Housing plots need rent. Sound horrible? Consider these facts:

[Madjames]

They just need to weed out the unsubs. If their subscription expires or is cancelled, give them 35 days to resub before sending their crap to the calamity salvager.

This I agree with. There are to many Cry Babies in this game. Give the unsubs 35-50 days after their sub runs out to come back, resub and refresh their house. If they dont, let it go back on the market. If you are not paying your sub, which in turn is funding then game for more updates, fixes, and expansions, then you do not deserve to keep your home.

Also do not give me this over saturation needing to take break bullcrap.

I have been playing MMORPGS since September 1997. From then until today, I have NEVER missed a subscription payment. I started when I was 10 YEARS OLD. I payed my sub by doing a lawn service when I started playing Ultima Online. I always had the 10 dollars a month to give my parents to keep my sub active (They would have canceled my subscription if I missed one payment which I never did miss). When wow came out, it was the same thing. I never have missed a subscription, NOR have I EVER taken a break from ANY mmorpg. Have I quit an mmorpg for another one? Yes I quit UO when wow came out in 2004. From 2004 until 2012 I payed for 2 subscriptions for Wow. One for me, one for my wife. Now I continue to work and pay for one sub for me, and one sub for my wife in this game. Between 2012-2015 I payed for 2 subs for SWTOR. I tried this game upon ARR release but didnt continue because my Ninja was not in the game yet.

If you do NOT SUB for a game and help fund it and keep it going, I have no sympathy for you and you do not deserve to keep your house unless it is in your own instance. However in my opinion if you dont sub for a month, you should lose it and the plot should go back up for sale without ANY reimbursement. Call me mean, heartless, or unforgiving but this world we live in is mean, heartless, and unforgiving. If I stopped paying my mortgage I lose my house. The mortgage company does not give 2 craps about my twin boys, my wife, me, why I may have lost my job and stopped paying. It would not matter if I got cancer and was terminally ill, I would lose my house eventually anyway. Mind you we would probably have a grace period but thats about it.

SE should give a grace period and that is about as far as I will accept to solve this issue.

There should not be a tax on our property but a time limit on how long someone is unsubbed.

[GenJoe]

It's only the poor who would be messed with, not the rich. It would only further the gap between 'haves and have-nots' not close it.

That is true, upkeep would have to FORCE some people to give up their housing, that's the only way upkeep would free up plots. If it didn't, there wouldn't be a reason for it other than to pester people and that's not why we're suggesting it.
But do you really want to protect people's properties that badly? When clearly, the amount of gil for upkeep could be farmed in a matter of hours? (one or two hrs of spiritbonding should take care of it)

You seem to think that gil in this game belong to all the crafters, that is simply not true. non-crafters can earn just as much as an average crafter and indeed they do, when they NEED the gil.. The only reason I see my raider friends running around with 50k gil in their pockets is because they don't need the money at that very moment. Usually, they have a few spare materia that they could sell for some quick cash, OR they could go out and spiritbond.


The only reason crafters sit on a stockpile of gil is because some of it is necessary to cover the cost of business and crafters don't really have much of a constant source of gil sink and whatever we decide to spend money on, just happens to be cheaper for us since we can cut out the middle man. That is not to say that non-crafters are poor, they can have just as much cash flow when they want it to happen, they're just more comfortable sitting on a little bit of money if they don't need it immediately, some raiders use just as much, if not more gil than crafters. (Penta-melds anybody?) That money (10m+) still had to come from somewhere.


Way I see it, I like to think of raiders as akin to the stereotypical newly graduate in a high paying field of studies, 6 figure starting salary, but between buying an expensive car, and an expensive house and student loans, they don't have any savings.. That is not to say they're not wealthy though, they're just spending exactly as much as they're earning.
Crafters are a little different, because they need to reinvest some of the money back into the crafting in order to be successful, so saving gil is simply a necessity for them.


Now, when I say raiders, I generalize the majority of the player base that's into the dungeon crawling. Whether it be coils, primals, or just roulettes all day long. Technically, they should all have similar earning potential.
There are some people who opt out of the gil making game and I understand that, but do they really deserve to have a house without an active method for making gil? Housing is designed to cost a lot of money in this game and in order to buy one, you need to work for it.

I give props to people who save for literally over a year for a house, I commend them for the gumption, but that's really not the proper way to buy a house. Just not in this game when we're all competing for the same limited resource.

If SE designed two types of housing, instanced and non-instanced and treated houses as something of a mobile home and people could choose to move their instanced housing to the real game world where people could come to visit etc.. Then yes, penny savers would be able to have a house in its instanced form, but as long as houses are not instanced and limited in numbers, it's only natural it goes to whoever works to keep it.

It'd be just as easy to say '1 month unsubscribed = no house'. That's it. Not one month not logged in. Not one month without going into your house. One month unsubscribed. Hell, make it 2 or 3 months if people want. That'd be enough to free up housing.

Yes but in this case, you're taking people's houses away for unknown, real life circumstances that could really be completely out of their control. Upkeep would automatically enforce this anyway as nobody has an infinite amount of gil and SE could implement the upkeep system in a way where it works like a prepaid system and you have to deposit money into a separate chest in-game for months at a time.. At least with the upkeep, the fate of their own house in Eorzea is in their hands.. You foresee a long hiatus? deposit enough money in the "bank" to cover it.


Tbh though, I'd be happy with either method.. Houses need to rotate ownership, I already have my FC mansion, I could buy a new personal house anytime if I wanted to.. Why would I welcome a change in the game that would drain my money? because I can see a definite improvement in the QoL aspect of housing, neighbors! Too much of the wards are dead due to inactivity, it kinda takes away any reason for houses to be non-instanced in the first place.

[Yeldir]

What?

No.

...

and more quickly reachable through gil generated as opposed to gil taken from other players. I shouldn't have to explain the importance of the distinction between those two income sources, and how they relate to new players and the barrier of entry they face when growing towards crafting for profit.

I guess I'll have to explain the difference after all. The problem I'm struggling to describe to you depends on the purchasing habits of new players vs established omnicrafters.

Who buys the things new players produce as they level to 50 and beyond?
Other new players, or people taking up crafting for the first time, almost to the point of completely excluding established omnicrafters.

I do not buy shards. Ever. In fact, none of the things I craft use any materials below one-star. I've crunched the numbers, and it is almost never worth my time to make anything that uses the items new players generate.

On the other hand, they desperately need many of the things I can make, if they want to progress beyond one star. As a goldsmith, I sell to two target audiences - already rich players who can afford to kit themselves out in platinum DoW/DoM gear, and poor players and new crafters who must have my crafting jewelry to proceed.

Let me remind you at no point do I purchase items from what I'll call the "low level" economy. This means my money, and the money of other fatcats like me, never has any direct route of reaching the pockets of new players, while they are frequently forced to pay money directly to me to "reach my level", as it were.

That leaves new players selling to new players and people breaking into crafting for the first time - people who, frankly, don't have a whole lot of gil to throw around.

What that means is simple: all the money goes to the top, i.e., me. And then when a new patch hits with incredible new crafting recipes, the money at the top changes hands, but only with people who are at the top already, or reach it first. A new player can never, ever make anything your standard fatcat ever has to pay for. Do you see what I'm saying?

The net result of this is extreme wealth concentration, and it means the larger proportion of the gil on the low-end side of the market is "generated" from quests and the like. Reducing the total amount of gil possessed by the "haves" increases the relative value of the static gil reward provided by those quests.

[StouterTaru]

Excessive taxation with the money going into a hole = deflation

Deflation is bad for an economy, and the wealthy will be the only ones thriving. Small, steady inflation makes for a very healthy economy.

[GenJoe]

optional taxation i.e. luxury tax

[Yeldir]

Damn right, Joe. Damn right.

[Souljacker]

bunch of blah blah me me me.

Really? This is precisely the sort of advice SE SHOULDN'T be taking. What they *should* do is just admit that they didn't have a working plan for this and remove "player" housing from the FC housing. This lack of professionalism on their parts is embarrassing. I'm embarrassed FOR them. Somehow the XI team figured out how to have player housing in their game well over a decade ago and it didn't involve making people feel badly if they had to unsubscribe for whatever reason.

That we are still talking amongst ourselves without even an acknowledgement from SE - gosh why am I even wasting my time?

they aren't going to revisit this, it seems. Might as well give up.

[Krylo]

But do you really want to protect people's properties that badly? When clearly, the amount of gil for upkeep could be farmed in a matter of hours? (one or two hrs of spiritbonding should take care of it)

Firstly, the spirit binding market is already starting to crash. The only things keeping materia prices where they are now (for DoW materia) is the relic quest requiring so many of them and hardcore raiders. However, that portion of the quest will no longer be mandatory come HW, which only leaves hardcore raiders trying to min-max their stats while achieving accuracy caps. Which, what were the clear percentages for FCoB again? 5%? 10%? That's not a huge market and spiritbonding won't make you the same money anymore once 50 relics no longer matter.

Secondly, considering housing opens up new monetization methods as well as being necessary for unlocking some of the content (like airship building that's supposed to be coming)? Yes. It's important that people who scrounge money together and save it can get, and retain, a house.

At least in any argument that's going to be worked as an appeal to 'helping the poor downtrodden have-nots' like Yeldir's.

Housing is important, if you want to make it important and only for the rich then be honest about it (like you are), don't try to claim you're helping out the poor players by destroying gil when all you're doing is ensuring they're locked out of content.

Yes but in this case, you're taking people's houses away for unknown, real life circumstances that could really be completely out of their control.

Too bad.

Housing is a limited resource. Any limited resource should be for active players, not people who haven't logged in for months and may never do so again. If you want to give them some portion of their money back, whatever. I don't care. But allowing unsubscribed people to keep homes because 'but I might need to disappear for a few months' is bullshit. How about people who play every day, have plenty of revenue to buy a home, and can't because of them?

You can't lock out content from your playing and active subscriber base because you might annoy your inactive and non-paying subscriber base on the off chance they actually do decide to play again after 6 months.

On the other hand, they desperately need many of the things I can make, if they want to progress beyond one star. As a goldsmith, I sell to two target audiences - already rich players who can afford to kit themselves out in platinum DoW/DoM gear, and poor players and new crafters who must have my crafting jewelry to proceed.

See, this is funny to me because MY target audience is you. I sell things like ehcahtl sealant needed for 3/4* crafts, which you then craft and sell to people trying to break in.

But here's the problem, those poor players don't NEED your shit. They can buy some materia, eat some food, maybe get the FC leader to activate an FC buff, and craft themselves the next star set up and go without any help from you or buying your things. A lot of people don't because the cost of that materia and food over multiple sets and the effort/time to make that + craft their own gear is less than the prices you're charging.

Your economics at the high end, no matter how much you wish or think it to be true, don't actually exist in a vacuum of monopolization that treads all over the poor. Your prices are set by the market's inflation just like everything else, and less gil in the market is still going to make your Artisan's Apron cost the same amount in sold shards or whatever as it does now. The only difference is that if all the Gil is destroyed, the effective cost of things like repairs are going to shoot up for poor players.

[Dante_V]

I don't agree with tax system at all. i wouldn't be against a penalty system for the purpose of vacating lots. Everyday your house goes unused by you or your FC you get charged $xx amount of gil for the "upkeep' of that property in your absence. once the cost in penalties exceeds a certain percentage of your housing value the house becomes forfeited and returns to the market.

Also the gil sink theory, while applicable in the economic understanding between rich and poor players doesn't hold much weight in the context of absent players as any money in hands of a player who is absent has zero purchase power and is essentially 100% out of the market unless the player returns at some point.

[Souljacker]

I don't agree with tax system at all. i wouldn't be against a penalty system for the purpose of vacating lots. Everyday your house goes unused by you or your FC you get charged $xx amount of gil for the "upkeep' of that property in your absence. once the cost in penalties exceeds a certain percentage of your housing value the house becomes forfeited and returns to the market.

I just don't even understand this mentality. Why can't we band together to demand what SE originally promised us (separate from FC, more affordable) instead of coming up with these elaborate ways to punish one another for not making housing their number one priority upon every single login? Are we playing a real estate mmo? Or should housing be a fun and entertaining side activity for those who enjoy it?

I just can't see anyone enjoying this content with the level of stress some folks want to add.