The Case for Instanced Housing

[yukiiyuki]

Scarcity makes things more valuable. It's 100% a fact of life, you might not think it's smart but people literally keep paying their subs just so they don't lose their housing because they are rare.

I do think that they should upgrade Apartments as stated before or just create really lovely instanced homes in general.

You literally rephrased what I said.
>not very smart idea from business perspective.
To make housing for everyone, that what I meant.

[HadesNight]

Sacrificing long term profits for short term gains is never good business. Services live and die on retention and vendor lock-in is a fantastic way to encourage your customers to look elsewhere.

That definitely sounds good on paper. Writing it like that, of course you have a point but it's not aligned with reality of this game. The only power FFXIV players have is to vote with their wallets and the few people that actually leave the game (if any) over housing are quickly replaced with new subs. Despite how annoyed people are with housing, or viera and hrotgar being half finished, or not having enough inventory, or omg mogstation and paying for retainers, etc. etc. Players have not traditionally voted with their wallets on any major unified issue. SEs model was created when the game was smaller and they know they have to do something to fix it. Housing was side content. I literally have no clue when it became popular but it really wasn't something people as a whole cared about even 2 years ago.

Plus, I think (not saying you think this specifically) it's foolish for those that believe SE is trying to maliciously keep their subs and money with housing. It's a bad system but I don't think it was created as a way to keep people playing. As noted housing was literally not important 2 years ago to the majority of people and that's from living on original Aether in NA and each server used to have tons of empty plots at min deval. Shirogane really kicked up housing a notch for sure. So this current system was built in a way where since housing wasn't that important, and people could afford to just pick up another small for cheap if they came back, it wasn't that harmful to lose your plot and that allowed others to get it if needed.

This isn't SE sacrificing long term... this is a housing situation that no longer can be sustained because the game got much bigger than they hoped. Additionally, I'd love to see what other MMO is like FFXIV. You can get elements of FFXIV in other games and other games do them better but this story centric casual MMO is something special. People can leave but it's not the same. I tried WoW recently and ESO and Terra and nah...

I'd be super SUPER impressed if people actually left the game over a unified issue. But I don't see it happening.

You literally rephrased what I said.
>not very smart idea from business perspective.
To make housing for everyone, that what I meant.

Np then, it's not written in a way that conveyed that. But in that case I agree with you!