House Payments

[AriesMouse]

EDIT: Editing to clear some things up people seemed to frequently overlook/not fully understand the intent of, and also just taking in account feedback. Also to get everything in one post, since two lovely posters informed me that editing a post gets past the text limit.

Keeping a house should require a small fee for house upkeep/maintenance, similar to repairing your armor, that is paid monthly. Changed references to this as 'rent' to 'upkeep' to follow that line of thought.

The amount paid per month shouldn't be too high, realistically, it should be extremely negligible for any active player.
For some example prices:
Small = 250,000 gil
Med = 500,000 gil
Large = 1mil gil
These are more examples for comparing the cost of one size of house to another, the numbers themselves should not be taken as what would actually be put into the system, or even anything close.

Anything in your currency tab should be able to be used as a means to pay the upkeep. With the vast amount of currencies we have in the game, many of which become completely obsolete and unused, while still being awarded to us very regularly, we should be able to use these currencies as a means to buy tokens to pay for the house upkeep.

Allow people to pay in advance. This would be very helpful when it comes to real life emergencies. Let's say you have to stop playing because you have to switch jobs, and money is tight. By paying the upkeep for your house ahead of time, you could cement your hold on your plot for up to 6 months if you needed to, while your sub goes inactive, and you tend to your real life issues. It would be a good way to help people that know they might not be able to play, or even afford the game for a short time, but allow them to keep the house they worked so hard to obtain. This could also cause issues with people dodging the auto-demo, but with the right checks and balances to limit the amount of time you can put a payment down for (or even increasing the price for every month you want to pay in advance), it could be a very helpful system, while not being game breaking.

Allow the option for people to open an upkeep donation box on their house, so that if a house is open to the public, and people enjoy using it for RP, gpose, or what-have-you, people can help that person maintain and keep that house.

I understand that some worry that this comes across like a punishment for people owning homes, but if the numbers are well balanced enough, an active player with a home shouldn't have any troubles paying. At most it would punish house flippers, people with a house on every character, and the people that are inactive in the game, but log in once a month at the behest of an email just to keep their house as a status symbol/trophy.

Until housing is no longer a finite resource, I feel like a system like this should be put in place

Adding: The argument has been made that people do not want to pay more after buying a house, but with a system like this, maybe the initial price of buying the house could be lower to counter balance. Keep in mind also, for the “buy it and done paying” mentality, would you then also argue that repairing your armor should be removed from the game? Once you buy that armor, why should we have to still pay anything else for it?

[Mirch]

this is not a big deal to house buy/sellers, they got gil, lots of gil.
anyway, i like the idea, i support this.

[Senn]

I do not support a monthly fee of any kind for housing.

[AriesMouse]

I do not support a monthly fee of any kind for housing.

Do you intend to give a reason why? Again, it wouldn't be a large fee, so for any active player it would be incredibly easy to pay, something people wouldn't even really notice.
If you're going to disagree, at least give reasons why, cons you see in this system. I've stated some pros that could come from it, so refute them, if you disagree.

[Senn]

...

I don't want to pay more just to keep a house, whether the payment be in gil, gc seals, or whatever.

[Taebok]

How about no.

[Senn]

How about no.

Hey bro aren't you going to try and refute him tho

[Alien_Gamer]

If you're going to disagree, at least give reasons why, cons you see in this system. I've stated some pros that could come from it, so refute them, if you disagree.

You haven't listed any pros, you've made a case for removing houses from people that paid for it in the false hope that you'll be able to buy it and tried to cover it up with some sort of fairness/anti flipper reasoning. A monthly charge will do nothing to stop flippers, they make more than enough money off selling that the house could go unsold for years and they'd still make a healthy profit...and thats discounting if they'll raise their rates to cover the monthly fee. However, a monthly fee will make it more work for regular players to keep their house. People play this game for lots of reasons, not all of them include making lots of money so this absolutely would be punishing players for owning a house.

This concept has been brought up before, many times and it has been explored from all angles. The end result is a monthly fee punishes players and does nothing to stop flippers and does nothing to alleviate the lack of supply in housing.

[Maoska]

I'm also against it. Given for example my good friend who owns a small private house. He worked a lot to earn gils for it, and he's not the person who's in the crafting / gathering things so he can't own a lot of money in easy way. For him such fee would be too much. It would be a dramatic move against casual players that own a house, and don't play that much. This solution would solve some problems but also would create a lot of new ones. So it's definitely a no from me.

[Dualgunner]

Hey bro aren't you going to try and refute him tho

I disagree with him as well, but it's fair enough he asks why someone would say no.