New Live Letter: YoshiP Comments on Housing Prices

[Dreadlockrasta]

Lol, this mindless gil grind is just a gimmick to get people to play for another 3+ months till the next patch where there will actually be progression for players who have ilvl 90 everything.

And before you even say pvp, don't hold your breath, it's just gunna be world of bardcraft.

I can't wait till they announce that they will never have player housing, only a inn room in a FC house, that's when the shits gunna hit the fan.

[Eloc]

how about they make the lots affordable but make you pay an upkeep fee, adjust the upkeep fee to regulate the gil but dont penalize smaller fc's. considering the cheap servers are getting the same increase to gil creation as legacy the extra price is not worth 10x the initial cost

i think a 0 needs to be dropped off of all the costs

3 housing zones should have about 80 small lots each so 240 small lots, 40 medium lots at 120 total and 15 large lots for 45 total. i think this would easily take care of a servers needs you just need to use the housing space better. at this volume a small lot far away could cost 1 mil.

[Naunet]

Screenshots of an awesome EQ2 mansion thing

Precisely. Obtaining a house - any house - should only be the first, minor step in a lengthy and enjoyable process, and that step should be as short as possible. Rift gives everyone a free dimension upon completing an intro quest. It's small, but it's something to play around with, and Rift's dimension system lets you change the look of even that starter dimension so much that it'd be unrecognizable from its original, rather unimpressive form.

Actually, to give ya'll a sense of what we could have if Squee wasn't such a Scrooge... Here's a dimension of mine! My fiance and I are slowly working on transforming it into the front for his character's evil lair - y'know, because enjoying the content and working towards a long-term goal is fun when it's more than just grinding gil to have access to a minimally customizable house.

When you enter, this is the first thing you see. Don't mind the scattered bug corpses - we just needed a place to keep them for now! xD

Of course, that's just the first thing you see. If you turn around, you're greeted by the following. Note that the boundary of the dimension ends just a little ways past that massive tree in the middle, before the bridge. Yes, the bulk of the lake is mine! Muwahahaha.

If we hang a right from that perspective, oh look! Where does this path go?

I suppose a graveyard is thematically appropriate.

Okay, back to the "house" (which is really only a tiny part of the whole dimension). Here we have our foyer and living room! It's very much under construction. The walls to the right with the boat and shelfing were entirely custom built by your's truly so that we could add a kitchen. To the far right, you can see a door that goes down to the basement.

This is the room we've spent the most time on so far: the kitchen! Everything in here had to be built from scratch pretty much - the counter, the stove (made out of a mine cart, a campfire, some fencing, and a window pane), the shelving on the far wall (oh my goodness, placing those shelves and the backing was so tedious - but worth it! xD).

For context, there didn't used to be an actual second floor in this house. The stairs led up to a sort of exposed hallway that ran around the outside edge of the room. We decided we wanted a room upstairs, so I went about laying down tile and wall pieces and so many wooden posts to create it! Also, added some stairs for extra effect.

Alas, we haven't put quite as much work into the decorating in this room as we have the kitchen. It's a long project, and we just work on it whenever we feel like. xD

Oh hey, did I mention there's a balcony? The dimension's rear boundary lets you go up the mountainside a ways, too.

And... what the heck is this under the house?

Oh, right. Okay. Evil cave. Nothing to see here, move along!

And here's the kicker: I got this dimension from working on a world event, purchased with world event currency. No gold or gil or whathaveyou spent at all (though I have spent a few plat on the various bits and pieces). We're starting to build a random airship over the lake just because we can, but it's so ugly right now I didn't wanna show it haha.

Anyway, I think these screenshots illustrate my point and my key complaint about XIV's housing. Squeenix has designed the system backwards and put all the effort into gil grinding, rather than actually enjoying their housing content. That is not how it should be!

[Aenarion]

For all the end of the world of AH guys, the market will keep moving in fact even more so because people are all trying to make money and to make money, you must first spend money.

Yes, because none of the crafters have gathering jobs, or can farm mats.

Nope, not a single one of them

[Fatestorm]

I dedicated the first 3 months to saving gil -- as a casual player, I earned over 700K by myself, which was close to the range of what they said housing would be. They rewarded that with this.

They have created false scarcity with high prices to make people grind limited content for months, plausibly to cover their lack of infrastructure. That isn't a good way to operate a game, and it will hurt them.

This guy understands. Still outlandish, still outrageous, still insulting. Not good enough SE.

[Ebojager]

Not that I would do such a thing but, wont such high prices cause people to support the RMT and buy gil online?

[rex1976]

LoL these designers must think we are stupid to not figure out they are in collusion with RMT, #1 rmt can spam you all day, you can take photo of spam and send to them but the account does not get deleted until it is blacklisted by everyone and the owner of account decides to make a new one and deletes it himself. WHY? #2 when you complain to se they say "just blacklist them". WHY?. now this is the big one #3. everyone needs 20-300M gil for a house. WHY? if you owned SE would you support rmt so drastically? is there any other mmorpg that has given RMT such a huge gift before?

[Lady_Venus]

hmmm its not the high prices that bothers me.. no matter how ridiculously high it is ... it wont be impossible. if you have dedicated people and spend time and effort you will get it eventually.. even if its after months sure takes alooooong time but not impossible.. but what bothers me most is this..

"YoshiP is saying it was set this way so players don’t buy out all the lands right away and end up in situation where none is available. RMT estimated gil has been removed from their amount, they checked how much gil the FC’s have and got the estimates."

So basically there is the chance that there will be no land available... ? personally to me this is worse than the high prices... knowing that even if i have the money there is no land i can buy cuz other people were faster than me and bought everything... ye not gonna be nice...

[SpayedNeko]

This guy understands. Still outlandish, still outrageous, still insulting. Not good enough SE.

He's confusing player housing with free company housing. When yoshi-p said the gil you earn from levelling 2-3 classes to 50 would buy you a basic house & land, he was talking about the currently not implemented player housing. Free company housing was always going to be a long term goal for free companies to work towards. I can understand how people feel the prices are a kick in the balls after the RMT flood, so all we can do is hope that SE doesn't ignore the problem and finds a middle road between affordable FC housing that everyone can get, and having a long term goal for FC to work towards

[rex1976]

i mean really, the gil buyers are going to have all the best/biggest houses while the grinders live in shacks, wich means either i buy gil or live in a shack? who benifits from this? SE has the brains to know that everything "elite" simply must require tokens(tomes) to shut RMT out of equasion. SE knows how to make money, and if they are not getting money from RMT then why would they not use the same economic model for best house as they use for best gear? WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY? if you have a single reason other than they are in collusion with RMT please share