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

What I don't get is in GW interview he used 3 pillars as an example that all 3 needs to be released at same time and can be played at same time since if just they are released separately people will concentrate on that one and by the 2nd/3rd one is out people won't do the previous released ones. What the devs did here was released all 3 at once as planned but made it near impossible to do one...

They already said they were going to limit 1 housing per FC for starters so they could of simply put a 1 land per FC limit at this time...

I'm a huge huge supporter but I'm confused in which direction this game wants to take right now... why do this to Legacy world and new worlds... it makes no sense at all... ><

JP forums is talking the exact same thing.

I'm not really sure what SE is trying to accomplish with this weird pricing scheme. If the idea is to prevent land speculation I can't see how this scheme could possibly work to accomplish that. Two games I've played with housing: LotRo and Aion both have failed housing markets. LotRo is utterly locked - no plots available at any price. Aion has land prices gone into the outer stratosphere which is just about as useless. One thing they both have in common and with FF14 - limited supply of land parcels which is of course the ultimate weakness of a player housing market. The only way player housing could be available and affordable for all players is to make it infinitely expandable via instancing ... like the Mog House. Tbh, I would be perfectly happy with that, like we had in 11. Screw this land speculation market business. >_<

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Originally Posted by Ksenia

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Thanks :) I was just trying to look for at least one positive in this whole situation, and de-segregation was something that came to mind when I read Yoshi's post.

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Originally Posted by Icefall

it really was the worst way to go about it since SE chose to dance around the issue instead of being honest and upfront about it.

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Yep, it's does feel like they aren't giving us the full picture, and using weak arguments to cover gaps in capability.

They have form for it though, claiming that /tell is restricted in instances to prevent abuse, when really there is a significant and costly technical challenge to overcome (namely coping with cross server name conflicts between players in instances and players on home world, like if you were in an instance with Some Player and send a /tell, should Some Player on the home world get it on the one from another instance in the server get it? Home? Instance? Both? ).

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Originally Posted by OldGeezer

It was an estimate but the cold reality is that other people saved more than you. Your 2.5 million won't be enough because initial supply is low. You won't be able to buy a doghouse in the first round. So to give you a shot SE developed a diminishing lottery so all the plots aren't gobbled up right away, but it requires people to wait and people here are very impatient.

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People are impatient because they were mislead (and even then, I would hardly call expecting to be able to get a bare minimum house after you've saved for three months or more impatient). I'm not sure if maybe you missed the part where people literally wouldn't have been able to save up because assuming Yoshi had come out and said "Housing will be 4 million minimum, with most servers needing 8 million and up".. people would have then saved that much, and the starting price would have been bumped even further. The entire situation is a combination of having facts hidden from the community, and SE just not having the server capacity (apparently) to hold FC houses for everyone. In the later case it should not ever have been advertised as a feature that everyone would get to take part in, much less that it would be something everyone could take part of for a largely cheap cost. I do not buy into the whole "you guys shouldn't be upset" mentality given the antics of SE. People are rightly upset because they've been mislead.

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Originally Posted by Naoki_Yoshida

Bad planning once again

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You guys have been planning and working on housing for a long time now so why are you waiting until the last minute to increase server capacity to support this feature? This is something that should have been on your mind and addressed when servers were being added to handle the stress crazy stress SE had to deal with for the instance servers. As a customer I would have been fine if you told me housing wasn't ready and was being pushed back to 2.2 because of these reasons. Annoyed, but fine. Instead housing is continued to be hyped and when it finally arrives we're told you can't enjoy the small plot until 2.2 if you don't have the gil to buy it now. The game is enjoyable, the new dungeons are fun, but the decisions being made because of the devs poor planning is only serving to dishearten your customers. Not all of them, but enough of them.

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Originally Posted by Naoki_Yoshida

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.

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That's all I wanted to hear.

By the way, you know ESO is coming in April right? Better fix things and prepare now, don't blame your servers in April when you get a mass exodus... Or heck, with ''great'' content additions like this, even sooner.

I've been playing MMO's since they first came out.
Ultima Online has player housing.
EverQuest 2 has player housing.
Star Wars has player housing (in the form of your own star ship).
Even newer titles, like WildStar, are giving players housing.
Heck, I even added player housing to my own Neverwinter Nights persistent world server back in the day. It wasn't that hard to do.

Player housing does not give a player an advantage in the game; it doesn't make you a better DPS, Tank or Healer.
It's basically a storage locker; a location to place your stuff, instead of hauling it around. It's also a place for friends to congregate and have fun.

Pricing a vast majority of the player base out of what is a staple in MMO's is a bad step for S.E. Given the amount of negative comments about this topic, S.E. should work to address the problem. The longer they take to react, the worse their image will suffer.

Basically, you don't solve the RMT problem by punishing your paying customers.

I never really cared about housing anyways but holy cheese the prices are a bit too high man...

However, he does have a point.

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Originally Posted by Naoki_Yoshida

Lots of stuff

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Well, I'm still disappointed I can't get a house straight away, no amount of explanations and justifications will take that away... but this makes sense, and at least this shows you're listening to the players and taking the time out to explain the reasons, so thanks for that :) Guess we now spend the next 3 months saving \o/ at least we now know they're going to become affordable for all, and we're not going to have a mad rush at the start!