An Open Letter to Yoshida-san: Please Slice One Zero Off the Housing Prices

[AlphaFEAR]

I am sure that this has been mentioned, but with a subscription based service, why not set bars that require a 90-day turn-around? Makes people buy your product more.

On the other hand, you can toss a few RL coins to others, and get your house the very next day with cash, and with gil to spare.

However, the problem remains RMT's. It could be solved simply by allowing player on player interaction. Say I can push another player. I see an alleged bot, doing same 3 nodes, every time I'm in that zone - no matter when I log in. If I could say, push him back from a node, every time he goes next to it, pretty quickly you'll get a conversation going with the person, but not the bot. After all, once a program has been completed, and set in motion, it will always do what it is programmed to do. Well, allow us the ability to 'police' ourselves. A simple video/screenshot/name could put the person under observation by the GM's, and if verified, ban them.

[Zourin]

What Yoshi did goes far beyond sticker shock.

Players are abandoning any expectation of FC housing, and instead are hoarding money because there's no telling what completely rediculous entry price will be set for personal housing. The prospect of something that doesn't exist has become more valuable to players than something that does exist and is seen as outrageous and unobtainable.

Markets are flooding with every rock and paperclip players can off into the markets, and are hoarding it waiting for something to change. There isn't a sudden surge of philanthropist omni-50's carrying their FC's to the promised land of beach front property. Instead, there's a lot of long nights grinding whatever happens to be marginally valuable in the snow.

Meanwhile, those 'ultra rich' people who skew the numbers, were never a part of the player economy except leeching off it. They aren't a part of the economy, just a drain. They off whatever they don't need or whatever seems valuble (such as high end materia when their old stuff soulbinds), and can make anything they want on their own without having to pay a gil for anything. Furniture? An omni-50 can farm anything themselves, craft everything themselves, and not have to drop a dime on anything other than maybe pay some gil sellers' bot for shards. They aren't bad people. Hell, our FC has one. Ask for a hand in a dungeon, you got a party member. Ask for some L50 crafting gear, get dressed up and down in full HQ. Ask for a house? That's pushing it.

[ZohnoReecho]

If in 3 months your FC is not able to match half the price of tier 3 servers (max price) you are doing it wrong or not trying at all.
And I'm sorry for those FCs whose members think they are going to buy someone else's house.

[KraggyKor]

And I'm sorry for those FCs

I'm one of those 'morons'.

Why? Because this is a GAME. In this game I joined an FC that had been created by someone whose 'philosophy' of what a GAME is and jelled with mine, and found several others of like mind. I along with many of the rest have given gil to this guy to build up funds for an FC house.

I have by no means given the most, my contribution ATM stands at 250k which is around 2/3 of my nett wealth, solely from leveling (I don't craft) one toon to 50 and another 40. I'm likely going to give another 100K leaving me with around 50k over both toons.

I TRUST the FC leader. It's a risk, but the pleasure of being part of a group will enjoy the fruits of a combined effort is pretty hard to beat, and it doesn't have to be part of a phat lewt grind.

Worst case (won't happen)? I lose my gamble, lose my gil, /shrug and go on my merry way.

We don't need your pity, stop being condescending!

[ZohnoReecho]

I'm one of those 'morons'.

Why? Because this is a GAME. In this game I joined an FC that had been created by someone whose 'philosophy' of what a GAME is and is not jelled with mine, and found several others of like mind. I along with many of the rest have given gil to this guy to build up funds for an FC house.

I have by no means given the most, my contribution ATM stands at 250k which is around 2/3 of my nett wealth, solely from leveling (I don't craft) one toon to 50 and another 40. I'm likely going to give another 100K leaving me with around 50k over both toons.

I TRUST the FC leader. It's a risk, but the pleasure of being part of a group will enjoy the fruits of a combined effort is pretty hard to beat, and it doesn't have to be part of a phat lewt grind.

Worst case (won't happen)? I lose my gamble, lose my gil, /shrug and go on my merry way.

We don't need your pity, stop being condescending!

Someone that got housing for what it is

Secondly, for you people who keep claiming everyone needs to just shut up and work to get their house:
Entry level housing is a CASUAL feature in all MMOs. That's why people want access to it. Okay affording unique items or a mansion are supposed to be a gring/take work, but housing access is/should be lose to free. So, stop saying people should be forced to gring for months to afford the lowest level house. Your wrong.

Ya, personal houses. By now you got FC's, you are wrong.

if your closed beta theory is true , why they charge "beta testers" all their lifetime saving for it??? they should select a few people by making a contest and providing em housing to test for free or maybe even a small gil reward

On my server there around 500 FC with 11+ members and around 800 1-10 members FCs. A lot of the small ones are 1 or 2 ppl, so lets exclude 20% of those. We are talking about a rough amount of 1100 FCs.
Lets absurdly think that all these FCs will fill all the plots, that means putting even 100 members FCs in small houses if necessary, 1100 / 30 (rough amount of plots in each housing area)… it's 36. Now multiply that for 61 servers… 2196 instances. Now you would invest into the hardware power to keep 2196 running from day 1? And remember that this amount was calculated under absurd conditions. Instances that maybe will never be used or abandoned, with just a couple of houses inside, because in the end people will not be interested? Of course I'm going to start slow and see how many FCs really want an house, making them work for it. And remember that they will need even more instances when personal housing is coming.

At the moment they already implemented 5 instances for each zone, 15 per server, 915 total instances, so I think thats fair enough to start.

[Roflcoptorz]

Again, it amazes me that people here actually still complain about the prices. Read some of the threads. Yoshi knows the prices are insane. He knows the prices will not allow No one to buy FC housing. This is not the problem. The problem is FC housing is not ready for launch. SE doesn't have the server capacity for every FC to have a house. Plain and simple. So they are using "launch" as a type of closed beta. A few FCs buy houses, SE tests things. Sry, the situation has NOTHING TO DO WITH RMT OR THE ECONOMY. That is a bold faced lie. (Okay in all honesty I'm sure it's 5% of the truth).
Do you really think that the SE development team is so stupid that the current situation was the best the best answer they could come up with?
They don't have the ability to give every FC a house, so they spewed crap and set and artifical barrier ensuring almost no one gets a house. This allowed them to launch the content without having to make it accessible.

Secondly, for you people who keep claiming everyone needs to just shut up and work to get their house:
Entry level housing is a CASUAL feature in all MMOs. That's why people want access to it. Okay affording unique items or a mansion are supposed to be a gring/take work, but housing access is/should be lose to free. So, stop saying people should be forced to gring for months to afford the lowest level house. Your wrong.

[AmnesiaHaze]

if your closed beta theory is true , why they charge "beta testers" all their lifetime saving for it??? they should select a few people by making a contest and providing em housing to test for free or maybe even a small gil reward

[Black_Pearl]

If they want test, that make a special server where to test things (hello FFXI).
We pay for play not for TEST. Also there's a lot of plots unused, in my server if not all of them, USEFUL I say.

[Roflcoptorz]

To you questions about the beta test theory, I agree with you. It's a bad way to do it but how else would you be able to officially "release" the material while not making it accessible? It's all about appearances. SE can now SAY housing is released, without actually making it available.

[ArkhamNative]

Here is what would have been a simple and easy solution, that would have made infinitely more sense:
Rather than having FC land plots cost and absurd amount of gil, which will then be directly removed from the servers, why can't we purchase it with this, so far, useless FC currency that we have sitting around collecting dust (which is already communally gathered)?

Yes, what's baffling is this fear/hatred of gil from SE. Clearly they understand the idea of saving gil for content. They say "save for 3 months" to afford housing. Yet people who have been saving for over 2 years, since v1, are not allowed to benefit from saving more than those who started only a few months ago. Yoshi-P's statement clearly states that it's these savings that made him increase housing prices on legacy worlds by 5x and 10x the other worlds' pricing.

If SE wanted to nullify the v1 advantage of having started playing the game earlier, they could have picked a currency that didn't exist in v1, like these FC currency you mention, or something else.

And again, what this "save 3 months" oddly ignores is that the game itself creates money at a constant rate across all worlds. 3 months would mean the 20k gil per day Yoshi-P mentions for world group 1 would have to be 5x and 10x on worlds where housing prices are 5x and 10x. Otherwise the 3 months becomes 15-30 months of savings at that rate on legacy worlds. (And we don't know how many hours per day of playing to get 20k. Most people won't farm 5 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 3-30 months.)

(For the record, I have v1 gil, but it is <1M. Just as I haven't amassed hundreds of stacks of ...whatever useless item, I didn't work to amass bajillions of gil because, for me, playing the game enjoyably didn't require it.)

[Lazy people didn't make money.]

The way it works to "make money" through crafting and market board in general is to find something scarce and charge money to make it more convenient to get. Then lots of people pay the few, and the few get richer. This happens a lot at the start of a game (high level crafters serving rush-to-endgamers) or start of new content (like treasure maps).

By definition "everyone" cannot make money on the market boards because 1. money is just changing hands, and it would be changing back and forth between "everyone", rather than piling up for just the few; and 2. If everyone can easily make/gather things to sell, they won't go to the market board to buy it. So if more people did do what early crafters did, nobody could have made as much because it would have been shared across more people and the demand would have been diminished.