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

[Fumamyena]

its not about now wanting to "work" for a house , im almost lv50 on all battle classes and got like 40K in my pocket , teleporting and repairs cover all my income , im virtually restricted getting a house by the prices because they are not realistic to achieve for me

That's fantastic that you are almost 50 on all DoW/M classes, but how were you planning on making money past questing, mob farming? By doing that you really on appeal to a small amount of crafters in the game Weaver and Leather. Let me ask you have you spent any time on you DoH/L classes? If you haven't there is your problem. This game is about being a well rounded character. BTW teleporting is not an excuse for being broke, one its cheap, and two, its a luxury. Last I checked all the zones are connected and you get basically a free choco that you don't even have to feed to ride it. Oh and repairs, maybe a DoH class would help you out there instead of giving your money back to SE.

[Alora]

snip.

Thank you, I mean it thank you I don't understand the point of housing. People were saying that it "might" carry buffs along with it, but I don't see any of that. All I'm seeing is a house that only the super rich can afford even for a medium house ghetto range, and it doesn't serve any purpose. One of the largest features in this patch and it's completely worthless to anyone other than RP players and even they can't afford it. So most of the fc's that are large in my server stated they had anywhere from 5million-10 million saved up from months of work. This will only buy a tier 5 small house for an fc of 50-100 people. I guess if they can have a ghetto cottage for all 50 of them to take turns sleeping in.... I had heard that in ffxi that there were buffs that came with the housing and that would have been amazing i'd pour all of my assets into it, but right now this is a major bummer.

[lukesneeringer]

Our fundamental stance toward housing prices was that we wanted to ensure that plots would be evenly distributed, avoiding a situation in which the wealthiest players could easily buy up all available plots of land.

The easy way to do that would be to only allow a free company to own one plot of land, total. That would have far fewer unintended consequences.

P. S. The other part of the FC housing prices that stings is how late they were announced. You could have gotten this feedback weeks ago had you announced the prices then, rather than three days before the patch hit.

[LastDream]

Making money ?
But all stuff got their prices divided by 2.
We used to sell tokens stuff for 70k, today it's 10k
What do we gain from farming ? How do we make money anymore ?!
I get like 1k per dungeon, do i need to do 1000 dungeons in order to buy a house ?
But yet for that, i'll have to make a FC and have everyone agree with me on where and how i'll build it.
Damn, why so complicated ? I just wanna play Animal Crossing on FFXIV.

[Someonewithclap]

That's fantastic that you are almost 50 on all DoW/M classes, but how were you planning on making money past questing, mob farming? By doing that you really on appeal to a small amount of crafters in the game Weaver and Leather. Let me ask you have you spent any time on you DoH/L classes? If you haven't there is your problem. This game is about being a well rounded character. BTW teleporting is not an excuse for being broke, one its cheap, and two, its a luxury. Last I checked all the zones are connected and you get basically a free choco that you don't even have to feed to ride it. Oh and repairs, maybe a DoH class would help you out there instead of giving your money back to SE.

Logic? Get out of here with that! Dont you know what forums you are in!?

[AmnesiaHaze]

The easy way to do that would be to only allow a free company to own one plot of land, total.

to be fair now they "evenly distributed" indeed, nobody can afford em

[Someonewithclap]

Damn, why so complicated ? I just wanna play Animal Crossing on FFXIV.

Found the issue.

[Zantetsuken]

Our fundamental stance toward housing prices was that we wanted to ensure that plots would be evenly distributed, avoiding a situation in which the wealthiest players could easily buy up all available plots of land. Please understand that while we will be adding servers and expanding housing areas as soon as we can, it is simply physically impossible for us to accomplish this easily, in a matter of one or two weeks.

^^ This is all the info we needed. ^^

As I suspected... the housing servers are simply not ready or stable enough to accept a huge influx of players yet.

Thank you Yoshi P for the clarification (and the quasi-fix to legacy prices). I'll look forward to housing when the servers are ready for it.

[Icefall]

What I take from this statement is that housing wasn't ready for this update so you artificially priced it out of all but the richest players' grasp. If this is the case I feel I would have had more respect for you were you to hold up your hands and admit you needed more time to deliver a product everyone could enjoy. Right now you have a huge part of the playerbase who feels let down, deceived, or downright lied to.

Legacy players are understandably feeling heartily disappointed. Try to remember, the Legacy servers represent people who stuck with you through all the highs and lows of the initial release through to the greatly improved product we have now. I feel you have seriously failed to reward their faith in you.

This this this this this. This is what I was talking about last night. I'd have much more respected Yoshida and the team if they were honest with us that it wasn't ready due to server issues, than toy us along like this. I'd much rather see the highly promoted feature be stable and secure and ready for the strain of a server fully participating in it than this little dance of carrot on a stick for 3 months. Anyone with the funds available to even afford these outrageous prices is pretty much paying gil right now to beta test for SE. If they'd been honest and said "Hey, this isn't quite ready yet, but we'd like some players to help us test this for a few months", I think players would have been a lot more understanding.

As for the whole bit about fears of server multimillionaires buying out the entire zone. What the heck? Are you seriously saying that your vastly creative team couldn't come up with a better means to prevent housing abuse? Just a few ideas off the top of my head:
- 1 FC land ownership per FC initially. Maybe later FC ranks in future updates allow for more house purchases, or just allow more later in general once you have that server stuff sorted out
- 1 FC land ownership per character. Wow, those multimillionaires now can't buy out the zone now, can they?
- 1 FC land ownership per account on a server. They thought they could get around this by passing off some gil to a new character through a third party? NOPE!
If anyone tries to throw their money around to abuse the zone beyond these checks, you can track gil transactions, no? If it comes up, investigate and handle accordingly.

With the current costs and lack of using logical lockouts like listed above, its so very blatant that you really didn't want people actually using the housing feature right now, but you were afraid to delay it again. Stop insulting us with weak excuses and you'd be surprised at how much respect your customers are ready to give you.

[AmnesiaHaze]

introducing houses for ridiculous prices before servers are ready is a huge mistake imo and they should have waited for the release of them

1.) now people who cant afford it (majority) are pissed of cause the prices are nor realistic to achieve
2.) later when servers will be ready and prices may become affordable the top hardcore players will be pissed off they were robbed for billions and the others can get it cheaper
3.) some people may even unsubscribe if housing was one of their major aspect they were looking for but its out of reach for average players

in any case the current situation is a lose-lose , except for RMT sellers