Regarding that Finaland Interview...

[Melichoir]

For the sake of giving Yoshida the most credit possible, his responses are a very indirect way of explaining certain things.

1)Housing

Houses are perks for people who are actively subscribed to the game. It essentially boils down to the issue at hand. The devs do not want a situation where people will buy a house then quit the game, which would hold onto that land and not have it in use for players who are actively subscribed. If you have an apartment, you are not at risk of losing your place. The issue with limited housing is a separate issue, but if I had to hazard a guess with that, its either they wnat to avoid "empty wards" or do not have server resources for infinite wards. Empty wards would be wards where there is just tons of empty plots of land with no one built on it. Since part of the game is reliant on 'theme' (I believe they have in fact stated this in the past), ti would mean they want housing wards to appear populated.

Also, server resources are limited and must be factored in. As of September, the rough estimate of active players in the US alone is 280k-ish. Every ward can hold a max 60 different land plots. They would need 4666~ wards to allow every active player their own place in a ward. That kind of server load is not reasonable, unless we change the housing system completely to be independent instances for each house. Even then, its still harsh. Even if we assume only 10% of hte population wants a house, thats 28k people in 466 wards. Its still a hefty amount.

It would be nice for the Devs to just speak plainly about the issue, but I hazard they dont do to either legal or financial reasons for the business. Meaning, theyre not going to say "Yeah, we dont have the server space cause this is our server size" cause that would be a company trade secret, or would be bad for the business broadly.

2) Open class Glamours
While I do personally believe that any class should be able to glamour, the game still is very broadly a themed game. They do not allow you to glamour any thing because there is still, at the end of the day, a design aesthetic they want the game to adhere to. They want this to give the world a certain 'feeling' and do not want to over pollute it with an "Anything goes" glamour system. What glamour they have now is probably the edge of what they want to get to. When Yoshida talks about taste, he is refering to peoples level of immersion. The biggest being that because the glamour system is semi limited, people arent jarred to much by odd glamour choices. But if you were to completely open it up, then you may get bigger issues with immersion. PERSONALLY, I think thats a misplaced position, and most of hte player base would be indifferent, if not positive to any glamour being on any class.

And this is just my own idea but the glamour system (as well as hairstyles) should be available to any character, regardless of class. So you should be able to get the variations of the hempen camise on every race. Every armor should be glamourable to any class. The caveat SHOULD be that you can only glamour armors, and that you are only able to glamour an armor of another class so long as you have reached that lvl. So you cant glamour lvl 50 PLD armor to a WHM unless you have a lvl 50 PLD already. Things that vary by race (like the camise, or hairstyles) should be available from Gold Saucer for MGP. The race you start with gets them automatically for free, but everyone else has to do Gold Saucer to unlock/buy them. The exception MAYBE would be storyline class specific armors (like the lvl 50 PLD armor from teh story quest, maybe).