Personal housing should be expensive, otherwise it utterly invalidates the lore surrounding Free Company Housing. Free Companies are allowed to buy house because the 3 cities/Grand Companies allow it as a special privilege. How much more so would it be special for an individual to purchase a house like a Free Company can afford?
There is no way that the *land* could ever be cheaper if it is in the same ward as Free Company residences. If it was it would immediately invalidate any FC purchasing plans.
Note, I said land, and the land is the only cost that has been revealed. The cost of actually buying the permit to build and building itself has not been revealed, perhaps its the same, perhaps it is less. Personally I would hope for it being a lesser amount since in my opinion personal houses should be limited to the kind of house that small FCs could afford when FC Housing was first implemented.
That leads me neatly to two questions which are burning in my mind as Free Company master;
FC Housing gives access to crafting facilities, gardening, Chocobo Stable/training and Moogle mail conveniently at the front door - among other things. Are the advantages of the Free Company housing to extend to individuals now?
And following on from that, if that is the case, then what is the point of Free Companies? You already wiped out one of the advantages by allowing individuals to buy the same plots of land and presumably houses as a whole FC (who doesn't think that will drive further RMT in this game?). So if those individual homes have all the same perks as a Free Company house, what really is the purpose of the FC?
Yoshida-san and the Dev team, please listen. You guys completely lacked pre-planning and thought when it came to the Hunt system which was a near total disaster - even with the subsequent hot fixes. And here we are again with you dropping a major new system on us which is *clearly* not through being tested, otherwise you'd have implemented what you talk about putting into 2.4, now instead.
Did it not cross your minds that allowing individual players to buy the same houses and facilities that FCs can basically undermines the entire purpose of the Free Company? Did it never cross your minds that the high prices of large and medium plots would potentially drive players to buying Gil?
This isn't exactly rocket science here, it is entirely predictable.
Now, the one ray of hope I have at the moment is that the patch notes didn't really elaborate on individual housing, and yet there has to be a separate UI for them. So there remains a lot we do not know. We don't know if the houses will be the same size, have basements, be able to host airship facilities (whenever they come) gardening, Chocobo stables/training, etc. I call it a ray of hope, but that might be too optimistic, I honestly think that someone forgot to think this through. not only that , Yoshida-san, I appreciate your letter about housing, but it honestly seems to me that you were informed by the Dev team about what would make it into 2.38 for personal housing, realized that players would be massively angry about it, and hastily wrote that letter in the hope that you could quell the angry voices with an apology. Sadly acts of contrition and apology do not work with the typical MMORPG player these days as they are too focused on themselves to realize that there is a bigger picture. That said, you are a very intelligent man, so how could you not see how this would affect the community?