Quote Originally Posted by Iscah View Post
If I can speculate on why they would want to limit access to gardening and airship building, I think it would be to limit the daily flow of "making gil out of nothing" into the game, same as things like levequests have a daily limit. Tying it to the finite number of houses could therefore make sense, especially as the system was originally intended to be strictly for FCs while personal housing would be implemented in some other way that either never eventuated or was supposed to be limited to personal rooms and apartments.
That's a fairly astute observation. I hadn't considered it, but I actually should have, because I've done stuff like that to try to put economic limits on things in games before. Not professionally developed games in this case, but just the sort of "written in spare time" games that folks throw out there on the internet.

(It doesn't work, for the record; the best you can do is slow it, at least in my experience. If you set up a sort of invisible "central bank" and put any money paid to NPCs or taken as market tax or whatever into that central bank, you can pay out from that when people sell to NPCs or whatever. But that creates the possibility that if the "central bank" runs out, people can't sell to NPCs any more. Or that running things/questing doesn't give you money anymore, because there's none to give. Have the bank just create more money when it runs out, and you're right back to "money out of thin air" at which point you might as well not bother with all the effort of some sort of central bank. ANYway.)

But even if that was the original intent, which I can believe, I'd argue that the airship has sailed on that. (Ha ha.)

Submersibles and gardening are the least of the economic balance problems on this game, and I suspect that locking folks out of those systems does more harm (bitterness/resentment of the housing system blocking people from stuff) than good (some degree of slowing the literal money-faucet creating money out of thin air); I'd thus argue it's proven to not be a good design. And that is something that can be changed.