New Housing Patch Makes Sense - Serious Discussion Only

[Aurelie]

Yoshida has never actually misled anyone with this particular thing. It was pretty clear (to me) that the post was in reference to 2.1 prices considering it was written/said during 2.1, and not in the last month or so. If it was more recently, like PAX recently, I'd have absolutely sided with the masses that the prices are higher than it was said. But this isn't actually the case, is it. What we see are far lower prices than what was originally (back in December) announced.

I agree that they should have been much more clear by what they meant when they said it would be less for personal housing, but regardless of the time frame of the prices they were referring to, it does not change the fact that at the current time they are charging the same price for a FC house and a personal house, which not only gives us good reason to feel deceived, it is far too much to expect people to pay. People keep saying "but the prices are going to drop", but that is irrelevant if there are no plots available, which is what happened before and is happening again.

I have spent over 6 months now preparing for the release of personal housing. Every day, while my friends have been having fun running dungeons and coil, getting their Animus weapons & i110 gear, I have been working exclusively on making gil for personal housing. I have spent between 4-8 hours almost every day crafting, adjusting the prices of my sales items, and restocking my sales just so I would have money for a house. It has taken me this long just to get 25 million gil. For months now my friends have been saying "you won't need anywhere near that much gil, you're overdoing it", but I always said we didn't really know how much it was going to cost & I wanted to be prepared. I was very happy when I hit 25 million gil just a couple of days ago. I felt confident that would be enough to at least get a medium house. Obviously I was quite mistaken.

To work so hard and so long and then not even be able to get a house is a huge slap in the face, and for me it has taken what little fun there was left in this game for me out of it. I thought I was going to finally be able to stop spending all of my time crafting, and actually have some fun, and now I am obviously going to have to put even more time into it than before if I have any hope of getting the house I want. At this point I'm not even sure that I feel it is worth it anymore.

[PenutButter]

After thinking about it for a bit, the space situation, while still bad, may not be as bad as I thought. If people are as poor as the people here claim them to be, then most people would prefer to wait til the prices drop to their lowest first before buying. To my knowledge, patch 2.4 is coming around October, which lands it right at the point where the pricing will be at their lowest. This means that new wards will be added when prices are at their most opportune time.

The OP makes a very good suggestion. Its becoming apparent that there will probably never be enough resources for everyone to own a full house. If the resource problem is as bad as it seems than an "apartment" system might be a good idea. These apartment rooms will be instanced and will be very similar to private rooms except that they will retain some housing features, such as gardening, and will be independent of a FC. Chocobo raising should not be included, since these will be added to NPCs at a later patch. You will also have less room to work with but you get what you pay for. Large personal housing should DEFINITELY stay as it is for those who want them, as a "status symbol" or whatever.

This suggestion is not for the sake of the people whining about prices, I already made my case clear about them, ESPECIALLY since the prices are lower than when FC housing first came out even though people have WAY more money now than they did then. No, this suggestion is solely for the sake of saving space.

[Raucent]

After thinking about it for a bit, the space situation, while still bad, may not be as bad as I thought. If people are as poor as the people here claim them to be, then most people would prefer to wait til the prices drop to their lowest first before buying. To my knowledge, patch 2.4 is coming around October, which lands it right at the point where the pricing will be at their lowest. This means that new wards will be added when prices are at their most opportune time.

the problem though is the Housing opening up in october starts out as "new land" i.e. FULL price just like the new wards we just had did, the plots drop in price the longer they are not bought, lets say a S in the 2.4 isnt bought in 30 days, then it'll be at its lowest price

[Dyvid]

Personally this is how I imagined personal villas would be. FC would most likely own the medium and larger mansion while individual players own small. People say they want community but now want to kill one of the biggest communal features we have by making it instance for the simple fact they could only add 2 wards for 2.38. Yea it's a pain to have to wait for more wards but I think it's worth it in the end.

I do think they need to address the fact FCs can own multiple plots since space is limited now.

[Snugglebutt]

Yea it's a pain to have to wait for more wards but I think it's worth it in the end.

I do think they need to address the fact FCs can own multiple plots since space is limited now.

It's not just a pain it is a complete failure of epic proportions when only a mere couple percent roughly of the entire player base in this game will have access to personal housing even after 2.4 comes out. Personal housing should be available to anyone and everyone who plays and the only barrier should of been cost and maybe level, reputation or quest line based not how many plots of land exist. They also should never have combined FC and personal housing in same plots and they should also not allow anyone to own more than one plot at a time regardless of if used alts to buy them.

[Souljacker]

Then wait till 2.4 where they are doubling the amount of plots.

The correct way to implement this is on an as-needed basis. The player decides to request housing from some NPC somewhere, documents are signed, gil changes hands, and the player is the proud "owner" of her own little virtual space that she can enter and decorate. Each player has this opportunity, because the "instance" is created when the player opens the content. This nonsense of using existing wards and "doubling" them is a terrible idea. Each ward has what, 40 plots available? I don't remember what it is, but in order to service the needs of a server population of say, four thousand people they will need to add about a thousand wards.

One. Thousand. More, actually, since we share with free companies and most players aren't going to buy the biggest houses available. Most will buy a modest home.

But then again, they don't want everyone to enjoy content. They want some to have access and everyone else to watch them.

[Nyxilin]

Really i get what they wanted to do but... "chasing two ends gets you nothing" as they say. IMO they should have ether pushed back personal housing *sure would cause rage but nowhere near as much* and just add new FG wards, OR just take those extra wards and turned them into personal wards the problem is it feels like a lazish attempt to fix both problems. And if this is what we are getting makes me wish they just did the same as the gold saucer and pushed it back.

[Aurelie]

I have spent over 6 months now preparing for the release of personal housing. Every day, while my friends have been having fun running dungeons and coil, getting their Animus weapons & i110 gear, I have been working exclusively on making gil for personal housing. I have spent between 4-8 hours almost every day crafting, adjusting the prices of my sales items, and restocking my sales just so I would have money for a house. It has taken me this long just to get 25 million gil. For months now my friends have been saying "you won't need anywhere near that much gil, you're overdoing it", but I always said we didn't really know how much it was going to cost & I wanted to be prepared. I was very happy when I hit 25 million gil just a couple of days ago. I felt confident that would be enough to at least get a medium house. Obviously I was quite mistaken.

To work so hard and so long and then not even be able to get a house is a huge slap in the face, and for me it has taken what little fun there was left in this game for me out of it. I thought I was going to finally be able to stop spending all of my time crafting, and actually have some fun, and now I am obviously going to have to put even more time into it than before if I have any hope of getting the house I want. At this point I'm not even sure that I feel it is worth it anymore.

To add to the problem, ever since the update activity on the market has died down almost nothing. The only way to have any hope of getting enough money to get a house is to sell things on the market, but no one wants to buy anything because they want to save their money for housing. Because of this, it now seems it's going to be impossible for me to get enough money to get the house I want no matter what I do.

They are looking at the total amount of money in circulation and averaging that to determine how how much gil the average player has, but doing this has a serious flaw. They aren't taking into consideration that there is a portion of the player base that has 100 million gil or more, while the large majority of the players have less than 2 million gil. Of everyone I know in the game, only a few people have 2 million gil or more, and everyone I have talked to says it's the same with the people they know.

The other major problem is they aren't taking into consideration the population of each world. They are implementing the same amount of housing in every world, when they should be adding more wards on highly populated worlds like Balmung and less on the the worlds that don't have as many players.

[Turkeysammich]

The one and only issue I have with it, is this:

"Originally Posted by Naoki_Yoshida
Personal Housing
While I cannot give a specific date on when personal housing will be implemented, I can say that prices will be completely separate from free company housing, and, naturally, far more affordable."

I dislike being lied too. If they had just told us this upfront, that they had changed their mind, then fine, I would have known, and dealth with it accordingly.

Right, we were told that individual housing would cost less than FC housing, and we were led to believe that personal housing would have it's own land, not that it would actually be the same exact housing. They didn't say "we're unlocking the ability for individuals to purchase housing" they said they were adding stuff specifically for personal housing, which they didn't do, all they did was unlock the FC only rule.

[BroodingFicus]

Why not add wards that are all small houses? This would seem the best way to help alleviate the issue some, especially for personal housing. Design larger, small lot wards so you keep the community feel but don't compete with fc's. Also yes, as has been said, the issue of people purchasing multiple lots must stop. Personally I'd be behind banning anyone who bought and attempted to resell. On struggling larger servers, this is more than a bit frustrating. Better yet. Implement an upgrade system. FCs can upgrade to larger plots in the same ward if they are available. That way you can put down a wide spread halt on relinquishing land entirely after purchase as I have seen some do. This would stop those who buy plots then sell them back out to the desperate. Say you cannot relinquish land outright for a set amount of time. Upgrade? Yes. Relinquish? No. Just brainstorming. Point is there are hundreds of better ways this could have been handled with what seem to be relatively simple fixes.