Thread: Patch 2.4 Preview

Originally Posted by Alistaire

Yeah, if that 850k was a joke right from the start it's in pretty poor taste; no way for players to know that was ridiculous outside of common sense.

Well the joke flowed like this basically:

Dev: Hey, I have 850k on my character!
Yoshi-P: 850k won't be enough gil for a house, lol.

Everyone basically took it as gospel that the price would be around 850k, because it was the only mention at all of a price as a starting point. No one had a clear idea that Personal Housing would be lumped in with FC Housing, so they took to the 850k (maybe a little bit more, within 2-3 mil) and then took on the assumption that Personal Housing would be instanced to achieve these prices. This problem is further expounded upon when Famitsu put out their transcript of the Q&A -- something that, while not a direct translation of events, tend to give a little bit extra information and constantly leaves out in-jokes by the team:

Q: Tell us about individually owned homes.
Yoshida: Private homes are simply land which can be purchased by individuals, but you'll have to have a certain grand company rank and be level 50. We're working hard on this but we're getting down to the wire on whether we can get private homes included in time for 2.3, so it might not be until 2.35. It would be tough to set the price (of private homes) as low as 850,000 gil. It's not going to be as high as free company owned housing.

Here you see what was an in-joke between friends become an explanation by Famitsu. There's where the problems began.