I lost one house to the auto demolish but I have bought both the houses I've owned from release.
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I wouldn't mind if it was an instanced house. Would also be a lot easier on the servers I think. Current housing wards, the servers have to keep the instances open, they are treated like any other zone, except they also have to load all the garden decorations for each ward for every player that enters. Switching to instanced housing would prob use up less resource.
You also have to bear in mind that Yoshi P was a lot less experienced when he said this. He was clearly excited about housing, and fully believed he could bring about the plan for housing he envisioned. He was also clearly not aware that the players were going to take his announcement as some kind of binding contract to hold over his head for years to come. You'll notice that he is a LOT more careful, now, about revealing plans for the game nowadays. He has experience, now, and typically limits announcements to things he knows the developers can deliver (in fact, the probably limits them to things the developers have already developed, or mostly so). He's learned his lesson.
If he was still making wild promises today then I'd agree that he should be held accountable, but the stuff about housing we can chalk up to his growing pains as a director. Continuing to dredge these remarks up nowadays is comparable to calling a woman a pervert because she said she wanted to marry her brother when she was four years old.
Eh, I mean I suppose. But that's why you have an entire PR department that coaches you, (and I'm pretty sure they do have one since it's been referenced many times about why he can't reveal things) so really I would understand if people don't let him off the hook completely.
I really doubt he just does whatever he wants, I'm sure some of it gets filtered through PR especially something like a Live Letter, which I assume has pre-screened questions.
Sometimes someone makes a silly promise and breaking it is the lesser of two evils. Or, in this case, actually the right thing to do. The only thing they did wrong was wording it as a promise in the first place. It was very naive of them.
If they never went back on this silly statement, nobody past the first couple of days of housing being added to the game would be able to own a house. How lovely that would be. I'm sure being given the amazing opportunity to wander deserted wards, admiring some long-gone early adopters' abandoned houses is exactly what active, paying customers want out of the game. Think of the exciting museum experience!
...said nobody ever ^^
Those who want to show off in a public instance should only be able to do so while actively playing the game. Those who want housing without commitment can still own apartments and private chambers. They never go away and you can take all the breaks you want without locking other players out of plot ownership.
You can either have the devs forever committed to one direction (even if it leads off a cliff)... or you can have devs who can evolve, respond to feedback and learn from mistakes. Pick one n_n
If they never made that statement, a lot of people would have also not bothered with housing because they'd have foreseen it being a subscription anchor.
I wish there was an alternate form to stop the auto-demolition counter without having to log-in into the game, I'm subbed in 180-days cycles so I never worry about running out of subscription time but there might be times when I can't play for more than 45 days and I don't want a system to destroy my mansions and leave me homeless!...
I'd suggest the Producer and the dev team to develop another way to stop the counter without having to play the game, maybe it could be done through the Companion app!...
That auto demolition isn't tied to your sub is just baffling, you're literally paying a sub and the only thing of yours actively using server resources can be removed if you don't access it, even though you're paying for it with real money. An auto demolition system was very much needed due to people who left the game never to return, but a paying customer should never lose their house.
Eh, it's a small but important difference, but you are not paying real money for the house. You are paying real money for access to the game servers. Nothing else. The house may be why you choose to pay to access the server, but that is not what SE is actually charging you for. It all circles back to that part of the ToS that explicitly states we own absolutely nothing (not our characters, gear, items, etc.) and merely pay SE to access content.
I understand SE's reasoning for the the way the auto-demo timer works. If it were tied to sub, then houses could sit just as empty for just as long as if the owner had quit the game. Yeah, you can pop over to it once every month and half, enter, leave, and ignore it again for another month and a half, but requiring you to actually go there at least encourages you to spend time there and use it.