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

[Altena]

Based on 20k every single day for 3 months, 1 player is able to save 1.7 mil.
Based on a rough estimation of 50 people per FC - if they were to put ALL of their savings into the house - that would equal 85 million gil in 3 months.

This means that they are HALF WAY to a large house on some of the Legacy servers.

Keep in mind this is every single day, not skipping a single beat - and relying on everyone donating all of their daily earnings.

I think SE has to realize that aside from the few FC leaders - most people will not be willing to donate ALL of their gil to their FC for housing.

[Jamesy]

as a legacy player who doesn't have a lot of gil and part of a free company who doesn't have billions of gil how are we to afford this housing? i'm curious your math square enix but if i remember correctly you took millions of my gil when this game was re-released. i'm honestly curious how we obtain such gil we don't have "hey did anyone see that 20billion gil i have?" other player"What? you have gil?". me:"Haha i wish i did"

[Kimura410]

Had no idea people were so concerned about housing lol. Honestly, who cares? Its like real life, you buy that crappy rambler first and then as you work harder you can one day buy that mansion. You cant just go straight into the mansion. Unless your justin bieber or something.

Im more focused on pvp. Huge addition to the game that could make or break it for me. Team raiding is great and I love coil but theres just something about being on a team (or solo for that matter) and beating another team that isnt artificially controlled.

[Yolteotl]

Sadly my rant can't be posted, not even on my blog on lodestone. So I put it all here on tumblr.. lol have a read if you want. It's just my two cent on it.

http://arroh.tumblr.com/post/7024661...ompany-housing
Read it, think it over some, or tear it apart piece by piece. I'm not white-knighting the prices or anything, I disagree with them, I am however trying to see things from the devs point of view tho and bring that into a better perspective with the majority of us who can't afford housing prices.

But honestly the Dev's excuses for not having the server capacity to meet the needs of the playerbase, just means they should of postponed releasing Housing until they had the server capacity instead of having a minority of the population paying over-price just to bide time while everyone else gets bitter.

It's a Lose-lose situation. For the FC's that CAN afford the housing they shouldn't spend it on Housing because it's over-priced for the lack of server infrastructure; and for the FC's that want to spend their gil on Housing they CAN'T.

[Req]

I think the prices are just fine for Marboro. Knowing the patch was coming we started collecting gil for our housing as sure, we can't get the large plot of land that we wanted to but we can get the best small piece of land and work our way to getting a large one. Gives us all something to work towards in the free company. 100 mil is a lot for 1 person, but for a collective group of up to 512 people its cake.

Even if you had 50 people and each donated 2m you can get the house. If you don't have that kinda gil figure out what you can do to make it.


I do agree that legacy people got screwed though.

Why would anyone have a free company of 512 people in this game when the largest group of people you can use for any of the content is 8 people. Many people over expanded their free company to around 100 people thinking there would be actual 24 man content we could do coming this patch with a large group. Because we can't, that number is incredibly excessive in itself for a free company. Take that number and multiply it by 5 and you have to sit there and wonder what the hell you are even doing in a pool of fish that large where you can't possibly get to know anyone. That number of people probably wouldn't even fit in the zone itself for the housing for a single house if they all wanted to have a house party after buying the largest number because it would crash the instance.

[Rex]

First off, I appreciate the time that Yoshida took to reiterate what he had said in the letter from the producer using slightly different words. That said, this response fails to address the mass of extremely unhappy people who are not only expressing themselves on this forum, but on gaming forums and in gaming blogs across the web. I am concerned that failing to address these issues in a substantive way will accelerate the decline of the game; it is a shame it will end so quickly.

Because FREE COMPANY housing prices are too expensive? Lol


"Houses too expensive. Game is failing because people are quitting because they don't have enough money to buy a house."


...I'm sorry... I just don't see it.

[Quesse]

Yeah, just completely ignore the fact that people have been WORKING towards this for 3 months, or so. Nope, we just found out about it today, and want everything right now, and for free.

This is what really grinds my gears. I have been earning gil solely to put towards an FC house. Now I find out my millions aren't even enough to pay for a half of the smallest trashiest house. Completely unacceptable. So were Yoshi's explanations.

I love it when he says that SE can't manage the RMT so he's going to take it out on the player-base in the form of high housing prices.

[Tashigi]

But honestly the Dev's excuses for not having the server capacity to meet the needs of the playerbase, just means they should of postponed releasing Housing until they had the server capacity instead of having a minority of the population paying over-price just to bide time while everyone else gets bitter.

This, pretty much.
It amuses me greatly that a game that's in closed BETA (Wildstar) allows player housing by simply reaching Lv 14 and doing a tiny/mini quest. And I am not talking a tiny piece of land housing here. Your own, massive plot; which allows you to plant a house, a park, activities, gardens, additional houses, etc.
http://youtu.be/YQm7eOjyQSY

If it's so stressful on the server, could have just made it a locally hosted thing (Runs on your side of the PC rather than the server).
But we all know what's 'causing this decision. They already coded the whole game backwards (Everything runs server side; including the whole 0.3 sec positional check nonsense).
Bottom line, housing should be accessible to all FC who put a small effort towards it (Such as ranking up, etc). Beyond that, the fee for having your own plot should be minor.

Customizing your plot should be challenging or expensive or both. This gives the player base something to claim as their own and something to works towards to.
You do not do it backwards; which is essentially what they've done here.

[EgweneALvere]

Wow that reply from Yoshi-P was such a nicely worded "bend over and take it in the ass" post to the players that were looking forward to housing. After reading his reply it certainly read like they intentionally jacked up the housing prices to limit the housing instance, which tells me their servers are as unprepared for housing as they were for launch.

[Eekiki]

Let's set the What If Machine to look at what would happen if SE set the prices as low as some folks here think they should set them.

Oh look, everyone bought out the large plots and no one is touching the small ones.

Or maybe...

Hey, all the land is bought up and people are mad because they have to wait for us to add more instances (because they think rack space in a data center is cheap and easy to obtain and set up)

And to go along with this...

Whoops, the prices are too low. We'll have to increase them. Sorry.

It amuses me greatly that a game that's in closed BETA (Wildstar) allows player housing by simply reaching Lv 14 and doing a tiny/mini quest.

Are you honestly comparing a game that's in closed beta with a few thousand players and population that's strictly controlled by the developers with a released game that has over 600,000 players (and climbing) and far exceeded its sales estimations?

It's a shame that the history of FFXIV has forced SE to do some things like release progression content out of order, and rush other content without fully baking it in a test environment, but it is what it is. Yes, they've had to work backwards in some aspects. But the choice was either do things the way they've been doing them and suffer through some massive first year growing pains or shut down the game completely, effectively killing the Final Fantasy franchise and possibly the entire company.

So the answer instead is to set the prices so high for some servers and lock out people from content because they cannot seem to plan server capacity properly?

Yes. Because there are a lot more people playing this game than SE or anyone else had estimated when they did their capacity planning. Don't forget they didn't simply decide to add housing a few weeks ago. They've been working on it since months before 2.0's launch.

It makes much more sense to set the prices too high, then lower them to match capacity. This way, they can expand housing instances proactively without risking crashes, outages, or data loss.

A whole lot of FCs around here can't afford the *small* plots, in the least desirable place available.

Why aren't they desirable? Because they're small? What's undesirable about their location? We haven't even seen the housing areas beyond brief flyovers in the trailer.