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Originally Posted by
Camate
Greetings everyone,
First off, we'd like to thank you for all of your feedback thus far, and as usual, we're working to get it all collected and delivered to the dev. team. That said, last night our counterparts in Japan hosted a live patch notes reading for those that might not want to read the full wall of text. Yoshida joined in to offer commentary on specific aspects, and we'd like to share what was said regarding the pricing for the Free Company housing.
You're welcome, but unfortunately I find the reply highly unsatisfactory, so I'm sorry, but I have to shake my head at some of the points made.
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Originally Posted by Naoki_Yoshida
One thing we wanted to avoid was situations where free companies wanted to build a house but couldn't because the land was sold out.
That's why you add more land when the available land runs out, which was the initial promise. Did that change? If so, why?
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We also examined all of the free companies across all Worlds, how many members there were, and how much gil each member possessed. We've been proactively removing RMT, but there is still a bit of RMT gil left in the economy which we've accounted for when creating the pricing.
I'm sorry, but if the pricing scheme is the result of examination, I think said examination might have missed some factors, like the fact that the money is *not nearly* evenly distributed. I suspect you've been provided average metrics to examine, but examining the average buying power across a large population it's the worst possible way to decide the price of housing that impacts everyone.
I hope you understand that punishing those that don't have enormous amount of gil for the sake of hitting those than do, and punishing those that never dealt with RMT for the sake of removing RMT money that they never touched is extremely unfair, and it's pretty normal that the community frowns upon it.
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In patch 2.1 you'll be able to generate a bit more gil. Battle classes can earn an average of 15,000-18,000 gil per day, and with role bonuses in the Duty Roulette this can exceed 20,000 gil. Doing this several days a week you can save up quite a bit of gil, and if all FC members do the same, it will become a considerable amount. We estimate that by doing this for around three months you should be able to purchase land.
1: 20,000 gil a day is paltry compared to the enormous prices of housing in some servers. It equates to 1,000 man-days to buy a small house in the least desirable plot on my server (Balmung). Add to that the fact that not everyone plays every day, and not every one has multiple hours a day to dedicate to grinding, and the scenario is complete. The price is excessive.
2: Fact is that players on non-legacy servers will make the same money at the same pace as players on legacy servers. So the current disparity in prices effectively *punishes* veteran players that in many cases supported you and your game since day 1 or 1.0.
How is that fair?
3: We have already waited enough for housing. As a matter of fact we have waited for it since 1.0 was still active. The patch has been implemented now, and housing has been hyped for now. Not for three months from now. Locking many out of using the feature at all for three months is, excuse me for the strong term, ridiculous.
Basically every MMORPG that includes housing doesn't lock the feature away from the players with less money, but just gives them an entry level offer in order to enjoy the feature, with much bigger long-run goals (rare furniture, large houses and so forth). This creates initial engagement and long run engagement at the same time.
The current implementation of housing, with the current prices, utterly fails to create any initial engagement for many players, and for quite a lot of them it fails to create *any* engagement, because they simply gave up.
I strongly encourage you at the very least to reconsider *quickly* the price of entry level houses. And by "reconsider," I mean taking a zero off the price, because that's what it'll make it reasonable.
You, Yoshida-san, have played many other MMORPGs, so you should know the high value many MMORPG players put in player housing. By making it unavailable for months for a large part of the playerbase, you're simply losing competitive edge against other titles on the market.
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For new users playing on Legacy servers, there were questions about how they would be able to purchase land as it's much more expensive, so moving forward we will be making adjustments to the lower limits. The prices listed in the patch notes are the high prices, and there have been comments that no one will buy them, but again, we will look at conditions and look into reducing the lower limits. We'll be keeping a close on eye on how everyone is making gil and on the economic conditions for each World.
The lower limit isn't the main problem. The main problem is the initial price. The lower limit will be reached in a long time, and retouching it doesn't solve the problem, which is in the present time.
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We understand that the initial prices for housing are extremely high, but this is a patch filled with a lot of content, so as you are having fun and enjoying everything the price will come down.
You, Yoshida-san, alongside with Square Enix, hyped housing as the most prominent part of patch 2.1, which is the first big content patch for this game.
It was hyped for December 17th, 2013, not for some obscure future date in which the prices will finally touch the lower limit. A lot of your players, quite obviously, care to enjoy at least part of the housing content on the date you hyped it for, not several months after.
We don't ask to be able to buy the large or even medium plots on day one, but providing an entry level to engage players with the feature as soon as possible is a necessary element of a successful housing feature.
Which is why we're asking you to reconsider your decision ASAP, and change direction radically, with a very sizable slice to the prices at least of small land plots, or at least with the removal of the price disparity between servers.
A successful housing feature requires an entry level to engage the playerbase at large. Your housing feature lacks that entry level, so it fails to engage a large portion of the player base, and as a company asking for a monthly fee, losing sources of player engagement is something you really want to avoid.
To be fully honest, Yoshida-san, we're paying 10+ dollars a month to enjoy the whole game that is called Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, not just parts of it.
We're all paying our monthly fee, so we should all be given the same chances to enjoy content providing the same effort. Players on legacy servers should not be punished for playing on legacy servers just because *some* on those servers are rich.
Please consider this, and have a nice day.