face though, between housing and CT the "once a week" dungeon that was lauded as their big schtick which should have been released at launch is just goddamn laughable. It's a fun dungeon, but man, that lockout is idiotic, since you can get MORE gear from Coil that's better in the same week.

Me and my friend recently got this game and we were pretty excited about all this housing business, now not so much. Really disappointed.

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Originally Posted by Cubester

So, apart from Yoshida-san's post that came down to "shut up and deal with it", this matter is now going to be ignored by the dev team?
I have to say, I was and still am very disappointed about how this is being dealt with.

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Evidently they are too busy banning people from the forums.

More than likely they realized that:

1: Their servers are garbage and could not handle the load if prices were cheap and everyone crammed into an area.

2: They need to cover for a lack of long-term content with some sort of grind. Voila! Exorbitant housing fee's and insane lock-outs.

Ahh, I still remember the complete positivity around the future during the 1.2x days and what 2.0 would bring.

[QUOTE=Sinth;1700003]The prices have nothing to do with gil sinks

No offense is intended when I say I disagree with the first part of your post, this is most certainly also about gil sinks. In this game after playing xi for some years SE here at least is paranoia central about large amounts of gil in the economy.

In order to limit RMT activity set price gates are established that limit what bots can charge and succeed in selling by setting those standards on vendors, the beastman vendors have now raised that mat lvl to 40, this stalwart gating sets a governor on the pace of the economy, and directly affects players who avoid illegal transactions altogether.

At first glance XIV's economy looks like a book titled "The best of a free economy", however between the front and back covers it looks more like the mob (rmt's) vs. the politicians (se), with the playerbase caught in between and utterly screwed.

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Originally Posted by Ksenia

Quite the opposite.

FF14 has had RMT from day one back in 2010. Nobody bought Gil in 1.00 and the RMT machine just kept building stocks of it. Those stocks are what Square are using as an FC standard when deciding prices.

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I remember always seeing a bunch of characters with roll-head-over-keyboard names standing around at Cedarwood, grinding that one leve with the black sheep.
HUGE EDIT!
Went to the 1.0 Archive and found the thread regarding the 'players' on the screenshot below. The german Rep responded back then and told us how to report such players. But since I never saw the numbers of those decreasing, I do not think many reported them. Plus they didn't look like they were doing anything against the rules/using bots, except having strange names, looking the same, standing around in huge groups and following one person who was killing monsters. AND they didn't shout or /tell you advertising for buying gil.
Someone repsonded to the Dev back then and said that it is (was) complicated and not possible to add detailed information in the recommended way. Regarding the ability to report botters it really has improved in 2.0

Couldn't take screenshots without Interface back then...
PC says I took this on 30th of June 2012

http://img2.finalfantasyxiv.com/acci...d8c5c6e3c1.jpg

P.S.: That screen was taken on Masamune

I recall trying to get all of the 1.0 behest achievements and the Cedarwood one being a mighty pain due to the sheer weight of RMT characters meaning the behest NPC wouldn't appear on my screen. :/

When we started collecting money at a fast pace before the patch, we thought that we were collecting at a very good pace. But when the prices were announced, we found that there was no way we could ever produce that kind of money in any given period of time. We don't care what kind of money other rich players have, we worked like crazy for weeks on end to try and get gil to pay for housing, but it just turned out that we were fooling ourselves apparently. Also if you notice, almost no one has bought a single plot of land. Maybe you guys should take another look at your figures, and try to think of a better way to allow players access to company housing.

I usually just read forums, but after seeing the cost of housing I just had to come in and say I too think its a sham the cost of this. While I may play on the less expensive servers which is tier 3 pricing (goblin). The housing imo is a joke if these are really the prices they expect us to pay. I know the game needs a gil sink,but in all honesty this is a bit much. There are only a handful of FC's even large enough to come up with this kind of money when to be quite frank the market sucks on Goblin atm. Damn near impossible to sell anything, even the 2 star items are becoming dirt cheap now. So now I too am forced to log into the forums and complain about it. I like this game, but your tactics are amazing and how anyone could even think that the average free company could afford this is amazing.

Well, now that tier 4 and 5 server groups will be reduced to tier 3 prices (of course they haven't described if it's going to be at maximum price or the de valued price, probably max) no ones going to buy them. Sure, there might be a few desperate people, but the higher end folks won't waste their money, knowing it will become cheaper. These houses have no resale value, this is no "market", it's simply SE putting high prices and letting them go down after time. Yoshi used three different reasons for their prices, which sounded a bit shady. Legacy players, hardware, and "well everyone can be a botting gil farmer for 3 months and get a house" were all pretty weak. After seeing that response the other day from the player bases rage, I wouldn't listen to anything he says anymore. Yoshi obviously says stuff to appease the playerbase when it suits him, he's pretty much become an American politician, hahahaha.

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Originally Posted by Sleverin

How upset are the JP players Reinhart?

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I can't speak for Reinheart or the content of the Japanese housing threads, but just by the numbers they're pretty angry. Their "prices too high" thread has twice the posts and six times the views as this one. I'm not surprised. Their legacy world housing prices are double that of even NA-based legacy worlds.

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Originally Posted by Dhex

ITT: A bunch of people that can't afford a house arguing over how affordable the houses they can't afford should be priced.

Y'all silly.

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Indeed... QFT!

Free housing plot, great neighbourhood!
http://s14.postimg.org/alaxcb2xb/free_FC_house.jpg

IT may look alsome at first but then you realize you dont have privelidges to change anything!
Only the leader and high ranking players will have that right so basicly saying you get the slave hut for all your dedication and shared gill to purchase it!

Ya this way of handling housing is penalizing the legacy players that took the time to earn that amount of gil in hopes of being able to get a house on day one.

By making the pricing as ridiculous as this they are pretty much saying their efforts were wasted when saving money and that they wasted their time earning all that gil because it didn't matter how much gil they saved up they were never going to have enough to begin with.

They really do need to reconsider how they are going about it, cause the anger is justifiable, Legacy players and those who were working hard to save gil on legacy servers were under the impression they would be able to get housing day one, but now with the way it's setup it's actually the new servers that will have a better chance at getting a house compared to the legacy ones.

Beimer - it's all about the experience and companionship within guilds that enjoy their company, plain and simple.

As for resounding and continuing thought on housing and more recent zingers, I can see how perhaps the team might wish to spread housing out aside those who have the gil but, lacing any reimbursement when vacating or the ability to sell period basically forces the suggestion it's to save money on hardware and server space.

This being 2.0 after the subjectively controversial 1.0, one might think they don't "cut corners" going forward, at least early on if including pragmatics.

Worst part of the pricing is how they have wrecked the economy. Since 2.1 came out, market board has been extreamely stale. It is impossible to save any money right now for us crafters. Nobody is buying anything. Any players who actually have any money are saving it for the insanely priced houses.

I think I'll just save for personal housing, where I can actually do something with it. FC housing will serve no purpose except to the top 1-2% of players.

I think these costs just made the RMT's very happy.

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Originally Posted by TrystWildkey

Wow, one house was purchased on Durandal in the Uldah area, Ward 1. It is a small size house.

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I found one (small one) on Moogle today as well - French FC - looks like small garden or bus stop shed though (in size) :(

Otherwise indeed congrats to that FC - mainly for the courage!

Daily Bump. Housing too expensive.

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Originally Posted by HEC

I found one (small one) on Moogle today as well - French FC - looks like small garden or bus stop shed though (in size) :(

Otherwise indeed congrats to that FC - mainly for the courage!

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Just want everyone to remember that when they say things like "Can't afford a large house get a small one!". Small house is borderline small for a personal house, let alone one for an FC of literally any size.

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Originally Posted by Beeraga

Just want everyone to remember that when they say things like "Can't afford a large house get a small one!". Small house is borderline small for a personal house, let alone one for an FC of literally any size.

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Well - actually - anyone can "measure" it themselves - go to the the housing area and try to fit as may as possible of your FC members alongside the red square / rectangle limiting the house dimensions and you'll see for yourself. Small one is only about 10 x 10 steps (yalms / yards / whatever), Medium 12 x 14 and Large 18 x 18. Also - note the fairly small (almost tiny) size of the "gardens" / yards for the Medium and mainly Large plots - will hardly fit any external items there - what moron designed that?? For that kind of Gil the large should have at least golf course included in price.

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Originally Posted by HEC

Well - actually - anyone can "measure" it themselves - go to the the housing area and try to fit as may as possible of your FC members alongside the red square / rectangle limiting the house dimensions and you'll see for yourself. Small one is only about 10 x 10 steps, Medium 12 x 14 and Large 18 x 18. Also - note the fairly small (almost tiny) size of the "gardens" / yards for the Medium and mainly Large plots - will hardly fit any external items there - what moron designed that??

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yeah we visited the first small house on our server, it felt smaller than an mog house in XI. My husband took these shots from the two "exit" side corners of the interior.

http://i1158.photobucket.com/albums/...ps6f628794.jpg

http://i1158.photobucket.com/albums/...pse457b551.jpg

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Originally Posted by HEC

... alongside the red square / rectangle limiting the house dimensions .... Small one is only about 10 x 10 steps, Medium 12 x 14 and Large 18 x 18.

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I'm glad(?) that I'm not the only person strange enough to do that.:) (I sort of estimated S:30'x28', M:50'x36', L:64'x64'.) But I also noticed the interior video of a 3-floor medium house looked huge, even bigger than the L's outer square, so I'm not sure that those glowing rectangles actually limit the interior size. Also, a house's exterior awning or covered entry seems to be within the glowy rectangle and that exterior wall is of course set back quite a distance from its boundary.

It's more of those questions I as a buyer would want answered before choosing a size, and before paying even 1M gil.

Gratz, you obliterated the markets.

Wind shards down from 30 Gil to 6 Gil
Crystals are at 25, they were 150

Savage Aim IV was 160K, not 64K.

Diremite was 400, it's 88 now.

Fleece went down from 300 to 66.

Transaction History has NQ Vanya at 85K
Only HQ on the market. 180K
Vanya Robes are at 140K

It's because everyone has so many billions of Gils, they don't need that stuff, just give it away.

daily bump bump bump

Rare-X bought the first house on our server tonight. They settled for a Medium since the prices were so high.

The description I got from one of their FC members on what they did to accrue that much money, tho. >.< I did not sign up for an asian grinder is all I'm saying.

I feel like this really needs to be said:

As an off-and-on player of this game, I understand the frustration of things like this--we get inside our own little worlds and expect everything to run like a well-oiled machine. The common argument I hear is, "Well, I pay $15 of my hard-earned money for this!" Believe me, I get that. We come to expect our money to mean something, to count for something. But the reality simply is: nothing's perfect.

I compare it to a dinner out. I may pay $15 for a meal; after eating part of it, I decide I don't like it. I can either wait for a new one to be made, or I can leave and go somewhere else. I can complain to the manager until I'm blue in the face, but the reality is I still have to wait for a new meal to be made if I want to eat there.

The same applies to this game: You can wait it out, hoping that the second time around is more satisfying, or you can leave. Ergo, you can keep playing the game if you truly enjoy it and wait for the housing situation to improve, or you can go play something else. Personally, I've got a backlog of games that I can play when I have a couple of hours to spare, and I don't really have the 20+ hours a week to devote to this game. Therefore, I'm moving on, and hopefully when I return the situation will have improved.

This game is fun to play; I get that. But you've got to breath in some fresh air and remember that, although you're paying that $15 of your hard-earned money, you always have the choice to try something else. The only person stopping you is yourself.

Just a friendly reality check :cool:

Reality check

I can like the steak but if the side dish is undercooked I can send that back to the kitchen while I still enjoy my steak. I can complain and rightly so that part of my meal sucks. And that's what people are doing here. Part of my gaming experience sucks. I enjoy the rest.

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Originally Posted by TheLostGunslinger

Just a friendly reality check :cool:

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I could understand your point of view if the pricing was astronomical AND the same on every server.

If you haven't yet, please, take a quick look at pricing on Durandal. Go ahead, I'll wait.

............

So, you're on Phoenix. Did you start the game at 2.0? Wow, that's cool. I have some friends that started at 2.0 too. They came to Durandal because that's where I was. We figured it would be nice to play together since world choice doesn't change the game at all. Wow, when we heard about FC housing, we were really excited! I love crafting, so I was really looking forward to this feature.

Then we saw pricing.

For a middle of the road, small house, you Mr. Gunslinger, and your FC would have to raise 7.2 million. That's a lot! But, as so many people keep saying (over and over and over) 'you need something to work for!' Ok, great. Let's see what a middle of the road, small house would cost my FC.

45 million gil.

45 million gil.

Just in case you missed that, the price for a middle class, SMALL house is 45 million gil. NO ONE expected this. NO ONE expected pricing for a game feature to vary between servers. And even if we DID expect it, NO ONE expected such an exponential difference in prices.

If you were a new player who joined a Legacy server to be with real life friends and you found out that other new players on other servers could pay 6-10 times LESS than you're expected to pay for a game feature that's THE SAME on all worlds, how would you feel?

Reality check indeed.

I paid far in advance for my subscription. Because I enjoy the game and have real life friends here. I can't get a refund of that money. Even if I could, it wouldn't help because if I come back to the game, I'll still have to wait months and months to enjoy housing. So, I'm going to use those months to keep playing and gathering whatever gil I can.

We are hoping, with this thread and others, that SE understands how this pricing decision has affected their customers. We are hoping that they change the pricing sooner so we can enjoy the content they advertised to us. Especially those of us that have paid in advance.


EDIT: To continue with your analogy of a dinner you didn't like: If your dinner was cold or burnt, yeah, it's reasonable to just leave and go somewhere else. If your dinner came to your table ON FIRE, then I think you'd be justified in complaining to the manager until you were blue in the face ^^

I'm all for working for my gil, but it's a bit difficult when they put measures in place to turn the market into complete morbol muck. Were we working in the economy of even just a couple month ago, it would be much more plausible to gather that much gil. However, with the current state of the market, the prices and the odds are stacked against us.

You're not seeing the forest for the trees. If you enjoyed the game before the housing development came about, then you can enjoy it afterward if it's not all you thought it was going to be. I fully support the housing being so expensive, if only because it's a challenge. What happened to the good old NES and SNES days when a challenging game was the most fun--where if you lost all of your character's lives, you didn't continue, you went back to square one and started over? It took true skill, and it took dedication in the sense that, if you lost, you didn't get frustrated and put the game down for good.

The problem nowadays is that gamers (and people as a whole) want everything handed to them on a silver platter, and if something is a challenge, it's not praised or heralded as a worthy treat. It's scorned, complained about, and ultimately, to keep making money, game producers have to give in to popular demand and hand it to the player.

You weren't paying $15 a month ago to live in an FC house, but you still played the game. You obviously felt the game was worth it as it stood, and the fact that the developers haven't patted its fan-base on the head and handed them a cookie is a far-cry from screwing them.

Those players who have enough skill and enough dedication will eventually get their houses. Those who do not will put down the game in frustration, or complain about it compulsively.

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Originally Posted by ArkhamNative

I'm glad(?) that I'm not the only person strange enough to do that.:)

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Well - I AM strange :)

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Originally Posted by ArkhamNative

It's more of those questions I as a buyer would want answered before choosing a size, and before paying even 1M gil.

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YES! This over an over again!

Where the hell are the DEMO houses?? Where are the EXACT specs for each house - dimensions, floor plans, available features and bonuses (current as well as future ones)??

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Originally Posted by TheLostGunslinger

You're not seeing the forest for the trees.

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Welcome to the Wonderful World of Game Design. You frustrate too many of your players, too often, you make less money. You want to challenge your players, you better make sure it's both engaging and fun. The only thing a bunch of zeros will accomplish is scare your audience away (an their moneys along with them). The problem with this particular blunder and/or oversight is that it affects and frustrates too many of the game's many audiences. People that want houses, people that want to make gil from the people that want houses, and even the people that get annoyed when people complain. I mean no one wins in this situation. Even the folks that are shaking their fingers at the complainers with their "20 feet uphill in the snow" responses. Again, nobody wins. Well, I guess the RMT and trolls win, but I'm not sure they count.

Challenge is figuring out a hard dungeon and boss fights to beat them, challenge isn't playing the markets to make gil or doing the same dungeon over and over just to scrounge up a couple of hundreds of gil. I don't understand how people keep saying this, making money is not challenging at all, it's just a side activity at best and a consequence of playing the game, it should never be the main goal in an MMO.

Of course now you'll say "if it's not challenging then why doesn't everyone have a house" #checkmatepoorpeople #rekt", maybe if prices were equal across all data centers and the announcement didn't completely crash the markets then sure. Once again there's no skill involved at all other than seeing what's selling and what isn't and finding a niche, and undercutting or just going with the same price. That sure is plenty skillful, as skillful as beating Twintania naked right? Sure makes everyone feel like pro players seeing that cash roll in.

If you really want a game where the main purpose is making then simply go play Recettear or something.

The issue is the disparity between players, on legacy servers there are players and companies with vast sums of gil and yet on other servers there are companies that have been saving and working towards the goal of housing who have comparatively very little...

I suppose SE could of considered a game wide gil and item wipe, reset all so that everyone was equal but instead they chose to try work out the average gil owned by a company and try set a fair price accordingly... it is impossible to account for everyone.

It happens with every MMO, new content is either so easy for some it is consumed too quickly resulting in complaints or too difficult to achieve and is considered gated content for elite players only by other players resulting in more complaints and content not being consumed at all by a large proportion of players.

There is another issue going on for the jP side, at least for this one FC that bought a company house. After FC members donated money to the company they bought the house then FC leader started kicking them since they don't need them anymore. Hope this doesn't become a regular for some FC's out there... it's messed up.