Hey Yoshi, you said personal housing "will be far more affordable."

[Clavaat]

I just can't wait until the next time they release a new ward that some super rich FC just buys up every single plot of land to make it their own instance.

...That'd be pretty cool, actually. Wouldn't even be mad.

[Wyrmnus]

...That'd be pretty cool, actually. Wouldn't even be mad.

But several others will be, only making our rep as a community even worse. Do we want that? I sure hope not.

[Fendred]

Lockouts go away with time. Cost of housing goes down with time. Drop rate of currency used to buy end game gear goes up with time... I don't know what to do anymore. All I feel is mild confusion.

[Ganfal]

Hello,

The following is a comment from Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida.

This answer just show how amateur SE is when dealing with Online Gaming communities. It's a basic notion for anyone working on the Online Gaming industry: any kind of comment a staff member (moreover the game Director) do, no matter how far in the past, will be taken as a statement by the players, will be remembered and brought back if you don't deliver. That's why you're seeing this backlash.

This answer is specially bad when you base your decisions on a flawed notion. You say you're balancing the prices based on the amount of money on each server even though you don't take aggressive actions against RMT sellers and farmers, who greatly increases the amount of Gil left and right. Go to Eastern Thanalan and look at all the bots killing the Golden Fleeces 24/7. They are Lv50. They Spiritbind their gear, convert and switch to others as needed. They rank up their Chocobos. They have a guild - and that shows they don't even have to hide. They're bots, they never answer and they attack every Golden Fleece around. If you tag them, they will keep hitting your mob with the same patterns over and over. I don't remember how many times I already reported that kind of guild and their members. But they're still there, 24/7. That's why the casual John Doe don't have even 2M to spend on a feature you claimed would be "far more affordable".

If you develop a feature of this magnitude, create a huge hype on it (by giving the players tons and tons of furniture everywhere, tie cool features like Chocobo Dyeing/trainning, and statements like "I can say that prices will be completely separate from free company housing, and, naturally, far more affordable") and gives it only to a given few, it's a broken feature. Just look at how other content-restrictive games are struggling to appeal to people. You can think you have a too great product in your hands and a fanbase way too big you can't hurt by taking bad decisions like this one. But don't be fooled: people will leave if their expectations are not met.

I work on Online game companies for almost 10 years now and deal with customers' requests on a daily basis. It's a completely different bussiness from dealing with non-MMO games. It amuses me how you still have a long way to go, SE.

[Niwashi]

FC housing being alongside personal housing does work. LotRO has had mixed districts for years. The only difference is they have a dedicated server that just handles housing and is implemented with a system that automatically creates a new ward when all other wards reach a certain population of homeowners. SE's model can work the way it is now, it just requires a vast amount of wards which is the only real hurdle here.

Yes, LOTRO is a good comparison. Its system would automatically add wards (or "neighborhoods" in LOTRO's terminology) whenever a given zone ran out of any size of house. So, for example, if the medium sized houses were selling out the fastest, then the moment the last medium house in the zone was sold, another neighborhood with its whole collection of houses would be created. So, while people weren't guaranteed the exact location of house they wanted, they were guaranteed the size house they want in the zone they want.

It did actually have an upper limit of how many neighborhoods could be automatically spawned that way, but it took a few years before even the most populated server reached that point. (And then Turbine increased that upper limit a couple times to get the full availability working again.) I believe the initial limit was 250 neighborhoods per region, with 4 regions. (I know that was the limit at one point, but it's possible that was after the first increase to that limit.) It has the same number of houses per neighborhood as FFXIV. So for total housing availability, compare LOTRO's 250 wards in 4 regions to FFXIV's initially 6 (now 8) wards in 3 regions and you can see why it works there and not here.

If SE wants all housing, personal and FC alike, to be in this sort of ward system, then they have to shell out for the sort of servers that can handle a thousand or so wards, just like Turbine did for LOTRO. If they're unwilling to do that, then they have to switch to the individually instanced type of housing that's easier on the servers. But they need to do one or the other (or at the very least choose which of those two they're doing and communicate to their players what that plan is) before the next update. One way or the other, personal housing needs to have unlimited availability or it could kill this game.

[NyarukoW]

.. One way or the other, personal housing needs to have unlimited availability or it could kill this game.

This is kind of claim has no data or evidence to back this. It is clearly unreasonable to expect that every green sprout will play to the point where they saved up the gil to a house. It is also not reasonable to assume every player will want a house, or even take steps to get one, just like not every player gets a blue bird, novus, or a crafting or gathering class up to 50. So to assume you need unlimited availability to match the number of players is clearly unreasonable.

Right now as it stands the housing lots to player ratio is roughly 1-to-100. If SE over increased to 1-to-10 or 1-to-5, would that be adequate? SE does not need to have wards of mausoleums, all decorate but forgotten by either inactive players or defunct FCs. And it is really much better and much liver to have people share a house with an active FC, where people that want to garden can garden help all the others in the FC with the gardening, and those that want to raise chocobos do that for the FC, and so the raiders can raid and the crafters can craft, because there isn't enough time in the day to do all of it for one player. SE probably has the data to see the FC creation is plateauing and housing utilization is not at 100% so they made available the remaining space to individual players. And even then the small lots at 3.3mil are not even being sold out. You don't need unlimited availability for house when there is already unliminted availability for FC rooms and inn rooms.

[Niwashi]

It is clearly unreasonable to expect that every green sprout will play to the point where they saved up the gil to a house. It is also not reasonable to assume every player will want a house, or even take steps to get one, just like not every player gets a blue bird, novus, or a crafting or gathering class up to 50. So to assume you need unlimited availability to match the number of players is clearly unreasonable.

I said unlimited availability, not unlimited possession (though that would be ok too and many other games have it). Unlimited availability means it's available to everyone who wants it, just as all those other things you listed are. The game isn't going to say, well several other players already have Novus weapons, so we don't need you to get one, we'll just switch off that whole upgrade system. All your examples are available to everyone. Some will do them, and some won't. But everyone should have the right to do them. Having a major source of content that only a few players are allowed to make use of is not a viable way of running an MMO, let alone a subscription based MMO.

[Souljacker]

This is kind of claim has no data or evidence to back this. It is clearly unreasonable to expect that every green sprout will play to the point where they saved up the gil to a house. It is also not reasonable to assume every player will want a house, or even take steps to get one, just like not every player gets a blue bird, novus, or a crafting or gathering class up to 50. So to assume you need unlimited availability to match the number of players is clearly unreasonable.

I don't know one person in XI who ever said "Gosh I hate that I have a mog house. What a waste of time I never even use it!"


Player housing needs to bridge a gap between the people who can afford to own and run a FC with all the amenities, and the "green sprout" that just logged onto the game and is wondering "where is my home here?"

XI had it right. They don't even need to look further than their own backyard to have the answer to what players were (mostly) expecting from "player housing". It didn't need to be the travesty it is now. It didn't even have to be a bigger deal than the FC rooms - they could have just added flowerpots to bridge the gardening gap and an opening to a small chocobo stall for our personal chocobo outside a window. The edge of a zone of the main cities leads to your personal "mog house" "Apartment" whatever you want to call it.

Really simple solutions to issues exist, but SE insists on taking the hardest path. You're kidding yourself if you seriously believe that this last string of patches didn't cost them player confidence and subscriptions. I was actually a little surprised at logging on last night to my usual spot at Limsa's trade halls and realizing that there were far fewer people than the day before.

It could be nothing. I'm not hitting the panic button just yet - but don't act like the players will just accept slop because YoshiP fixed the UI and rebranded the game a year ago.

[Snugglebutt]

@NyarukoW

Every player should have the option of buying a house with the only limitation on the player being whether they wish to save up enough gil to buy one, full stop, end of story with no if or buts about it.

They cocked the whole housing element up from the day they introduced FC housing by making everything a land grab race that was extremely limited in plots, the addition of personal housing on pre-existing FC wards increased this problem. Their customers a lot of them have been complaining about this issue of reliance on land grab racing for months so they must have known it would cause more problems by further increasing the issue by making FC and personal houses use the same wards.

They should of gone down the path of instanced homes for both FC's and personal houses from the offset if realised wards would create server problems, allowing for everyone to own one if they saved up for it not just couple percent of the entire player base having the option to own one. Also do not use small lots not being sold out as some form of general statement because on most servers all small lots sold out in seconds, some in minutes and others within couple hours. Just because on your server there might be empty small plots it just makes you the exception not the rule.

FC rooms are not the answer because people should not be forced to leave their friends in one FC just to join one that has a house, people should not have to lose their homes and their furniture just because they leave a FC either, people should be allowed the freedom to create the home they want not what the FC leader wants, garden how/what they want not what other people in an FC demand and all of those problems with FC housing just mentioned is what personal housing was meant to solve for most people...inn rooms are not the solution too as you cannot do anything with them unlike Mog Houses from FFXI which actually could allow for gardening, customization and such.

If server issues are what is holding Squeenix back from implementing housing as should be then upgrade their servers as they need to soon anyways or alternatively they should have not gone down the route they had originally with FC housing from a game engine/coding perspective given how server intensive it is especially when they promised personal housing prior to RR even re-launching and prior to FC housing if I recall correctly. If I recall FC housing was an after thought, one that plugged a gap while everyone waited on personal housing. That stop gap measure is not a solution especially when comes with so many flaws and negative aspects which I mentioned above.

[Snugglebutt]

Really simple solutions to issues exist, but SE insists on taking the hardest path. You're kidding yourself if you seriously believe that this last string of patches didn't cost them player confidence and subscriptions. I was actually a little surprised at logging on last night to my usual spot at Limsa's trade halls and realizing that there were far fewer people than the day before.

We lost around 100 players from our FC shortly after this patch came out, most of which I think was due to the massive failure of meeting players expectations on housing. The incompetent way in which housing was handled and the ridiculous way in which they went about implementing it. Players should all have the option of owning a house if they wanted one, not only a couple percent of the entire subscriber base having the option of owning one. They need to fix this and 2.4 doubling of wards is not going to solve it.