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

[Abriael]

This is FFXIV: ARR Producer/Director Naoki Yoshida. First of all, allow me to express my thanks to all of you who have offered feedback on the matter of housing prices. Needless to say, I have been following the discussion very closely.

First of all, thanks for taking the time to respond, but I'm afraid I have to say that I don't find the response very satisfactory, if at all.

Here are the reasons why and a few possible solutions:

1: if you don't want all the land to be grabbed by "the wealthiest players" immediately, the solution is very simple: just allow each Free Company to own only one plot of land/deed. No one needs more than than one now anyway, and with this kind of prices there's no market for land outside of just scraping the bottom of the barrel to get one for your free company. The ability to sell land deeds to other players is an accessory we can easily do without for now. Locking a large portion of your playerbase out of the whole feature for an extended period of time is much more damaging.

2: I'm afraid you underestimate the problem of having to wait for multiple months before being able to purchase a house for many free companies. Free Company housing was hyped and publicized for December 17th, 2013, not for March 17th, 2014. And it was hyped probably a lot more than it was warranted. It was hyped so much that the President and CEO of Square Enix worked up the hype himself basically during every single Live Letter by becoming "housing ojisan". In the past you also said that three level 50 players would have been able to afford a FC house by putting their savings together and three days ago you contradicted that.

I'm sure you understand that announcing that a large portion of your playerbase is now locked out of the feature for three months is simply not cool, and should be addressed a lot faster than in three months. The announcement of the prices just three days before the patch was a low blow.

Even due to the hype generated by your company, many were looking forward to patch 2.1 mainly for the housing feature, and I'd like to see Square Enix take responsibility for that and amend the prices to make them accessible immediately*. I'm quite sure you have the tools to do so.

3: I'm confident that you looked at a lot of metrics, but the fact remains that a LOT of players on legacy servers aren't as rich as you believe, and their free companies are being penalized for the sake of those that are rich. It's also unjust that players on legacy servers are penalized compared to players on non legacy servers, because we all pay the same monthly fees, and that IMHO, gives us the right to access the same features in game at the same rate. It's not right to penalize a whole category of players because SOME players within that category are richer.

4: the difference in housing prices that will still be retained even in three months will make legacy servers much less popular between new players coming with the PS4 and Steam versions of the game, than non legacy worlds, which will result in us having trouble convincing our friends to join us on our servers. This difference in popularity might easily lead to underpopulation on the long run, as a number of players will naturally leave while less players join. This kind of discrepancy should be avoided at all costs.

Ultimately, Yoshida-san, I think that we need something done a faster than three months from now, for the reasons mentioned above. Here are my suggestions:

1: Limit ownership of land deeds to 1 per Free Company
2: enact one of the following at the most immediate possible time.
a: slice one zero off all prices
b: slice one zero off prices of small land plots, halve medium, keep large as is.
c: immediately* unify prices of legacy servers to category 3 and drop all servers to category 1 in three months OR immediately* unify prices of legacy servers to category 3 raise prices of category 1 and 2 to category 3 in three months. Whichever more appropriate.

*Immediately is intended as "at the earliest technically possible time", of course no one is demanding for it to happen right now.

I'm sorry, but I see no other solution. As they are now, the prices are massively unjust towards a large part of the community in order to address problems that they didn't cause (IE you're penalizing those that aren't rich in order to dry the money of those that are), and I don't think it's right to ask those that are being penalized to just wait for three months in order to enjoy a feature that was massively hyped as the primary feature of the first large content patch of the game, and for which we already waited for several months (actually more than a year since it was announced).

I know and appreciate that you're working very hard to make this game a success, but this blunder is counterproductive to that success, and is penalizing many of your most faithful supporters, while there'd be way to handle it much more gracefully and without penalizing people that don't deserve that kind of treatment.

All the best,