Latest comment from Yoshida regarding Housing + Inventory space issue

[Alukah]

It's a good question why private chambers were released before personal housing, or why they have no issues with every single player belonging to a free company being able to create a private chamber (instanced) but they have issues if instead of private chambers we had an instanced personal housing.

Another forgotten thing is, they said we would be able to upgrade our houses to medium or large, how are they going to do that with the current ward setup? Or will this also be forgotten? I feel like they should consider replacing the team in charge of housing, maybe a new team could figure out how to implement this properly without murdering their server resources.

[TheRogueX]

Also let's not forget that this game is only a year old, and according to them they have 2.5 million accounts on the game, and SE is already stating that they have technical limitations in regards to the game? How is that, in any way, a good sign? They have had a year of watching the population grow, even saying at the start of 2.0 that they were amazed at how many people had joined and started to pay, to see this issue coming and start planning for it. Yet now, technical limitations? 2.5 million accounts... now lets say HALF of those active. so you end up with 1.25 million people paying for this game. And I'll even be generous and say... lets say everyone is paying the lower price of 9.99, no one is paying the 14.99 per month for extra characters.

1.25 million x $9.99 a month = 12,487,500.00 a month from subscriptions.

Now lets be fair again and say the first 3 months they earned 1/3 of that... then 4-7 they earned half of that and then 8-12 they earns all of that.

Months 1-3 = 12,487,500.00
Months 4-7 = 24,975,000.00
Months 8-12 = 62,437,500.00

For a Total of 99,900,000.00 (roughly) that players have paid in the last year for this game. Of course this doesn't count the money people pay per month for extra retainers, (2$ a month) and the money people have paid for fantasias (10$ a piece). But even with all of that, they have technical limitations and limited server resources? You would think with all the money the player base is paying, they could at least put some of that towards the servers and keeping them up to date so we aren't having this issue.

Over all, as I said taking out the gil issue, this is a mess.

You forgot the income they generated from the sale of the software. Let's just assume that everyone paid only $15 for it; that's another $37,500,000, and that is guaranteed because you *must* purchase the game to play it (at least, up until the free-trial recently). It's likely higher though because most people likely paid waaay more than the $15 sale price that was on Steam for a couple weeks.

[Chasely]

It's messed up because they tried to do something too ambitious in too short a time. My instructor for an android development class was teaching a group of graduate students in a previous semester who all agreed to collectively build a video game for their class project. Long story short, what they were able to accomplish and what they had envisioned were two entirely different things. The housing is a good example of how that looks when a team of professionals run into the same problem. The primary difference being their's actually functions with unintended consequences whereas a group of students will be lucky to have something running at all. It's an idea that needed more time and testing than what was given.

They've been planning personal housing for 4 years...

[Roris]

2.5 million accounts... now lets say HALF of those active. so you end up with 1.25 million people paying for this game. And I'll even be generous and say... lets say everyone is paying the lower price of 9.99, no one is paying the 14.99 per month for extra characters.

I really wish they outright stated how many active subscribers they have, none of this "adventurers" thing that's just another word for accounts, pretty sure most P2P MMOs actually report on their solid subscriber numbers since accounts don't really matter that much for subscription based MMOs. Honestly I'd say their subscriber numbers could be lower than 1 million, closer to around 700k or maybe less, but we'll never really know for sure until they state them. It would still be good money, but they were operating at a large loss for years, most likely they're allocating a good part of their profits into the expansion, which seems like the next big "but wait until X", then dropping PS3 support will be the next big excuse, etc.

[Nalien]

It's an idea that needed more time and testing than what was given.

I don't really think it does. The way wards are structured is never going to lend itself to everyone who wants a housing having one. All they need to do is provide everyone with an instanced option; something they could knock out in an extra weekends worth of work, depending on how much they want to do with it.

I can't speak for everyone, and I certainly shouldn't in this debate, considering I'm in a fairly good position to get my medium sized house, but I think it would be perfectly fine for everyone to have a private room regardless of their Free Company, and the minority to have a house occupying the wards along with Free Companies. That gives players options; you can have your own private inn room that you can decorate, you can move in with your Free Company, you can save up and buy your own house. There would still be some supply/demand issues on housing wards, but if everyone could just go to the Innkeeper NPC and buy a private room right now, I think the demand for housing would fall dramatically, provided they also work on gardening for such rooms.

[Yukiko]

With every patch we are getting new housing stuff, retainers are already full...
Can we get the items back after placing them in FC housing or private housing? No!

[WhiteGarden]

I love how personal housing is actually designed to fail.

By lumping it in with Free Company housing, SE has made absolutely certain that it remains for elite only. Land availability will remain extremely extremely limited compared to the entire player-base of the server.

The whole FC Housing, personal chambers, personal house ideology is very poorly designed. But that's what happens when you're forced to design the game around server limitations.

[Kaeda_Valentyne]

Ok, so I thought about it and I think I came up with why they think the high prices on personal housing will deter RMT sales.
By the way I don't think it was completely thought out, It's actually quite stupid.

They must think most of us are to poor in the real world to afford to buy that large amount of Gil, or at the very least make us think twice about doing it.

To be completely honest the housing is the only think that actually made me think about buying Gil. I didn't because in my opinion its cheating and anything worth getting is worth working hard for, but the real issue is the availability.
I am so close to being able to buy a small house, should have enough by the end of the week. Alas there wont be a small house available for me to buy.

Now all the availability issue does is promote RMT sales because you need the Gil now so you can insure getting a house.
You can say wait for the next patch when new wards are added, but to do so I will have to take the day off of work if I want to get a house in the Lavender beds or Mist.

If they do double the wards there might just be some left when I normally get home for work the thing is they said they were going to try to double them. The key word there is "Try". Saying that is leaving a loop hole incase they cant double them. They will be able to say that thy said they would try but they just couldn't make it work in time. I don't know about you but I'm not going to take my chances. I will take that day off work just so I wont be disappointed again, it's just sad that I have to just to be sure.

[Souljacker]

I agree - "try" is the operative word here. They already know that they are at server capacity and I really wish they would rethink this whole thing. We don't need huge instanced zones for people to have personal monuments to themselves. We just needed a basic mog house as part of the Adventurer package, something they were somehow able to do on servers two decades OLDER than what they have now.

It's sad, really.

YoshiP - Just swallow your pride and ask Tanaka already.

[NyneAlexander]

I agree - "try" is the operative word here. They already know that they are at server capacity and I really wish they would rethink this whole thing. We don't need huge instanced zones for people to have personal monuments to themselves. We just needed a basic mog house as part of the Adventurer package, something they were somehow able to do on servers two decades OLDER than what they have now.

It's sad, really.

YoshiP - Just swallow your pride and ask Tanaka already.

Thats the problem. These housing wards aren't instanced. They're static - and they exist whether or not people are in them. This means that they take up physical server space, unlike an instanced world. If they take up physical server space, then they cost physical money. And if they cost physical money, they will exist in very limited supply. And a very small micro-fraction of the population will get to enjoy this feature.