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

[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.

[Talynia]

Why play the what if game?

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.

I don't even.... *sigh* You just proved the point I was making. If a developer is not constantly monitoring server capacity to ensure the features they want to implement run smoothly and not crash the servers then they are not doing a part of their job.

I am well aware they didn't decide to put in housing a few weeks ago which is why the server excuse is unacceptable. They know how many FCs there are, how many people are in each one, how much gil they each have and yet they can't seem to use that data to properly plan server capacity.

[Tashigi]

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?

Yes, I am.
It's not as if they don't BETA test their patch with some dozens/hundreds before they make it available to that 600K player base.
You can draw an estimate on server weight by multiplying the impact a smaller number of players have on server to match that of the expected "actual" player base.

I really love this game, but the dev team and their backward mentality with it are slowly pushing me away.
Don't get me started on the changes to some classes/armor pieces.