The Free Trial and Housing - or: Please no

[Gothicshark]

So, we all know that the Free Trial is expanded to Level 60 and Heavensward Patch 3.56. What about the consumers of the Free Trial and Housing, though?

The same restrictions as before are placed on the Free Trial when it comes to the new version, included Marketboard Interaction and FCs. However, there is no rule for Housing so far, as a level 35 character could never fulfill the conditions to buy one.

Now, with the more generous level cap, a player on the Free Trial could potentially meet all the conditions to buy a house. I hope they get a restriction for that as well.

Because, let's face it, Free Trial players adding to the high demand of houses would add fuel to the fire. Not to mention the inevitable storm if a paying player loses out on a house against a free player.

Just... food for thoughts, I guess.

You realize they are limited to 300k gil. I doubt this will increase the amount of gil needed to purchase a house, or an apartment. If they do increase the gil cap on them, I doubt it will be high enough to purchase a house, maybe an Apartment, but so far there seem to be enough Apartments even on Balmung.

[MsQi]

(or they could revamp housing to make the shortage go away)

Let's do that.

[Packetdancer]

Likely intentional, make it free to play through Heavensward, but give you incentives to buy the game before the free trial is complete

I think it's even more motivated by gold-spammers/RMT bots. They get banned and just make free trial accounts again. However, due to the marketboard restriction, they need real paid accounts to actually do the marketboard portions, so when those bots are caught and banned they have to get another real account and start that part over.

If they lifted the marketboard restriction, the RMT folks could use free trials for that part. And if the free trials could join FCs, the people who just throw Free Company invites at anyone without an FC tag would probably end up with the free trial bots accepting the invites and immediately starting to spam the FC channels with RMT advertising.

[Limonia]

Ungarmax.

Never assume.

That was a bug/exploit, not something they put in the game deliberately.

[LaylaTsarra]

I don't understand why free trials are an unlimited time though. They should be a max of 3 or 4 months but keeping them indefinitely I don't quite get the rational behind that. Seems to me that is more than enough time to experience the game and if someone likes it enough they'll sub when the trial period ends.

[Iscah]

Well gil aside.

They can just make it that trial accounts cannot buy a house.

Really simple.

That seems the obvious approach, yes. If they can block you if from things like the marketboard and retainers then it seems likely that they can block you from purchasing a house as well.

[SturmChurro]

I don't understand why free trials are an unlimited time though. They should be a max of 3 or 4 months but keeping them indefinitely I don't quite get the rational behind that. Seems to me that is more than enough time to experience the game and if someone likes it enough they'll sub when the trial period ends.

Players will play sporadically over updates, events, time. Perhaps it is to keep sub-60 content more populated. I don't really see why not to have it unlimited in a perfect world, to be fair. I have only seen news of this in this thread here, so I haven't seen the full details of this change.

[Roda]

That was a bug/exploit, not something they put in the game deliberately.

An exploit that was used because the devs overlooked permissions for accessing it.

[Iscah]

An exploit that was used because the devs overlooked permissions for accessing it.

Yes, but it seems like a different level of oversight to what would be involved for them to open up the free trial but not consider whether players need to be blocked from owning houses.

[ItMe]

God if you could get a house on a free trial just IMAGINE all the bots on free trials trying to get houses...