First article about the House pricing.

[Abriael]

Never said it was irrelevant, but the customer isn't always right. We players have a very limited access to information, no access to the plans (other than what the devs tell us), so we can't always make good judgements. There are times when a developer has to follow his vision. There are times when it's a good idea to not listen to the .1% player base.

The customer may not always be right, but the customer pays for the servers' lights to stay on. There's an enormous difference between going against customer satisfaction when we're talking of relatively minor things like balancing a stat, or nerfing a class, and when we're talking about locking the most hyped and pubblicized feature of the very first content patch of a game that isn't exactly floating in overabundant content away from a relevant portion of the population.

The first requires a deep knowledge of the system to gauge. The second just requires eyes to see that Square Enix dangled the housing carrot in front of our nose for months (actually years) only to replace it with a big hard stick three days before patching. That is, beyond any reasonable doubt, bad business.

Conjure up semantics all you want, but it still doesn't change the fact that you're using bad argumentation. It also doesn't change the fact that we're dealing with extremely limited knowledge and facts, and thus, unable to come to the proper conclusions at this time.

The facts are that a whole lot of FC can't afford even the smallest house in the least desirable area on many servers, and that won't change unless SE suddenly pushes an inordinate amount of gil into the game (which would be bad anyway). If you're blind to the existence of many small free companies that have 10-15 members, and to that family-oriented playstyle (that should not be penalized) you're blind to facts.

The facts also are that housing prices effectively punish those that supported the game for the longest time and those that just decided to join legacy servers, even more so because the ratio of income after the patch will be the same between legacy and lon legacy servers, so those on legacy servers are evidently penalized, which is objectively unfair, as people pay a monthly fee whether they play on Balmung or on Lich (or any other server).

The facts are that in every MMORPG that offers housing, an entry level option is always offered, because housing is notoriously a high engagement feature, and it's in the interest of both the developer and the players to grant customers access to high engagement features, even just at an entry level. I shouldn't need to explain why.

The facts are that Square Enix hyped the housing feature as much as possible. As much as having their president and CEO become "uncle housing," and teasing everyone with it incessantly at every possible chance. When you hype something that much and then lock it away from a vast portion of your customers, you're not doing anyone a favor.

Oh yeah. We have plenty facts to draw conclusions.