Why does housing initially need to be a massive gil sink?

[Quesse]

Housing should be something that is attainable by the majority of players. Its fine if there is small goal to attain. But the prices should not be in the high millions of gil. The reason for this is that the majority should have access to benefits such as chocobo raising or gardening.

I'm completely fine with upgrades to houses being costly. Create a system where certain room add-ons (not furniture) or other benefits are a really high cost if you must.

As a paying subscriber, I do not care if your servers "cannot handle the load". That is no excuse to limit housing to the top 1%. In other words, the technical limitations of the game should never be a massive impediment to enjoying content. That is your problem to figure out, don't make it mine.

Fix this.

[Twinbros]

The ONLY people this hurts is the poor. Plain and simple. It rewards people who play the market, have all their gathering/crafting maxed or straight up BUY gil, and punishes the average player who makes their gil through dungeon runs and raid runs. It solves nothing.

[Dyvid]

The ONLY people this hurts is the poor. Plain and simple. It rewards people who play the market, have all their gathering/crafting maxed or straight up BUY gil, and punishes the average player who makes their gil through dungeon runs and raid runs. It solves nothing.

Please feel free to check my character. You can plainly see I'm casual, only 1 DoL and 3 DoH, not star 3. I don't buy gil and have a full /blist for RMT. I am an average casual player yet I have enough money to buy a house. The cold hard reality is like everything, you have to work toward something instead of just having it handed to you. Nexus Weapon, get ready for months of work. Full PvP set, yep months. Unique mounts and gear, more months.

Snip.

I got bad news for you, housing is a gil sink. Buying a plot and building house is just the first step. Wait till you have to buy furniture for it. I easily dropped 2 or 3 million on unique items like Levi Fountain, Summoning Bell, Garuda Couch, ADS, Titan, Ifrit, Tonberry, Ahriman, etc...

[Nalien]

They should have opted for a constant Gil sink through a Housing tax every 35 days, rather than going "If you don't use it in 35 days you lose it".

The idea behind the price is to give players a Gil sink, but its a one time Gil sink, so that's stupid. Reduce the overall cost and make it so you have to pay X (presumably based on the size) every 35 days to keep it and it is a manageable Gil sink.

If, for example, it cost you 1,000,000 Gil for a Small Plot, and then 100,000 Gil every 35 days to keep it, eventually that's going to cost you the same as the current cost. Eventually it's going to cost you more. That works as a Gil sink; paying 4,000,000 Gil up front does not. That just annoys people and after it's payed, it's no longer a Gil sink. I remember when people were first getting their FC Houses after 2.1, once they had them they just started making Gil again; there was no Gil sink in the game after they'd achieved that. That is an issue only further exacerbated by Gardening. What makes the most Gil in this game? Gardening. Who has access to Gardening? FCs with a House. Who has the most money to shell out for Private Housing? FC members. Nice going Yoshida.

It would also be a nice way to actually differentiate between FC and individuals; FC House tax could be larger for the same plot size as an individuals. That would also actually give FCs a constant activity to pursue - making Gil to pay for their House tax.

[Twinbros]

They should have opted for a constant Gil sink through a Housing tax every 35 days, rather than going "If you don't use it in 35 days you lose it".

The idea behind the price is to give players a Gil sink, but its a one time Gil sink, so that's stupid. Reduce the overall cost and make it so you have to pay X (presumably based on the size) every 35 days to keep it and it is a manageable Gil sink.

It would also be a nice way to actually differentiate between FC and individuals; FC House tax could be larger for the same plot size as an individuals. That would also actually give FCs a constant activity to pursue - making Gil to pay for their House tax.

Not all of us can stay at our parents basements eating cheetos and playing 24/7. Some of us actually have jobs/ school and real life. A tax is about the dumbest idea i've ever heard.

[Nalien]

Not all of us can stay at our parents basements eating cheetos and playing 24/7. Some of us actually have jobs/ school and real life. A tax is about the dumbest idea i've ever heard.

I'd be more incline to bother listening to your opinion were it not for the blatant ad hominem bullshit.

35 days, doing just the Expert Duty Roulette and resulting Alexandrite Map comes to about 300,000 Gil by the way. Hardly 24/7 play time, and the example I gave was 100,000 Gil every 35 days? You don't even need to play for anywhere near those full 35 days. If 10 days worth of Expert Duty Roulette and Alexandrite Maps (content which takes about 1 hour a day at most?) every 35 makes me a parent leaching basement dweller, then so be it. That's putting 10 hours into the game in the space of 840 hours, but obviously you'd have to sacrifice work/school/RL and play 24/7 in order to manage that, right?

[Nicobo]

They should have opted for a constant Gil sink through a Housing tax every 35 days,....

Was it suggesting when a player has not enough gil on the due date then lose it? ^^;
If it was a FC house, the master no pay on due date, then all member lose their private chambers as well?

[Souljacker]

I'm against a tax. There's no need for it. I pay taxes in real life and the market boards somehow manage to get me coming AND going. There's enough pointless gil sinks in this game - the economy will only be fixed by ending the practice of every crafting job at max. That should have NEVER happened.

Housing is a big ol' broken wheel. There's no affordable plots on balmung anymore. 35mil and up, which is out of reach for the average player.

[Nalien]

There's enough pointless gil sinks in this game

No, there really aren't. Market Board fees, Teleport/Airship/Porter fees, and Repairing fees really are not enough to counteract the massive amounts of Gil players get from; FATEs, Levequests, Regular Quests, Dungeons, Duty Roulette, Hunt Marks, Treasure Maps, Clear Demimateria, Challenge Logs, and whatever else I'm forgetting.

The amount of Gil I get per day is astronomical, even compared to the amount of Gil I lose in fees per month. Every week I'm walking around with an extra 100k at least, just from playing the game; that isn't Gil I got from other players, it is literally Gil the game has just given me for playing, and there is literally no Gil sink taking a significant amount of that Gil out of the system. Not every player is going to be making that kind of Gil a week, because not everyone plays the game the same way (some don't touch the Duty Roulette, for example), but we can assume that a significant proportion of players can and will. That is a lot of Gil being printed per server, with a pathetic fraction being removed.

Reducing the cost of Housing pleases everyone.
Adding a tax keeps it as a Gil sink long after you've payed for it.
That reduces the ridiculous amounts of Gil being printed, and goes a way to fixing the hyper inflation that even lead to them making housing this expensive in the first place. Housing was designed to take Gil out of the system, that's why Legacy servers are burdened with ridiculously higher costs. The current system for Housing doesn't do that in the long run, and the massive prices have obviously just been upsetting the player base, even as far back as 2.1. Taxes solve that, as long as they balance it so it isn't ridiculous, it would work very well.

The only remaining issue is accommodating space for everyone to have a House. Having both instanced and non-instanced Wards should solve that; they're certainly not going to solve it with their brute force approach of doubling the number of Wards. They wasted nine months doing absolutely nothing but giving everyone access to the exact same thing we had in 2.1 when they should have been working on any number of things really. It's really quite sad, I wont say Yoshida should resign, but whoever was actually in charge of Housing certainly should. What we got in 2.38 could easily have been in 2.1, you do not do that kind of work and expect to keep your job. When we didn't get Personal Housing in 2.1, it was under the pretense that they were working on it, when it kept getting delayed, it was because they were working on it. I'd really like to know what they were working on, because it looks like absolutely nothing.

Heck, even if they don't want to make a constant and effective Gil sink, they can just give you the option to pay up front or pay over time. The main issue here is that they also want to use the cost to halt demand, hence why the prices depreciate, which is a serious mistake. If they wanted to halt demand there were plenty of ways of doing so, they were just too lazy to bother with any. At least when 2.1 hit FCs needed to grind a few ranks to even purchase a House, they couldn't even be bothered with something like that here. It's just incredibly lazy. They should have spent the past nine months addressing the reason why they even need to halt demand.

[polyphonica]

When we didn't get Personal Housing in 2.1, it was under the pretense that they were working on it, when it kept getting delayed, it was because they were working on it. I'd really like to know what they were working on, because it looks like absolutely nothing.

The stated reason, for whatever it's worth, was because, since 2.1, the amount of ways to make gil increased, and the overall price of land decreased. Rather than creating a separate system for personal housing, they say they were waiting for the right time economically (in-game) for individuals to purchase FC houses, and also for the back-end changes needed to expand capacity (which may come in 2.4). They say they considered whether separate pricing was required, but the numbers suggested that the current prices would be fine with the aggressive deflation scenario (half-price within a month).

That's totally aside the main issue of supply on legacy servers, of course.