Regarding that Finaland Interview...

[Fhaerron]

Yeah about that. Ever since they reopened personal housing back in what, 4.2? Or whenever the personal ban for new buyers was lifted I found my newest neighbor across from my medium was actually a housing squatter. Aside from a few weeks the house has had a completely empty yard. Even my FC's house is next to a house that doesn't see any use.

There's certainly no shortage of people holding onto houses they've no intention on using other than keeping it purely to relocate to a larger house, or sell if they find some means to do so. Every plot may be owned on Leviathan but the housing wards feel very much dead, at least in my neck of the woods save for maybe one neighbor upstairs.

The housing wards are dead on most server. I've been playing on 4 servers in EU and housing wards are dead on all of them. There's hardly anybody there. If there are they're most likely inside their house.
The majority of people online will be in Limsa standing about and waiting for the DF queue or PF group to fill up.

[Kirsten_Rev]

I remember an interview where he stated that FF14 now has every system in the game that are mandatory in the MMO business (like housing, the glamour wardrobe) and that they now can focus on other things and I was really sitting there and wondering how they can be fine with having systems in the game that are there but far away from standards. When F2P games have better housing, better storage for glamour and more shouldnt one try to get at least on that level? Having them in the game in a medicore way does not imo mean that they are done with it but honestly it sounded like they are fine with the way they are implemented..no matter how bad this will be in the future with more and more glamour, less space and systems that need to be changed again and again.

Honestly, sometimes I wonder whether it's a lack of investment, or a lack of expertise. Obviously SE knows that better platforms are possible, but it could be they don't think they have the skill necessary to match what other games have done. They are a console company, after all - FFXI and FFXIV are literally the only two games they've developed with significant online components. Compare this to Blizzard, who has been learning since the 90s with multiple different types of titles.

Hard to say. I do agree with you though, that SE is playing a risky game by not investing the resources necessary to maintain XIV's AAA status. It's a particularly odd development considering XIV's rocky launch and subsequent rebirth: this very game demonstrated clearly that proper investment of resources pays off. They seem to have forgotten the lesson awfully fast.

The responses shouldn't surprise anyone. That glamour issue has been around since 2.0. It isn't really hidden that they take the older pieces and recycle them in such a way to allow it to be gathered for glamour later. And that isn't really much of a problem -either- because it saves them the dev time to use on other things.

All well and good, if we actually saw the results of this increased dev time. Personally, I haven't seen any benefits. I also haven't seen much in the way of recycling; it's not like they're slowly introducing old tank or melee gear sets to casters. We get more than enough Glamours, it's just that many people feel we don't get enough variety. They could save even more development time if they'd just aim to create more truly unique looks.

As for the apartment he is sort of right on point. People should be weighing if they really need a house if they can have an apartment. A lot of people are asking for instanced housing and it already exists.. right there. Granted, they could do with expanding the sizes or making them upgradable. I would kill for a large penthouse suite to have. I would never want to buy a large in that case. Otherwise, why have a house if you arent going to use it? If you are going to use it later, are you actually going to keep using it, or are you just going to have it sitting there without anything? xD

He's right on point if you accept the premise of his argument, which is that the housing system we have now was the only sensible choice to make. If you accept that, yeah, sure, the demo system makes sense, as does the differentiation between apartments and houses.

The problem of course is that the premise is ridiculous. SE never needed to build Wards at all, and doing so proved to be a tremendously stupid decision that created far more problems than it was worth. This is why Yoshi-P's answers come off as disingenuous to many players: he's whitewashing some major mistakes that were made under his watch, in order to make subsequent unpopular decisions seem less objectionable.

I'd also point out that even had SE wanted to pursue the idea of Wards, there was a way to do it well. Had they put fewer houses in the Wards but increased the size, and restricted purchase to FCs, we'd have kept the neighborhood feel. Couple this with an intentionally-designed character housing system (individual instanced housing that was expandable, featured gardens, etc.), and everything's kosher. But SE didn't do this: they released Wards without a single thought paid to the infrastructure demands, tacked on apartments as an afterthought, and then started trying to explain away their actions by acting as if their original sin in the game wasn't a foregone conclusion. It's shameful, and it's a shame that players still fall for the song and dance.

[TheCurls]

In this thread people are asking a man to quit his job because they can’t keep a house in a game they are no longer subscribed to play and might never subscribe to play again.

[JunseiKei]

In this thread people are asking a man to quit his job because they can’t keep a house in a game they are no longer subscribed to play and might never subscribe to play again.

Well, not really just that, but asking for changes to things that Yoshida might have his hands tied on because he still answers to Square Enix. A lot of assumptions being thrown around while not being privy to critical information.

[Kirsten_Rev]

In this thread people are asking a man to quit his job because they can’t keep a house in a game they are no longer subscribed to play and might never subscribe to play again.

Not at all. The housing is an example; it's not the problem in and of itself. Every time FFXIV has attempted to add industry-standard systems, they've come with asterisks and functionality flaws. The vast majority of new content additions have been riddled with problems, problems significant enough so as to render the content dead almost immediately once the rewards are no longer cutting-edge. The core end-game formula has grown stale, with no sign on the horizon that it's going to change.

As Director of FFXIV, Yoshi-P is failing. It's his job to prevent things like this from happening, to ensure that FFXIV continues to grow, continues to set the bar as a leading AAA MMO. He's spectacularly failed to do so for years now. How is this not a scenario in which he should be asked to step down?

Also, it's disingenuous to suggest that someone shouldn't lose their job just because the concerns aren't all that important in the grand scheme of things. Coaches and GMs of sports teams lose their jobs all the time for failing to deliver winning seasons. Movie stars and big-name directors rapidly lose their influence and prestige if they fail to deliver strong performances at the box office. When your job involves entertainment, you're going to be judged on some silly-sounding stuff, up to and including, yes, housing systems in a video game. That's the job.

It's ridiculous to defend Yoshi-P's performance over at least the past 2.5 years or so. Maybe it's not termination-worthy in your eyes, that's a fair point to make, but to suggest that he's done a good job is hopelessly biased.

[Rhus]

That's a shame because I would love to equip my tank with the current Striking Tome gear. Think It would look...Awesome ^.^

[TheCurls]

It's ridiculous to defend Yoshi-P's performance over at least the past 2.5 years or so. Maybe it's not termination-worthy in your eyes, that's a fair point to make, but to suggest that he's done a good job is hopelessly biased.

See, here’s the problem with this statement. People are still subscribed and paying SE money. You want things to be shaken up and changed, then stop giving them your money. I promise you that they’ll hear that far more readily than the entitled cries of people who want to keep a house in a game they no longer play. When you unsub, SE has to consider that you will never come back or else they waste resources that currently subbed players can use.

You hear an argument you don’t like and right away use the “white knight/fanboy/fangirl” defense and that’s dumb. I don’t care who is in charge of the game. All I care about is that they make a game I’m happy to give my money to and play. And while there are things I’d wish were different, and it might come as a shock to many of the people on these boards, some of us actually like this game.

[Awful]

That's really painful to hear about the housing it's kind of like a "House is about to be destroyed? Here have an apartment instead!" I wish they'd do something more with the housing demolishing issue I don't even know if the bug has been fixed where the timers aren't showing up. If that's the case then they really need to fix that ASAP and next expansion hopefully do something about houses I doubt they'll do anything though.

Glamour options are the most restrictive in any MMO that I've seen a lot of the pre 50 gear looks horrible which I get since you're leveling till you get that artifact gear but what if people want to be armored mages? Leather wearing tanks? People have their own views on wanting to look a certain way and what looks good to them. GW2 and WoW you have way more than 20000 pieces of gear I don't get how they can't add more character this baffles me I don't get that excuse at all.

As for content...yikes...I can't believe they're changing DoH/DoL gearing but not our own DoW classes? Why? Grinding tomestones for hours and hours is boring why can't we have another option? They said they're a big fan of Blizzard then they should take that inspiration and create new ways to gear up our character they could easily implement the Mythic+ dungeon system that WoW has and create a unique FFXIV feel of it so that we could have Savage Dungeons.

All in he's quite out of touch with the community and keeps making these ridiculous excuses that I'm not mad at SE just disappointed.

[Stormfur]

Who cares if someone else thinks your character looks ridiculous? That's on them, not you. You go out there and be the best damn pigsuit tank or chocobo dragoon you can be, and don't worry about what others think.

I really think XIV could be more flexible in this regard.

[Dzian]

There's certainly no shortage of people holding onto houses they've no intention on using other than keeping it purely to relocate to a larger house, or sell if they find some means to do so. Every plot may be owned on Leviathan but the housing wards feel very much dead, at least in my neck of the woods save for maybe one neighbor upstairs.

The problem here is that's there's no purpose in being in the housing wards and nothing to do there.

I'd wager for example if you shifted tome / scrip vendors and the things like primal and omega sundries vendors and a few other things into the housing wards they would be vastly more populated places. Which would also go a long way to taking server load off other zones.. and reducing lag a lot.

Remember how long mor dhona took to load in arr comparedto any other zone. Or iddyllshire in hw. Or the reach now...