Pushed to quit after 1,860 days subbed

[Penthea]

And yet how often do we hear of people getting their houses demolished because they neglected to read or learn of the tools available towards them? You don't reward willful ignorance of a situation.

It doesn't take much effort to educate oneself about the housing system

No it doesn't but people should not have to read third party sources to find out that their house can be removed. Having something you own being taken away from you is a really big deal, and SE should make it exceptionally clear when someone buys a house. Not when they're a lvl 15 sprout who barely know how the game works and have not even 10k gil to their name.

Information about demolition is simply not relevant to a sprout. They won't be able to purchase a house for at least a few weeks, if not a few months or even over a year. You can't expect people to remember every tiny sliver of information they read. People are human. They forget things. It wouldn't kill SE to put in an additional pop-up about how demolition works directly after someone purchases a house. You know...when the information is actually relevant to them.

I have encountered plenty of people like OP, avid players of the game who eventually got a house and had no idea demolition was even a thing. They completely forgot the game even mentioned it at all. The timing of when information about the demolition timer is presented is extremely poorly timed.

[Sigma-Astra]

No it doesn't but people should not have to read third party sources to find out that their house can be removed. Having something you own being taken away from you is a really big deal, and SE should make it exceptionally clear when someone buys a house. Not when they're a lvl 15 sprout who barely know how the game works and have not even 10k gil to their name.

Information about demolition is simply not relevant to a sprout. They won't be able to purchase a house for at least a few weeks, if not a few months or even over a year. You can't expect people to remember every tiny sliver of information they read. People are human. They forget things. It wouldn't kill SE to put in an additional pop-up about how demolition works directly after someone purchases a house. You know...when the information is actually relevant to them.

I have encountered plenty of people like OP, avid players of the game who eventually got a house and had no idea demolition was even a thing. They completely forgot the game even mentioned it at all. The timing of when information about the demolition timer is presented is extremely poorly timed.

Again, it shouldn't used as an excuse whether you had forgotten all about it or you refused to read. A mortgage company isn't going to care if you felt it was unneeded to read the fine print on your home and then you decided to "forget" paying for the bill for an entire year.

There's no reason why you can't own up or take responsibility for your actions if you're also part of the problem inside an MMO either. They could put more warnings in, but people would still say it's not enough, and we'd still end up with these topics regardless. Players need to be held accountable for their actions just as much as well.

We have people who don't even read their tooltips half of the time.

[Penthea]

Again, it shouldn't used as an excuse whether you had forgotten all about it or you refused to read. A mortgage company isn't going to care if you felt it was unneeded to read the fine print on your home and then you decided to "forget" paying for the bill for an entire year.

Oh come on...this is A GAME. Are you really going to compare buying pixels to the complex undertaking of getting a mortgage approved? A lot of people who play this game are too young to legally apply for a mortgage. Get off your high horse.

There's no reason why you can't own up or take responsibility for your actions if you're also part of the problem inside an MMO either. They could put more warnings in, but people would still say it's not enough, and we'd still end up with these topics regardless. Players need to be held accountable for their actions just as much as well.

That is an extremely poor reason to not make the demolition mechanic clearer. Just because there will always be careless fools does not justify having woefully poorly timed information.

[Sigma-Astra]

Oh come on...this is A GAME. Are you really going to compare buying pixels to the complex undertaking of getting a mortgage approved? A lot of people who play this game are too young to legally apply for a mortgage. Get off your high horse.

...Why on earth would you think that just because it's a game, a person is excluded from taking personal responsibility for their actions or lack of knowledge? It's a high horse to expect people to have accountability? Good lord. What on earth should we be teaching the younger people? That it's okay to make mistakes and blame others for it instead of owning up towards the fact that you made a clear mistake or oversight? That you made a poor judgement and assumption of something, but it's okay to pass the blame solely towards the other party instead of taking partial blame as well?

We shouldn't teach the younger generation it's okay to not read everything clearly and then just blame someone else for your lack of reading later on.

That is an extremely poor reason to not make the demolition mechanic clearer. Just because there will always be careless fools does not justify having woefully poorly timed information.

...No, you just made it an actually very good reason why it doesn't matter how many times we have warning pop-up messages. There will always be careless fools.

[Penthea]

...Why on earth would you think that just because it's a game, a person is excluded from taking personal responsibility for their actions or lack of knowledge? It's a high horse to expect people to have accountability? Good lord.

It is when you compare buying pixels to getting a mortgage approved. Do you even know how that works? And how many warnings after warnings you get if you don't pay it? And the great deal of paperwork involved warning you of losing your home? SE's so called warnings about demolition can hardly compare. It is actually a really long process to take away someone's home in real life. Not a measly 45 days and a few emails.

What on earth should we be teaching the younger people? That it's okay to make mistakes and blame others for it instead of owning up towards the fact that you made a clear mistake or oversight?

So what you're saying is then that we should teach children about mortgages, only once, when they're unable to even get one approved, and then tell them it's their fault they don't know how it works by the time they're adults? That is what telling a lvl 15 sprout about demolition is. It's giving information at a time when it's not relevant, easily misunderstood, and most likely will be forgotten as time passes.

There isn't enough eyeroll in the universe for your attitude towards this. You seem offended at the mere thought of having information more appropriately presented.

[Sigma-Astra]

It is when you compare buying pixels to getting a mortgage approved. Do you even know how that works? And how many warnings after warnings you get if you don't pay it? And the great deal of paperwork involved warning you of losing your home? SE's so called warnings about demolition can hardly compare. It is actually a really long process to take away someone's home in real life. Not a measly 45 days and a few emails.

Yes, I do actually. And furthermore, my personal life is none of your business, so why don't you leave the personal attacks of intelligence regarding lines like "do you even know how that works?" out of the argument as your last failsafe to try and prove me wrong, mmkay? Btw, it's not a very long process. It only takes 120 days before a bank can legally start attacking you for a foreclosure if you don't pay up, that's only about 3-4 months of not paying your monthly bills in which you'll only get paper or email statements stating otherwise that can easily be ignored or neglected if you don't want to pay them or if you don't have the funds necessary. When you get served papers from the sheriff to vacate the premises so the bank can take over your house when it's foreclosed, you'll have anywhere from three days to thirty days, depending on your bank and the severity of things to leave the property. It does vary state by state as well.

So, all in all, it will possibly take you only 5 months, which can go pretty quick to lose your house irl that you could have been living in, for example, possibly longer than 3 years. It's not that long of a process to lose something that could have taken you years to build up on.

So, really, SE isn't too far off with how actual real estate works. Banks and their lawyers do not care about you usually. SE is effectively your mortgage company/bank in this regard. You have 45 days before you are effectively removed from the premises permanently. It's actually amazing and scary how close the two are in comparison here.

So what you're saying is then that we should teach children about mortgages, only once, when they're unable to even get one approved, and then tell them it's their fault they don't know how it works by the time they're adults? That is what telling a lvl 15 sprout about demolition is. It's giving information at a time when it's not relevant, easily misunderstood, and most likely will be forgotten as time passes.

There isn't enough eyeroll in the universe for your attitude towards this. You seem offended at the mere thought of having information more appropriately presented.

And you seem somehow offended about others wanting people to just take accountability for their actions which is a really simple thing to do, but apparently that's like pulling your arm into a pit of snakes. God forbid others account partially for their own mistakes. What a terrible thing and world we live in~.

[R-Pete-G]

I'll be honest, I'm quite disappointed that it's turned so nasty between people bringing different sides to the conversation. I certainly didn't intend for this to turn into insult trading.

Again, it shouldn't used as an excuse whether you had forgotten all about it or you refused to read. A mortgage company isn't going to care if you felt it was unneeded to read the fine print on your home and then you decided to "forget" paying for the bill for an entire year.

I actually do agree with the comparison you're making to a real mortgage here. The thing is, your bank give you the terms of your mortgage agreement. Fine print and all. When you come to make a mortgage agreement, they say "This is everything you need to know". And the terms of your payment are clear. Because the consequences of breaching your mortgage agreement are obviously so serious, they have a burden of responsibility to communicate everything you need to know. Saying that the automatic demolition process is like not paying your mortgage is actually not quite right.

If we follow that equivalency through, you go on a 6 month round-the-world trip with a loved one, and return to your house to find it's been repossessed. You're shocked - you kept up your mortgage payments, what's going on? You call the bank and they tell you that there's a clause about stepping foot inside your house once a month, otherwise you default on your mortgage. Except that clause isn't anywhere in the mortgage agreement you were given when you bought the house - it's in a blog post on the bank's website from a few years prior. Any financial regulator would put them through the ringer for failing to make the terms of your mortgage clear.


What the discussion seems to be boiling down to (which I'll be honest, surprises me) is what I mentioned earlier. The idea that whenever you engage in a new feature in the game, you should go and find all the articles written about it in case something is relevant. Go back and read parts of patch notes that you may not have remembered because they weren't relevant to you at the time (when I read them, I skip parts of the game I'm not engaged with).

Is this a good habit? Sure. Should it be a requirement to not losing your stuff? Consider the planting example Raven gave - the game happily gives you a help popup to warn you that your plants might be lost if you don't water them regularly. And that happens straight away, when you start gardening with cheap, easily replaceable plants. It's pretty staggering then that a risk as big as losing a property and all its furnishings is not highlighted in this way, let alone better than that.

When we're talking about a game system that will completely delete content on your account that you've invested time and effort into, the idea that you should have gone and found a Lodestone article from 3 years ago does come across as a fairly smug "Didn't you know that?". This is one of the most significant things that can happen to your account - what other systems are there in the game that literally take something away from you? What precedent is there elsewhere that it would even have occurred to me that such a system exists?

...No, you just made it an actually very good reason why it doesn't matter how many times we have warning pop-up messages. There will always be careless fools.

There's a big difference between "How many warning signs do you want?" and "Why have any?". There will always be "careless fools" who ignore a message, but we're talking about in-game clarity here. You can't ignore what isn't there, which is neither careless nor foolish.

[R-Pete-G]

The followup I should clarify, for people making assumptions about why I'm posting or what I'm trying to say, is that having the house demolished sucked. I don't think it's well communicated in the slightest, I still contest that the emails were insufficient (as they didn't arrive for whatever reason). But I could have chalked that up to a lesson learned, given feedback about the game system that I didn't like, and gotten on with it. I do think Square Enix are massively dropping the ball here in considering their players, but I'm not "shifting the blame", "failing to take accountability", etc.

What pushed me to pack it all in was the possessions I lost, permanently. For whatever reason, my house was demolished and that's that. In my original post I did say that I didn't expect for one second to get it back. But those furnishings that I'd collected over the years, those are the real sting. That the automatic demolition is poorly communicated is one thing, but that the reclamation of your furnishings is so unforgiving is another thing entirely.

When you stop subscribing to the game, your retainers retain (pun intended) all of your items until you come back. They're stored for you until you're ready to return and become active in the game once more. The window on reclaiming your furnishings in this instance seems either very arbitrary, or it's Square Enix clawing back some of the inventory space stored against characters that they've admitted they struggle with. And for someone who was still paying their subscription, that feels like a really bad practice.

And as Enkrateia already referred to factors that might introduce a reasonable doubt that I did not receive those emails, and I really did have no idea my house was up for demolition, what then? Would a GM see that there had obviously been some mistake, a misunderstanding for whatever the reason, and help restore those items? The clearly precious collection of years of work?

Sigma-Astra, you made a comparison to WoW when you mentioned patch notes etc. As you've already brought a "competitor" into the conversation, I'll chime in with another comparison. As a long time WoW player myself, this is the sort of thing that Blizzard (and many other MMO GM teams) would assist with to support a player continuing to enjoy the game. This makes the contrast with FFXIV even more stark, and my value as a player felt even less by comparison.




(Please be nice to one another!)

[Xiomara]

When you stop subscribing to the game, your retainers retain (pun intended) all of your items until you come back. They're stored for you until you're ready to return and become active in the game once more. The window on reclaiming your furnishings in this instance seems either very arbitrary, or it's Square Enix clawing back some of the inventory space stored against characters that they've admitted they struggle with. And for someone who was still paying their subscription, that feels like a really bad practice.

It's odd that SE went to the trouble of adding a housing storeroom so that we can move our houses, but then don't tie in the housing demolition system to it. A simple solution in your case would be that when a house is demolished, all items are moved to the storeroom, just like you were moving the house and then change the reclamation NPC so that it's an interface to said storeroom.

[R-Pete-G]

It's odd that SE went to the trouble of adding a housing storeroom so that we can move our houses, but then don't tie in the housing demolition system to it. A simple solution in your case would be that when a house is demolished, all items are moved to the storeroom, just like you were moving the house and then change the reclamation NPC so that it's an interface to said storeroom.

Indeed. It's such a practical idea, in fact, that I can't believe this isn't somehow intentional as a way to save on character data.