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

[Yeldir]

Specifically designed so that only people with tens of millions of gil saved up can take advantage of it.

Yes. However, I've already conceded there are other ways to combat abandoned lots, which are as good as my suggestion, as gil destruction can always occur elsewhere. Why am I in favor of house fees specifically? Because it attacks the richest element of the player base. I've explained all of this.

As far as I can tell only you and GenJoe actually own houses in this thread. You're also the only people agreeing with your proposition and the only haves in the thread, both financially and housing related.

I do not own houses, which is amusing, because I've bought them. Just not for myself.

The people that 'agree with you' do so on the stipulation that it be less than 5-10%. Enough that someone who had to save for the house could still make it, and only on the basis that SE is doing nothing and/or that people's houses get moved to instanced housing or something that doesn't make them just lose it if they can't pay.

5-10%, if you look back at my original posts, was my suggested amount. As for "not losing houses for nonpayment", I'm really not sure where you're getting that. Can you quote a post that was in favor of monthly lot fees, but not in favor of repossession for failure of payment?

Giving out 2 million out of 60 doesn't make you Robin Hood. Especially not when done while screen shotting to be used as an argument for how altruistic you are. I've given away more than that in gear and money and my total assets amount to under 5 million right now.

No, it doesn't. However, lacking a time machine, I can't go back and show you my breadcrumb trail of good deeds and gifts, and even if I did, you could (and quite probably would) claim I did all of that for my own benefit.

[Voldemort]

I agree with that, Voldemort, entirely. How do you think the problem would be best solved?

I believe the best way to solve the content accessibility problem would be a form of temporary housing that gives players enough time to get what they want (color their chocobo, train a race bird, grow a garden, etc) then auto relinquish when done in time for new tenants to fulfill their wishes to experience said content.


Though it would still be problematic in that it doesnt help those who want to decorate their dwelling or are looking for permanent housing. As taking time to decor defeats the purpose of it being "temporary".
Not to mention airships coming our way, which will probably increase the amount of time a player would be needing a house for X amount of time. As I would probably speculate coloring a chocobo takes significantly less time that crafting pieces of an airship. And this is assuming a player is 100% working on the airship and not taking time to raid, hunt, socialize with friends, and more...

Someone else mentioned in either this thread or another, instanced housing done by a frequency number would have been the best way. So yes every house would be instanced, but you can still visit a FC or personal house so long as you remember the instance number that was generated with said house.
An expansion of this idea could be the ability to link up houses in an instanced world.
So everyone has their own personal house they made in an instance, and then upon linking, both houses show up on the same instance. Could be an easy way to have all FC houses of individuals in one ward, and the Main FC house in the center.

[GenJoe]

snip

Balmung is not a rich server.. You need to check out the MB situation on Jenova to see what kind of problems we're facing.
When most people are walking around with less than a million gil and few dozens of veteran 4 star crafters are all sitting on 8, 9, even 10 digits of gil.. It's not hard to imagine shit's gonna hit the fan sometime soon that's why I want more gil sinks implemented.. What's funny about this game is, not only is there just a raw lack of gil sinks in the game in general, most of the gil sinks implemented affect the poor the most, and crafters can do so much to avoid them (cheaper gearing, cheaper materia melding, cheaper repairs, the perks are just endless!)

House upkeep is just one of many ways to implement an effective gil sink, take the added benefit of adding an operating cost to the real estate agents of Eorzea and I see no problems with it..

[Yeldir]

some cogent pros and cons of instanced housing

I'm completely against the introduction of "second class housing" on top of the non-instanced stuff. A total conversion of all housing to instanced content would be fair and solve the availability problem forever, at the cost of destroying whatever sense of neighborhood still remains in the wards. I truly hope this is avoided somehow, because getting to know your fantasy adventure neighbors can be a lot of fun. And "fun". Heheh.

[Krylo]

5-10%, if you look back at my original posts, was my suggested amount.

And even I, in my first post, agreed a 1% cost wouldn't be bad.

As for "not losing houses for nonpayment", I'm really not sure where you're getting that. Can you quote a post that was in favor of monthly lot fees, but not in favor of repossession for failure of payment?

Maybe a hybrid system would be good - everyone seems to really care about being in the wards themselves, so maybe you have to pay rent to stay in your swank location.

If you don't pay rent you lose your plot location, the plot goes up for sale and your house gets moved to an instanced plot all by itself, accessible from that gate to nowhere that all the housing wards have and don't use.

No, it doesn't. However, lacking a time machine, I can't go back and show you my breadcrumb trail of good deeds and gifts, and even if I did, you could (and quite probably would) claim I did all of that for my own benefit.

It also wouldn't change the fact that locking anyone who doesn't play often enough to have 4 or 5 hours a month to dedicate entirely to farming gil to make 150-500k (bad/best small plot prices divided by 10) a month out of content like airship building, chocobo coloring, farming (which is a revenue stream that would help them not be poor anymore if it didn't all go to housing upkeep) etc. is pretty elitist.

15-50k would be fine. That's like. . . two 'adventurer in need' bonuses. Easily payable through gil, green or otherwise, by anyone who is active doing anything that they enjoy, however, a lot of people have jobs or get jobs or family issues that, while may let them stay active, could cut play time down to 30 hours a month, at which point expecting them to spend four of those (which would generally amount to four full nights of their game time, possibly more), doing something they don't enjoy is becoming kind of an obnoxious burden.

I still don't believe we need even THAT, but I wouldn't be opposed to it.

Edit: In other news, can we raid SE's headquarters with pitchforks and torches until they multiply the post character limit by ten or so?

Edit 2 because it's easier than making a new post and then editing that to get it in

Balmung is not a rich server.. You need to check out the MB situation on Jenova to see what kind of problems we're facing.
When most people are walking around with less than a million gil and few dozens of veteran 4 star crafters are all sitting on 8, 9, even 10 digits of gil.. It's not hard to imagine shit's gonna hit the fan sometime soon that's why I want more gil sinks implemented.. What's funny about this game is, not only is there just a raw lack of gil sinks in the game in general, most of the gil sinks implemented affect the poor the most, and crafters can do so much to avoid them (cheaper gearing, cheaper materia melding, cheaper repairs, the perks are just endless!)

House upkeep is just one of many ways to implement an effective gil sink, take the added benefit of adding an operating cost to the real estate agents of Eorzea and I see no problems with it..

I think I've heard Jenova's MB are just completely fucked? Like I'm pretty sure I've read that somewhere. It's not even an inflation issue, it's like. . . a people keep pushing down prices on everything acquirable plus inflation issue? I'm pretty sure Jenova is the one I read that about.

Regardless, Balmung is one of the most popular servers and gets a lot of green gil floating around as a result (inflation) and has the highest housing costs, which means they'd have an equal amount of weight from this implementation. And I closed the window and am having trouble finding it but I'm pretty sure Balmung was one of the servers that still cost 7 mill 4 months ago.

[Firepower]

I remembered reading an old post from Yoshi way back at housing's implementation about charging rent.

Letter from the Producer LIVE Part IX Q&A Summary (10/30/2013)
Q: Will there be any maintenance fees or other costs for housing, besides the cost of the land and house?
A: In older MMOs, such as Ultima Online, there was a house maintenance fee you had to pay weekly, but in FFXIV: ARR we decided against this system. Similarly, these older MMOs also had a system where your house would break down if you didn’t log in after a while in order to have you continue your subscription, but this is a thing of the past and we won't have any system like that.

Although I must say a lot of the stuff they mentioned at release of housing has been drastically changed or not implemented, such as making deeds available on market wards, tradable and ways for people to "move house to a larger one". Not to mention that they actually DID go back on their word here and consider implementing the destruction of house after long periods of not logging in, they then backpedalled again and decided not to implement it.

The point of this post was just to indicate that they had already discussed and decided against a rent system when implementing it, now I am sure that it has not worked as intended but I am confident that they are unlikely to go back and implement this as a fix to their current issues.

In fact it is quite interesting to revisit this old letter and see what they have and have not yet implemented in the housing department: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...810-30-2013%29

[Yeldir]

And even I, in my first post, agreed a 1% cost wouldn't be bad.

Hmmn. Seems a bit low to me, but I wouldn't complain. It'd get the job done, assuming players are barred from just dumping a mil on their personal home to secure themselves 18 months of empty home-ownership on an inactive account, or however the numbers would work out.

As for FJerome's post, I see what you mean, now! I failed to understand what he meant until you put it in this context. Thanks for fishing that quote up for me. I can't see anything wrong with the idea, in spite of what I said about "second class housing" being bad news, as it is really a punitive measure against inactivity and non-payment, with the net result of opening lots for eager homeowners.

It all seems pretty reasonable, although given the numbers you favor, I'd want to see vicious gil deflation measures put in somewhere else. I don't really need to wish for that, of course. It's almost certain that airships will cost an arm and a leg.

Firepower:
SE says a lot of things. Remember what they said about personal housing being different from free company housing? Heheh...

[Voldemort]

I'm completely against the introduction of "second class housing" on top of the non-instanced stuff.

I understand what you mean, but the second class housing would be meant for players who dont care about hanging up their Ifrit trophy or even owning a permanent residence. But rather, it gives them a place to establish the "I have (some form of) a house. Now I can utilize that content I've been missing out on"

A total conversion of all housing to instanced content would be fair and solve the availability problem forever, at the cost of destroying whatever sense of neighborhood still remains in the wards. I truly hope this is avoided somehow, because getting to know your fantasy adventure neighbors can be a lot of fun. And "fun". Heheh.

Perhaps with the instanced housing and the linking suggestion I made, there could be a feature to "randomize" your ward.
How it would work is once you have your house ready to go, you would go to the linking feature for instanced housing, then choose Randomize Ward.
So players who choose randomize would get matched up with like minded players (who also chose randomize), whom want to be next to someone besides manually picking their friends/FC members.

And voila!
Now you can experience those fantasy adventure neighbors too, but this time they actually want to be next to different people instead of secretly hating their neighbors and complaining to the Homeowner's Association whenever the others park their chocobo on their lawn or don't trim their dryad bushes...

[Krylo]

Snip

I honestly think cycling houses at ALL will add a lot of gil deflation. Inactive people losing their houses means that the 1-80mil they spent on it is gone from that server forever, AS is the 1-80 mil the next guy/FC/whatever spends on it. Having any way of cycling housing at all will help with that. Especially after we've gone so long with no inactives being removed, you'd see a lot of gil removed from the market pretty quickly.

It might honestly be too quick and create a tumultuous MB situation for awhile.

Another thought might be giving mansions, that are only going to be owned by either people or FCs with a lot of income and no poor FC/player really has a use for, a higher rent percent than small houses. That way people who scrimp and save and don't have a lot of time to play can still, if they're active, maintain a small house. Though I'd suggest waiting until after the initial MB upheaval from 100s of millions of gil disappearing from servers into newly freed up housing settles down before implementing any kind of rent system (but have a warning it will be happening and how).

Edit: Also I dislike the 'pay in advance' feature I've seen people ask for here and elsewhere. The whole (or at least main) point of any of these should be to create churn in the real estate market, primarily by removing property from inactive players. Letting someone pay a year ahead of time completely invalidates this.

[Yeldir]

I think we're on the the same frequency now, Kry. The points you've just made seem flawless to me - rent could be extremely low. Trivial, even, and it would still suck gil out of the game effectively due to the extreme costs of the initial land grab. Yeah, that's top notch. I'm going to call Yoshi-P and tell him we've got this worked out at long last.