[Salt thread] Owning a House Offically became Dead content for me

[Kaoru_Nagisa]

That's how they get you. The sub is "optional" .. it's really not though, if you seriously want to play. I agreed that the housing system is good every time I have talked about that game, I have just always criticized the monetization of said feature - the game in general really, it's awful. I understand that there are players who do not really like this game or it's direction, and the housing definitely could be better, but FFXIV is still the all around better game. Anyway, sure, if someone has a lot of money (or time) that they are willing to spend, likes bad gameplay, likes ES in general, then they can always give it a try.

ZOS is money-grubbing just as much as SE is, it's true. I think it's better to call both out on crappy practices, however, instead of painting a wide swath of "ESO bad FFXIV good". ESO has a lot of issues, just as FFXIV has a lot of issues. They aren't all the same issues, however, and what ESO offers vs what FFXIV offers is ultimately subjective in whether it's "better" or "worse". Frankly, I'm having more fun in ESO in the past... 3? 4? months than I've had in FFXIV in 10 years, thus why I've moved to it as my primary MMO and am likely to remain with it as my primary MMO (unless some massive, sweeping changes happen over here to fix most of the issues that have been piling up for literally years).

Overall, every one of my friends who has moved to ESO with me lauds its housing system. One of my friends moved over solely because it has instanced housing that is relatively easy to access and permanent, account-wide. They played the placard and then the lotto game in here for years with no luck, and it genuinely killed their motivation to continue paying for the game because they were essentially locked out of content due to poor implementation and artificial scarcity that SE has perpetuated.

You go on about "it's really not though" - the sub is entirely optional. You can play the game without it. You can spend the time and effort to make enough in-game gold to purchase literally anything and everything on the Crown store with in-game gold. The sub simply offers a fair bit to it and is honestly more worth to get than not, but that is simply how things are in a b2p-then-f2p-for-life game. They want people to buy the sub, so they make the sub tempting without making it incredibly intrusive to simply being f2p. For all the faults of ZOS as a company, they actually offer a decent sub model in comparison other (mostly Korean) f2p MMOs I've seen.

And honestly, just like in here, the Crown store as a whole is entirely optional.

Trying to downplay its housing system by making incorrect statements about it costing people hundreds or thousands of dollars to get into or fully decorate was just very disingenuous. I know people hate it when others bring up how other games are doing things better than FFXIV, around here, but seriously.

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ESO's housing isn't terrible, I have a house on Vvardenfell. Too bad decorating it was annoying because I didn't have gold because the market system there sucks harder than a Dyson.

If you're talking about the trader market system, it's got its ups and downs. Overall, I actually prefer it now that I've had time to experience and get used to the way it works - it keeps markets relatively stable, listing fees prevent massive and constant undercutting, it's difficult to control a market unless you have a lot of time and money to spend going all across the world to buy up everything of one type of item, and it keeps trade guilds active because they need to be making money for the house in order to bid on a trader.

Not the most perfect player-based buy/sell system out there, of course, but I definitely prefer it over a broken, easy to exploit universal market system where nothing has value. Buyer's markets are great for people who only ever buy things, but it is absolutely atrocious for people trying to make money through hard work and market trends.