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

[Dhex]

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.

What is your plan to address this problem when the wealthiest players decide not to buy housing immediately and wait three months (spending that time accruing more wealth) until prices have been reduced? Will there be a system in place to stop them from being able to "buy out" an entire instance three months from now when prices are lower? If the problem of instances being bought out is not addressed now; then when will you address it? Putting a bigger price tag on the content will not "fix" the issue.

Will you be able to invest in more hardware to provide the needed infrastructure or are we going to see similar barriers on personal housing? If you cannot implement it right; don't do it at all. Don't make promises you and your team can't keep.

Sorry for not taking your word on it anymore.

Please explain how you plan to address this.

[Icefall]

What is your plan to address this problem when the wealthiest players decide not to buy housing immediately and wait three months (spending that time accruing more wealth) until prices have been reduced? Will there be a system in place to stop them from being able to "buy out" an entire instance three months from now when prices are lower? If the problem of instances being bought out is not addressed now; then when will you address it? Putting a bigger price tag on the content will not "fix" the issue.

Just another proving point that this wasn't about preventing a buy out by the Uncle Moneybags and Uncle Scrooges of the servers. There is nothing in place to prevent land ownership abuse other than cost. This was all just about buying time for SE to trickle users in to stress test their instance infrastructure before properly releasing it in full. This was a way to delay content without having to say it was delayed, but it really was the worst way to go about it since SE chose to dance around the issue instead of being honest and upfront about it.

[Dhex]

Just another proving point that this wasn't about preventing a buy out.

I merely asked because it seems like Yoshida is either trying to divert attention from the fact that they could not implement this content properly, or he is being honest with this presentation of what they wanted to do and what they would like to do but has failed to observe the blatant fallacy in the argument for this pricing. In short the explanation he's presenting falls short in addressing the issue driving the decision making.

Which makes me wary of trusting his insights with us (the community) on content his team is developing.

[Mitzuki78]

I'm not really sure what SE is trying to accomplish with this weird pricing scheme. If the idea is to prevent land speculation I can't see how this scheme could possibly work to accomplish that. Two games I've played with housing: LotRo and Aion both have failed housing markets. LotRo is utterly locked - no plots available at any price. Aion has land prices gone into the outer stratosphere which is just about as useless. One thing they both have in common and with FF14 - limited supply of land parcels which is of course the ultimate weakness of a player housing market. The only way player housing could be available and affordable for all players is to make it infinitely expandable via instancing ... like the Mog House. Tbh, I would be perfectly happy with that, like we had in 11. Screw this land speculation market business. >_<