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

[dean3364]

Personally I don't see a problem.

Even if you are a small to medium FC of 40 people, you only need to put in 100K each (unless my math fails me horribly which wouldn't be surprising). If you can't afford that you shouldn't be looking at FC housing in the first place.

uumm yeah your math is off by quite a bit. You forget to take into consideration what sever some ppl are on etc and 40 X 100k is only 4 mil That is 1/5th the price of the bottom end shack on Sargatanas as the opening gates starting price on a small house is 20-25 mil. not a med. a Small.

[Mihael_Longclaw]

That's not remotely what I said. I really hope you get reading classes. You need them. Your assertion that sinking millions of gil into a house as "endgame" is laughable. It's stupid. It's beyond idiotic. In fact, it's so bad that I wish your mom had considered abortion at any point in her pregnancy.

That is such a terrible thing to say, these forums are just so wretched.

[Rain_Rahl]

Just food for thought and I'm not making the argument this justifies the devs actions but i wonder if the plan is to get the really rich people in game to spend their money before dropping the prices in a week or two. It would explain why they waited till last minute to reveal prices. Knowing there would be an uproar. And they couldnt reveal the plan without causing those before mentioned rich people from just waiting til prices dropped. Again not saying if this is a good or bad plan, just saying it might be the case.

[Mihael_Longclaw]

Awesome response! Well said!

Going by that logic, what purpose does playing a video game at all serve?

We do things for fun, or at least I do.

[SanjiroLionheart]

Really? Because I'm pretty sure they never confirmed personal housing in the 1st place. They are still debating whether ppl get personal homes or just rooms inside the FC Housing

On a roll tonight aren't we...... Have a look at this http://www.usgamer.net/articles/squa...vp-and-housing Mainly I'd have you read the following: First up is player housing. Initially this will be a Free Company perk, but there are plans to roll out individual personal housing in the near future.

Tried to make it so you could visibly see it, and possibly avoiding situations like this in the future.... again.

[Yolteotl]

uumm yeah your math is off by quite a bit. You forget to take into consideration what sever some ppl are on etc and 40 X 100k is only 4 mil That is 1/5th the price of the bottom end shack on Sargatanas as the opening gates starting price on a small house is 20-25 mil. not a med. a Small.

Not to mention 40 people in a small house will be CLUSTER-ED wonder if the moderator catches what I did there,,,

Bill Gates probably did ._. and celebrities etc.....to be fair the Lala *did* say the richest people, I'm sure IRL there are some pretty wealthy folks that can go in and pay for a 30M mansion in cash lmao. I know I'm nowhere near rich, livin in small town Kansas....wealthier folks live in Beverly Hills etc. Read into a comment before you totally blast them for making a fairly accurate, IMO, comparison.

Any Citable references?

On a roll tonight aren't we...... Have a look at this http://www.usgamer.net/articles/squa...vp-and-housing Mainly I'd have you read the following: First up is player housing. Initially this will be a Free Company perk, but there are plans to roll out individual personal housing in the near future.

Tried to make it so you could visibly see it, and possibly avoiding situations like this in the future.... again.

Again check your facts. They HAVE NOT DETERMINED if personal housing by definition is a room inside a FC House or if it is literally a seperate piece of property.

[Twinbros]

Could not agree more with the OP, the prices for the houses, EVEN AFTER the 50% off at 90days are just ludacris! Basically what ENIX is doing is telling people to go buy gold because if you wan't a house in the next 6 months that's going to be the only viable option...it really is just a great promotion for the gold sites bravo Enix.

[Dark-Saviour]

Mainly I'd have you read the following: First up is player housing. Initially this will be a Free Company perk, but there are plans to roll out individual personal housing in the near future.

Tried to make it so you could visibly see it, and possibly avoiding situations like this in the future.... again.

Q: When will individual housing be implemented?

A: It will be around half a year after patch 2.1's release. Currently, we are split between implementing a personal room within a free company house or personal housing. Since the decision will have a huge impact on how many additional servers we'll need to prepare, we have to carefully consider the balance of the housing system. We believe it will take roughly six months to have everything planned out and prepared.

You were saying?

[Abriael]

Greetings everyone,
First off, we'd like to thank you for all of your feedback thus far, and as usual, we're working to get it all collected and delivered to the dev. team. That said, last night our counterparts in Japan hosted a live patch notes reading for those that might not want to read the full wall of text. Yoshida joined in to offer commentary on specific aspects, and we'd like to share what was said regarding the pricing for the Free Company housing.

You're welcome, but unfortunately I find the reply highly unsatisfactory, so I'm sorry, but I have to shake my head at some of the points made.

One thing we wanted to avoid was situations where free companies wanted to build a house but couldn't because the land was sold out.

That's why you add more land when the available land runs out, which was the initial promise. Did that change? If so, why?

We also examined all of the free companies across all Worlds, how many members there were, and how much gil each member possessed. We've been proactively removing RMT, but there is still a bit of RMT gil left in the economy which we've accounted for when creating the pricing.

I'm sorry, but if the pricing scheme is the result of examination, I think said examination might have missed some factors, like the fact that the money is *not nearly* evenly distributed. I suspect you've been provided average metrics to examine, but examining the average buying power across a large population it's the worst possible way to decide the price of housing that impacts everyone.

I hope you understand that punishing those that don't have enormous amount of gil for the sake of hitting those than do, and punishing those that never dealt with RMT for the sake of removing RMT money that they never touched is extremely unfair, and it's pretty normal that the community frowns upon it.

In patch 2.1 you'll be able to generate a bit more gil. Battle classes can earn an average of 15,000-18,000 gil per day, and with role bonuses in the Duty Roulette this can exceed 20,000 gil. Doing this several days a week you can save up quite a bit of gil, and if all FC members do the same, it will become a considerable amount. We estimate that by doing this for around three months you should be able to purchase land.

1: 20,000 gil a day is paltry compared to the enormous prices of housing in some servers. It equates to 1,000 man-days to buy a small house in the least desirable plot on my server (Balmung). Add to that the fact that not everyone plays every day, and not every one has multiple hours a day to dedicate to grinding, and the scenario is complete. The price is excessive.

2: Fact is that players on non-legacy servers will make the same money at the same pace as players on legacy servers. So the current disparity in prices effectively *punishes* veteran players that in many cases supported you and your game since day 1 or 1.0.

How is that fair?

3: We have already waited enough for housing. As a matter of fact we have waited for it since 1.0 was still active. The patch has been implemented now, and housing has been hyped for now. Not for three months from now. Locking many out of using the feature at all for three months is, excuse me for the strong term, ridiculous.

Basically every MMORPG that includes housing doesn't lock the feature away from the players with less money, but just gives them an entry level offer in order to enjoy the feature, with much bigger long-run goals (rare furniture, large houses and so forth). This creates initial engagement and long run engagement at the same time.

The current implementation of housing, with the current prices, utterly fails to create any initial engagement for many players, and for quite a lot of them it fails to create *any* engagement, because they simply gave up.

I strongly encourage you at the very least to reconsider *quickly* the price of entry level houses. And by "reconsider," I mean taking a zero off the price, because that's what it'll make it reasonable.

You, Yoshida-san, have played many other MMORPGs, so you should know the high value many MMORPG players put in player housing. By making it unavailable for months for a large part of the playerbase, you're simply losing competitive edge against other titles on the market.

For new users playing on Legacy servers, there were questions about how they would be able to purchase land as it's much more expensive, so moving forward we will be making adjustments to the lower limits. The prices listed in the patch notes are the high prices, and there have been comments that no one will buy them, but again, we will look at conditions and look into reducing the lower limits. We'll be keeping a close on eye on how everyone is making gil and on the economic conditions for each World.

The lower limit isn't the main problem. The main problem is the initial price. The lower limit will be reached in a long time, and retouching it doesn't solve the problem, which is in the present time.

We understand that the initial prices for housing are extremely high, but this is a patch filled with a lot of content, so as you are having fun and enjoying everything the price will come down.

You, Yoshida-san, alongside with Square Enix, hyped housing as the most prominent part of patch 2.1, which is the first big content patch for this game.

It was hyped for December 17th, 2013, not for some obscure future date in which the prices will finally touch the lower limit. A lot of your players, quite obviously, care to enjoy at least part of the housing content on the date you hyped it for, not several months after.

We don't ask to be able to buy the large or even medium plots on day one, but providing an entry level to engage players with the feature as soon as possible is a necessary element of a successful housing feature.

Which is why we're asking you to reconsider your decision ASAP, and change direction radically, with a very sizable slice to the prices at least of small land plots, or at least with the removal of the price disparity between servers.

A successful housing feature requires an entry level to engage the playerbase at large. Your housing feature lacks that entry level, so it fails to engage a large portion of the player base, and as a company asking for a monthly fee, losing sources of player engagement is something you really want to avoid.

To be fully honest, Yoshida-san, we're paying 10+ dollars a month to enjoy the whole game that is called Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, not just parts of it.

We're all paying our monthly fee, so we should all be given the same chances to enjoy content providing the same effort. Players on legacy servers should not be punished for playing on legacy servers just because *some* on those servers are rich.

Please consider this, and have a nice day.

[Jinrya-Geki]

Maybe they made the houses so expensive that way no one could buy it, cause it's not finished.

And if there is barely room for FC to buy land, then how can personal housing possibly be accommodated?