(3.1) Balancing Rental Airships vs Player Crafted Airships

[Yeldir]

EDIT: I'm not really satisfied with the direction this thread took (besides the nod from Zhexos that this issue is something the devs have been considering deeply all along, which is deeply satisfying to hear), in that my original post makes it seem like I was mostly thinking about gil when I made this thread. This was bad writing on my part.

Truth is, when I started on airships, I had no plans to make money off of them. That was just something that happened as a result of being an early adopter in a market with forced scarcity, exacerbated by the housing problem. I specifically desired to ensure my free company had access to everything the game had to offer. I was, in short, attempting to invest in an experience for myself and my friends.

News of rentable airships came as a blow to me, for two reasons, one of which is extremely selfish: The ability to use the content lockout to recruit individuals eager to experience the content into my free company. That got axed, and a damned good thing it did. The other reason was simply disillusionment that my efforts in no way would provide an interesting experience for my free company. After all, if anybody can just rent a boat at the docks with all of the same features, what role do Free Company airships play beyond an another set of retainers ventures, and gil, gil, gil?

And there's more to this than gil. Keep that in mind as you go through my original post below, and the rest of this thread.

ORIGINAL ORIGINAL POST:
Let's all point and laugh at Voclain, who paid three times what his plot was worth and spent tens of millions of gil on parts and has been getting up at 3 AM for the last two months to dispatch and level what are now apparently the game's most expensive and complicated glamours+retainers.

So, you can go through all that trouble, or you can just walk up and rent one. The question quickly becomes, why go through all that trouble?
You'd probably say, "dusk leather sells for 10 million, you selfish cad!", and it is true. Sort of. Well, it was true. I did sell one, and it was for about that much. They're down to three mil on Famfrit. They'll be down to nothing in a month. In short, there was a window of extreme profitability for the earliest of the early adopters, and that window will be shattered forever long before patch 3.1 hits.

When that window breaks, crafted airships become tremendously expensive investments (5-20 million gil, and hundreds of thousands of FC credits) without returns that could ever possibly compensate for the effort involved in them.

...

A player should want to use a free company airship to explore 3.1's hidden island content, without physically being forced to, or they become gargantuan wastes of time and effort.

Most of you, rightly regarding these things as toys for officers in rich uber-FCs, will receive this idea with a certain contempt. You will kind of want them to be useless. While this sentiment is understandable, given how dumb the housing system is, it isn't rational. It's emotional. You know, rationally, that massive grinds in these games should have some kind of payoff proportionate to the effort involved, especially of large groups of people were busting their buns to attain them.

Wanting FC airships to be useless, expensive glamours is as irrational and unfair as wanting to gate content for players without access to them.

TLDR; Players crafting their FC airships just now and in the future will never make their money back. Dusk Leather will be cheap pretty dang soon. Crafted airships will be functionless glamours that take a bazillion gil.

So the question is, how do you make them worth the time and effort to assemble?

[TheMax1087]

Its actually simple how to balance it. Have every airship(fc or rented) be able to take a max of 8 players(to incentivize having more than one fc airship). Have what island you can go to be determined by the type of ship you own/rent. And finally, have renting the better ships cost much more money

[Cabalabob]

Put a once per day cap on rented ones and no cap on FC ones?

[Gunspec]

I just got 38 craftsman cunning III from my last airship voyage. In total, I've accumulated a couple hundred random materia III, and it looks like the later voyages will bring back grade IV.

All of that, just for converting the miscellaneous crafting mats I've been hording into airship parts. The only things I've made an effort to acquire for the airship are coke and darksteel ore, but the GC seals I get from fate leveling has made that part fairly reasonable. I did all of this totally by myself, and have felt like I've neither invested too much time or effort in it.

It would be nice if the company airships still did something helpful during the upcoming exploration content, but I think given the housing shortage, making the rental ones just as valid is a reasonable thing to do.

And I don't know how you're spending a bazillion gil on what is essentially 2.0 materials, unless you are buying coke off the market for insane prices rather than naturally acquiring it in a day or two of casual play.

[HulveinBlitz]

The rental ones will probably have massive restrictions compared to the FC based ones. Probably limited on size, maybe you can only visit a handful of sectors, as opposed to all the ones you get via FC etc.

I'd say, just wait some more before speculating.

[Nalien]

I assume a Rank 1 Tiny Bronco can be used in just the same way as the Ishgard Airship or a Rank 50 Airship with Tatanora parts, at least. Free Company Airships seem to be more about Grade 3 Actions, rather than anything else, they'll always be useful for that at least.

I really don't think they're worthless even without this upcoming content, though... Guess it depends on your servers economy (and how you built yours), but I've earned something like 15m off the Materia mine have brought back since Heavensward launched, and that isn't counting the millions I put back in to speed up building new parts... Glorified Retainer Ventures? Sure, but I'm certainly not complaining about all those IVs I'm getting...

If they really need to balance it though... Just give the Ishgard one an 18 hour recast time, similar to Treasure Maps. If you don't have a Free Company, one voyage to the new zone every 18 hours. If you do have a Free Company, two voyages, or more, depending on how many Airships/how unbalanced that would be. I'd actually find that enhances the content in general, you'd have to plan going out there, it would feel more like exploring and death might actually have a price for once; You wipe out while exploring, you have to home point and you've wasted one of your allowances for visiting the area.

[Yeldir]

I just got 38 craftsman cunning III from my last airship voyage. In total, I've accumulated a couple hundred random materia III, and it looks like the later voyages will bring back grade IV.

...

And I don't know how you're spending a bazillion gil on what is essentially 2.0 materials, unless you are buying coke off the market for insane prices rather than naturally acquiring it in a day or two of casual play.

Regarding III and IV crafting materia, and their value, well, I'm of the firm belief that we are in the early stages of what is essentially crafting armageddon, and I base this on the removal of crafted gear as part of the PVE progression cycle. These crafting/gathering materia sell well for the moment because crafters as a whole haven't really accepted what has been done to their role as real. Everyone is collectively assuming it's a hiccup, and it isn't - Yoshi P and co. specifically do not want players using crafted gear to push content.

There is, in short, a brick wall in crafting's future: The point where the majority of crafters/gatherers are finally geared out. What will you make with your shiny AF? Who will you sell it to?

...

In response to your accusation of the wastefulness of buying materials, who said I did much buying? I regard not selling the materials myself and my FC produced as an expense. I could have sold those hundreds of thousands of materials, and if we (my FC) did that, we'd be rich indeed.

What some of you aren't thinking is long-term, and what happens to the economic reward of crafted airships, which is their only allure at present.

[Gunspec]

In response to your accusation of the wastefulness of buying materials, who said I did much buying?

You said "Crafted airships will be functionless glamours that take a bazillion gil.", so I assumed you meant in terms of the market price of the materials, to which I said don't buy coke from the market.

And maybe materia demand will change radically in the future, or maybe it won't. All I know is, my 150 crafted gear is now stuffed full of +CP materia that I wouldn't have spent money on normally. I received and consumed the market equivalent of 500k gil in materia, and I can now craft better as a result.

If things change in the future concerning the value of airship rewards, they can add or subtract items from the airship voyages easily enough. The rewards are currently good, and "in the long term" they can change the rewards.

What they really shouldn't do is lock other players out of content that is REPLACING a third expert dungeon in patch 3.1, just because there is a housing shortage that SE hasn't properly addressed.

[Nalien]

What some of you aren't thinking is long-term, and what happens to the economic reward of crafted airships, which is their only allure at present.

No, you're not thinking in the long-term. You're acting like the current set of crafting content is it, completely ignoring that subsequent patches will add onto it and create new demand. Is there a brick wall in the future for crafting? Sure, just like there was in 2.0 as well. Thing is, new patches gave crafters a new wall to hit. That's not even considering things like the Relic quest, which added most of the demand for Materia anyway... Wouldn't be too surprised to see SE add another "Sell your soul for Materia" stage in the coming patches...

Then, of course, is the fact that you're ignoring the other allure Airship Voyages present; A source for free Grade 3 Actions.

[Airget]

The "rented" airships could be super simple in practice, they just don't offer any perks, they allow you to go to the area and you have to go through a process to unlock new areas.

Fc airships, you can go areas you unlocked and the stats of your ship offer perks during your journey on the island, so you could get 4-5 buffs based on the stats of your airship whereas the "rented" airships would grant you no buffs.