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

[Ifervan]

for those saying 1 plot for ......Squenix to spend a few thousand dollars on data center upgrades on a game, they have no idea how many people will be playing in 6 months. so they roll this out, and hope that the feature keeps enough players to pay for a data center expansion.

Until I share in their profit, I have no concer for their loss.

It's a realistic view; don't worry about their business model they are profiting plenty!

[Abriael]

My FC leader: Okay guys, today we're going to sell Titan runs to make another 40M for a second FC house. Who's coming?

Me:

It was obvious that this would happen. And the sad thing is that some people aren't even ashamed of it.

The massively inflated prices do nothing else than making the community worse by encouraging mercenary behavior and discouraging just helping people without a pricetag.

[Sunarie]

So? It's an open market. Just because I pay a subscription doesn't mean I'm entitled to FC housing. The individual market is 6 months away and Yoshi said it will be much cheaper. With increased supply prices will come down, it just a matter of when. I can wait.

Just to make sure I have this straight. According to you, it's okay to quote Yoshi saying that individual housing is 6 months away and it's going to be much cheaper, but it's not okay to hold those expectations for FC housing when he said those were going to be a fraction of the cost that they actually were. Why is it okay to take his word for one but not the other?

Who is to say he's not going to turn around at patch time (after talking about how personal housing is going to be for 3 months straight) and go "oh, economies are still high and we want to make sure that only 80% of the population ever receives a personal house so we've adjusted all the prices". Cause that is -exactly- what happened here. Except people were actually given a real estimate as opposed to a generalized "much lower" statement that can be interpreted a large number of ways as it means different things to different folks.

This is not the first time he's done a hard turn in what he's said either. I remember being told people just weren't unlocking the full potential of the warrior, and that dark devices was working as intended. Losing the trust of your players, or your consumers/customers, is absolutely not a good thing.

Just as a personal note: What would make -me- happy would be to leave small housing available for 4 million gil. The lower price for the lower server. Allow us to "sell" back our plots of land for around 90% of the cost so that we don't lose out on all of the investment. Keep the higher tiered pricing as is. That's a compromised as I see it. I still wouldn't be happy with that being the entry level price, but it is achievable with a bit of work.

If we're gonna stick with the "server gil dictates the prices" then put the houses up for actual auction and let the player base decide what they're actually worth.

[Baka]

I find it interesting that the numbers for purchase prices are so high. Granted, I was working with a number close to the 2.1 minimum (14,994 Gil per day per player - over a six to seven hour period), I didn't expect them (SE) to go over the 3 million mark per lot on my own server, simply because of the cost inherent to building a house as well as furnishing it with both mechanically useful and vanity items (ignoring the trend of deflating Gil). However, what I am more interested in is the exact math used to calculate the expected average earnings of 15,000 Gil to 18,000 Gil per day. My own math is as follows:
18 FATE’s: 1,800
6 Hunting Leve: 4794(?)
Minimum for 3 WP Runs: 8,400 <-- A greater number was mentioned?
Minimum per DoW/DoM Player per Day: 14,994
Total Minimum Gil for DoW/DoM Population per Day: 8,511,194,160

Seeing as I was incorrect on my prediction of current housing prices, would it be possible for anyone to help me correct the numbers in my personal calculations?

[Abriael]

This is FFXIV: ARR Producer/Director Naoki Yoshida. First of all, allow me to express my thanks to all of you who have offered feedback on the matter of housing prices. Needless to say, I have been following the discussion very closely.

First of all, thanks for taking the time to respond, but I'm afraid I have to say that I don't find the response very satisfactory, if at all.

Here are the reasons why and a few possible solutions:

1: if you don't want all the land to be grabbed by "the wealthiest players" immediately, the solution is very simple: just allow each Free Company to own only one plot of land/deed. No one needs more than than one now anyway, and with this kind of prices there's no market for land outside of just scraping the bottom of the barrel to get one for your free company. The ability to sell land deeds to other players is an accessory we can easily do without for now. Locking a large portion of your playerbase out of the whole feature for an extended period of time is much more damaging.

2: I'm afraid you underestimate the problem of having to wait for multiple months before being able to purchase a house for many free companies. Free Company housing was hyped and publicized for December 17th, 2013, not for March 17th, 2014. And it was hyped probably a lot more than it was warranted. It was hyped so much that the President and CEO of Square Enix worked up the hype himself basically during every single Live Letter by becoming "housing ojisan". In the past you also said that three level 50 players would have been able to afford a FC house by putting their savings together and three days ago you contradicted that.

I'm sure you understand that announcing that a large portion of your playerbase is now locked out of the feature for three months is simply not cool, and should be addressed a lot faster than in three months. The announcement of the prices just three days before the patch was a low blow.

Even due to the hype generated by your company, many were looking forward to patch 2.1 mainly for the housing feature, and I'd like to see Square Enix take responsibility for that and amend the prices to make them accessible immediately*. I'm quite sure you have the tools to do so.

3: I'm confident that you looked at a lot of metrics, but the fact remains that a LOT of players on legacy servers aren't as rich as you believe, and their free companies are being penalized for the sake of those that are rich. It's also unjust that players on legacy servers are penalized compared to players on non legacy servers, because we all pay the same monthly fees, and that IMHO, gives us the right to access the same features in game at the same rate. It's not right to penalize a whole category of players because SOME players within that category are richer.

4: the difference in housing prices that will still be retained even in three months will make legacy servers much less popular between new players coming with the PS4 and Steam versions of the game, than non legacy worlds, which will result in us having trouble convincing our friends to join us on our servers. This difference in popularity might easily lead to underpopulation on the long run, as a number of players will naturally leave while less players join. This kind of discrepancy should be avoided at all costs.

Ultimately, Yoshida-san, I think that we need something done a faster than three months from now, for the reasons mentioned above. Here are my suggestions:

1: Limit ownership of land deeds to 1 per Free Company
2: enact one of the following at the most immediate possible time.
a: slice one zero off all prices
b: slice one zero off prices of small land plots, halve medium, keep large as is.
c: immediately* unify prices of legacy servers to category 3 and drop all servers to category 1 in three months OR immediately* unify prices of legacy servers to category 3 raise prices of category 1 and 2 to category 3 in three months. Whichever more appropriate.

*Immediately is intended as "at the earliest technically possible time", of course no one is demanding for it to happen right now.

I'm sorry, but I see no other solution. As they are now, the prices are massively unjust towards a large part of the community in order to address problems that they didn't cause (IE you're penalizing those that aren't rich in order to dry the money of those that are), and I don't think it's right to ask those that are being penalized to just wait for three months in order to enjoy a feature that was massively hyped as the primary feature of the first large content patch of the game, and for which we already waited for several months (actually more than a year since it was announced).

I know and appreciate that you're working very hard to make this game a success, but this blunder is counterproductive to that success, and is penalizing many of your most faithful supporters, while there'd be way to handle it much more gracefully and without penalizing people that don't deserve that kind of treatment.

All the best,

[Rok]

Any "faithful" supporter most likely played FFXI and doesn't bat an eye at the thought of it taking 3 months to earn something. The amount of crying in this thread is hilarious.

I know and appreciate that you're working very hard to make this game a success, but this blunder is counterproductive to that success, and is penalizing many of your most faithful supporters, while there'd be way to handle it much more gracefully and without penalizing people that don't deserve that kind of treatment.

All the best,

[Abriael]

Any "faithful" supporter most likely played FFXI and doesn't bat an eye at the thought of it taking 3 months to earn something. The amount of crying in this thread is hilarious.

Too bad that in FFXI housing was completely free.

And in FFXI Square Enix didn't ride the hype train as it did for housing in FFXIV.

Try again

[pizzil]

I just want to say I am an OG when it comes to hating on Yoshi and the 95 pages of this thread warms my heart.

[Smashington]

I'm not sure if Free Company Credits has been addressed by the DEV team yet.

Did you consider having FC Housing purchased with FC credits and decided against it?

Is there a possibility that FC credits may be used to off-set the Housing costs still?

I can't see any reason why they weren't the primary currency used to purchase housing. I also don't see why they could not be used right now to buy a discount voucher for the purchase of FC housing.

I think last time I checked our FC had around 500,000 FC credits (from memory here). That represents the actual combined achievements of the FC, which is exactly what the FC housing size and location should represent.

[Tazo]

Too bad that in FFXI housing was completely free.

And in FFXI Square Enix didn't ride the hype train as it did for housing in FFXIV.

Try again

You miss his point entirely. To achieve anything worthwhile in FF11 it took awhile.....some things took years.