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

[jomoru]

Reality check

I can like the steak but if the side dish is undercooked I can send that back to the kitchen while I still enjoy my steak. I can complain and rightly so that part of my meal sucks. And that's what people are doing here. Part of my gaming experience sucks. I enjoy the rest.

[TrystWildkey]

Just a friendly reality check

I could understand your point of view if the pricing was astronomical AND the same on every server.

If you haven't yet, please, take a quick look at pricing on Durandal. Go ahead, I'll wait.

............

So, you're on Phoenix. Did you start the game at 2.0? Wow, that's cool. I have some friends that started at 2.0 too. They came to Durandal because that's where I was. We figured it would be nice to play together since world choice doesn't change the game at all. Wow, when we heard about FC housing, we were really excited! I love crafting, so I was really looking forward to this feature.

Then we saw pricing.

For a middle of the road, small house, you Mr. Gunslinger, and your FC would have to raise 7.2 million. That's a lot! But, as so many people keep saying (over and over and over) 'you need something to work for!' Ok, great. Let's see what a middle of the road, small house would cost my FC.

45 million gil.

45 million gil.

Just in case you missed that, the price for a middle class, SMALL house is 45 million gil. NO ONE expected this. NO ONE expected pricing for a game feature to vary between servers. And even if we DID expect it, NO ONE expected such an exponential difference in prices.

If you were a new player who joined a Legacy server to be with real life friends and you found out that other new players on other servers could pay 6-10 times LESS than you're expected to pay for a game feature that's THE SAME on all worlds, how would you feel?

Reality check indeed.

I paid far in advance for my subscription. Because I enjoy the game and have real life friends here. I can't get a refund of that money. Even if I could, it wouldn't help because if I come back to the game, I'll still have to wait months and months to enjoy housing. So, I'm going to use those months to keep playing and gathering whatever gil I can.

We are hoping, with this thread and others, that SE understands how this pricing decision has affected their customers. We are hoping that they change the pricing sooner so we can enjoy the content they advertised to us. Especially those of us that have paid in advance.


EDIT: To continue with your analogy of a dinner you didn't like: If your dinner was cold or burnt, yeah, it's reasonable to just leave and go somewhere else. If your dinner came to your table ON FIRE, then I think you'd be justified in complaining to the manager until you were blue in the face ^^

[DarkDedede]

I'm all for working for my gil, but it's a bit difficult when they put measures in place to turn the market into complete morbol muck. Were we working in the economy of even just a couple month ago, it would be much more plausible to gather that much gil. However, with the current state of the market, the prices and the odds are stacked against us.

[TheLostGunslinger]

You're not seeing the forest for the trees. If you enjoyed the game before the housing development came about, then you can enjoy it afterward if it's not all you thought it was going to be. I fully support the housing being so expensive, if only because it's a challenge. What happened to the good old NES and SNES days when a challenging game was the most fun--where if you lost all of your character's lives, you didn't continue, you went back to square one and started over? It took true skill, and it took dedication in the sense that, if you lost, you didn't get frustrated and put the game down for good.

The problem nowadays is that gamers (and people as a whole) want everything handed to them on a silver platter, and if something is a challenge, it's not praised or heralded as a worthy treat. It's scorned, complained about, and ultimately, to keep making money, game producers have to give in to popular demand and hand it to the player.

[TheLostGunslinger]

You weren't paying $15 a month ago to live in an FC house, but you still played the game. You obviously felt the game was worth it as it stood, and the fact that the developers haven't patted its fan-base on the head and handed them a cookie is a far-cry from screwing them.

Those players who have enough skill and enough dedication will eventually get their houses. Those who do not will put down the game in frustration, or complain about it compulsively.

[HEC]

I'm glad(?) that I'm not the only person strange enough to do that.

Well - I AM strange

It's more of those questions I as a buyer would want answered before choosing a size, and before paying even 1M gil.

YES! This over an over again!

Where the hell are the DEMO houses?? Where are the EXACT specs for each house - dimensions, floor plans, available features and bonuses (current as well as future ones)??

[DarkDedede]

You're not seeing the forest for the trees.

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Game Design. You frustrate too many of your players, too often, you make less money. You want to challenge your players, you better make sure it's both engaging and fun. The only thing a bunch of zeros will accomplish is scare your audience away (an their moneys along with them). The problem with this particular blunder and/or oversight is that it affects and frustrates too many of the game's many audiences. People that want houses, people that want to make gil from the people that want houses, and even the people that get annoyed when people complain. I mean no one wins in this situation. Even the folks that are shaking their fingers at the complainers with their "20 feet uphill in the snow" responses. Again, nobody wins. Well, I guess the RMT and trolls win, but I'm not sure they count.

[Roris]

Challenge is figuring out a hard dungeon and boss fights to beat them, challenge isn't playing the markets to make gil or doing the same dungeon over and over just to scrounge up a couple of hundreds of gil. I don't understand how people keep saying this, making money is not challenging at all, it's just a side activity at best and a consequence of playing the game, it should never be the main goal in an MMO.

Of course now you'll say "if it's not challenging then why doesn't everyone have a house" #checkmatepoorpeople #rekt", maybe if prices were equal across all data centers and the announcement didn't completely crash the markets then sure. Once again there's no skill involved at all other than seeing what's selling and what isn't and finding a niche, and undercutting or just going with the same price. That sure is plenty skillful, as skillful as beating Twintania naked right? Sure makes everyone feel like pro players seeing that cash roll in.

If you really want a game where the main purpose is making then simply go play Recettear or something.

[ASnogarD]

The issue is the disparity between players, on legacy servers there are players and companies with vast sums of gil and yet on other servers there are companies that have been saving and working towards the goal of housing who have comparatively very little...

I suppose SE could of considered a game wide gil and item wipe, reset all so that everyone was equal but instead they chose to try work out the average gil owned by a company and try set a fair price accordingly... it is impossible to account for everyone.

It happens with every MMO, new content is either so easy for some it is consumed too quickly resulting in complaints or too difficult to achieve and is considered gated content for elite players only by other players resulting in more complaints and content not being consumed at all by a large proportion of players.

[Reinheart]

There is another issue going on for the jP side, at least for this one FC that bought a company house. After FC members donated money to the company they bought the house then FC leader started kicking them since they don't need them anymore. Hope this doesn't become a regular for some FC's out there... it's messed up.