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

[LiadansWhisper]

I see what you are trying to say and you are being very reasonable the prices of the housing is far fetched I was just defending my opinion. I am still trying to figure out what se is trying to do. I personally think they are trying to take a large amount of gil out of our server. The only reason I can think is gil buyers and sellers. everyone was hit when they reduced our cushion when 2.0 was released but I see people selling primal fights from the day they had them down and they are charging 1.5 to 2mil on my server I think its ridiculous and its not just the devs its some of the players too that I think are the reason behind the prices on housing

I never saw primal fights go for that much. I think the most I saw was 700-800k, and that was for Titan itself. Most people didn't need help prior to that, it's just that Titan is a large step up from the general "difficulty" level of the previous parts of the questline. I think that trying to take so much gil out of the economy is, however, a bad idea. Most of that gil isn't circulating as is, but completely removing it will leave even less gil circulating - which leads to deflation. Which we're seeing right now. Between the housing situation and bots dumping on the markets, it's really become frustrating and discouraging, to say the least. Hopefully, as the prices on housing are finally lowered to reasonable levels, things will pick up again.

There are people that charges money to help you with Primals? O.o

Surely people could just join an FC or something?

What if their FC doesn't have enough people, or not enough people at max, or what if they aren't very good at the PvE part of the game? People join Free Companies for all kinds of reasons, and only one of them (raiding) is one that would help with primals. People on my server and others have sold Titan kills and such, and I personally don't see any issue with it - if people want to spend their money there, then by all means.

I repeat I goddamn don't care of what are server stuff,

I understand your frustration. Please believe me - I really do. But you need to be careful how you phrase things on this forum. Cussing, yelling, and verbally abusing people isn't going to get you anywhere - and may very well earn you a forum vacation.

[Taekrys]

The price of housing is the biggest incentive to use RMT that is in the game now. So I don't see how they think high pricing is going to solve RMT problems.

Absolutely correct. And I think that's the biggest issue here.
If they were just trying to put a challenge on the players, not a big deal. I mean, it's still unfair and unreasonable, and a lot more senseful in F2P MMO, yet understandable.
But they are helping RMT a lot this way, instead of fighting them: if RMT is fire, it's like SE is throwing gasoline at it instead of water.

That Leaves only two possible explanations:
1) They don't care enough.
2) RMT gives a cut of their gain to SE.

I guess the first one is correct, even if I cherish the possibility of the cospiracy behind the latter!

[Kinseykinz]

SE tries to keep the price of houses relative to the amount of gil in circulation, so that the value of the house, compared to the value of gil, is roughly the same across servers.

About that:

I made a 'price checking mule/spy' on a 'World A' mostly to keep tabs on their current Housing Prices so I could know what my worlds housing prices will be. But while I was on this world, I decided that it would be prudent to check the ward prices of some random items and compare them to the same item and price on my server that day:

Results:
Higland Parsley: Them 100 ea Us 110. NOT 2.5 times the price like housing is. (250 ea)
Buttons in a Blanket: Them 845ea Us 950each Not 2.5 times the price like housing is (2113 ea)
Button Mushrooms: Them 85ea Us 60ea. Not 2.5 times like price of housing (213 ea)
Sun Lemons: Them 170ea Us 200 ea. Not 2.5 times like price of housing (425ea)
HQ Vanya Robe or Healing: Them 100K Us 125K Not 2.5 times like price of housing (250K)

My point, your arguement is moote because IF gil was really inflated on my legacy server to 2.5 times the value of gil on 'World A' servers, then our prices would be closer to those in the parenthesis and NOT basically the same as the World A prices. As to the 'but you all have more savings....' That may or may not be true....but punishing customers that played and SAVED and not allowing them to access content that others, on other servers have played and payed less for is wrong...especially when at the end of the day. House Plot 1, Ward 1 on all wards is the SAME THING.

Stop believing 'legacy markets are inflated' 'Legacy players are loaded' We're most simply nothing of the sort. When our gil was redominated...90% of all 1.0 weath was erased.

[Miyenne]

It's doable, at least on my server. My company of ten people has, since the 17th, made 1.6 million gil on top of what we've saved previously.

But it's getting harder.

I craft random things to sell so I don't flood the market. Every day I check my retainers, only a few things have sold. Every day I have to drop my prices 500 gil, 1000 gil, even in more than one case 100,000 gil because people keep undercutting so bad hoping for ANY sort of profit, it becomes more and more difficult.

10 people, 10 days. Only a million gil. It's going to be a while.

We just need a few more ways to make gil outside the market board.

[MortalWare]

If you FC has 200 active players and they all submitted 1 million Gil each, you still couldn't buy a large house. Insane.

[Heat]

What worries me more is the individual housing system.

First of all I don’t trust them anymore, what they say today 90% of the time will change after a month, like what happened when they said 2-3 people leveling 3 classes to 50 could buy a house.
So will they do the same to individual houses? Who knows?

Second thing, the sizes of the houses, the small FC house could not fit 3 persons with 1 table in it, how could it fir 20 players?

The sizes right now should be for individual players and the FC houses should be 10 times bigger than what they are now.

[ArkhamNative]

Every day I have to drop my prices 500 gil, 1000 gil, even in more than one case 100,000 gil because people keep undercutting so bad hoping for ANY sort of profit, it becomes more and more difficult.

Call it "undercutting" if you want, but the market is just doing what it always does. The big change is that people are more aware of the value of gil. They are buying less at high prices (300 gil for a single BTN20 lemon?, for example) and gathering/crafting/farming more. Now there are also more sellers and their costs in gil are almost zero. Content gives away items and now, instead of discarding or NPCing, they're selling it on the market and any price is a profit.

More sellers equals rising supply. More frugal, self-sufficent buyers equals falling demand. That's what traditionally pushing prices down. At some point buying will rebound once prices are in line with perceived value of gil (like, same example, 20 gil for a lemon). It was a seller's market early on, while most people consumed combat content and got free gil. That's gone now, until the next new things where only a few have knowledge or ability to make something and the many have a great desire to buy it.

TL;DR: see bold text, above.

[Taekrys]

Call it "undercutting" if you want, but the market is just doing what it always does. The big change is that people are more aware of the value of gil.

Yeah, most of complaint I read on AH prices are basically like saying: "Why did SE make so hard to strip ignorants from their money?".
I managed to gather around two millions in three months out of that, but the rest of my FC were the ones stripped, not the ones stripping (they now have around 300k each).
What really troubles me is that even with me being able to do so and gather so much - and then "playing dirty" on the market - it's still impossible for my FC to afford even the small sized house. And when the price in my Group will be halved, I will still have to cover for around 50% of the price with just my cut (and I won't!).

However, it's wrong to complaint about free market going nuts and prices lowering. It's a natural evolution.
What people should complaint instead, are the lack of ways to make good and honest money, via LeveQuest or Istances for example.

[cainejw]

The big change is that people are more aware of the value of gil.

Except now you're seeing that the value of gil that they just realized requires everyone to hold on to it as much as possible. This is the exact same behavior seen in real world economics during recessions and depressions. People are holding on to every cent they can, produced goods are plummeting in value to entice buyers, and the alternative source of income (here quests and such) has become so laughably small that it's becoming difficult for people to gather the required gil.

If this were the real world, you'd see more people "laid off" resulting in a massive rebounding of inflated prices causing goods to be unsellable. Thankfully, FFXIV has unlimited resources based on simply getting the resources and crafting. That's causing the flooding of the market of goods that just keep devaluing as fewer people buy what more people produce.

Simply put, in one quick move, Yoshi-P made people realize that gil is valuable AND that they need to hoard it in such large values that it's actually crashing the market in a Great Depression scale as most people withdraw their money from the market causing the items to devalue very quickly in hopes of moving ANY money.

People are aware of the value of gil, so they're not going to let go of it making the markets oversaturate and devaluate.

[Quesse]

Simply put, in one quick move, Yoshi-P made people realize that gil is valuable AND that they need to hoard it in such large values that it's actually crashing the market in a Great Depression scale as most people withdraw their money from the market causing the items to devalue very quickly in hopes of moving ANY money.

People are aware of the value of gil, so they're not going to let go of it making the markets oversaturate and devaluate.

This is exactly what I'm doing. I'm not spending a penny in hopes Yoshi will come to his senses and REALLY fix the housing market. He has completely lost it on this one. I have no idea what he was thinking. What a train-wreck.