House Payments

[AriesMouse]

EDIT: Editing to clear some things up people seemed to frequently overlook/not fully understand the intent of, and also just taking in account feedback. Also to get everything in one post, since two lovely posters informed me that editing a post gets past the text limit.

Keeping a house should require a small fee for house upkeep/maintenance, similar to repairing your armor, that is paid monthly. Changed references to this as 'rent' to 'upkeep' to follow that line of thought.

The amount paid per month shouldn't be too high, realistically, it should be extremely negligible for any active player.
For some example prices:
Small = 250,000 gil
Med = 500,000 gil
Large = 1mil gil
These are more examples for comparing the cost of one size of house to another, the numbers themselves should not be taken as what would actually be put into the system, or even anything close.

Anything in your currency tab should be able to be used as a means to pay the upkeep. With the vast amount of currencies we have in the game, many of which become completely obsolete and unused, while still being awarded to us very regularly, we should be able to use these currencies as a means to buy tokens to pay for the house upkeep.

Allow people to pay in advance. This would be very helpful when it comes to real life emergencies. Let's say you have to stop playing because you have to switch jobs, and money is tight. By paying the upkeep for your house ahead of time, you could cement your hold on your plot for up to 6 months if you needed to, while your sub goes inactive, and you tend to your real life issues. It would be a good way to help people that know they might not be able to play, or even afford the game for a short time, but allow them to keep the house they worked so hard to obtain. This could also cause issues with people dodging the auto-demo, but with the right checks and balances to limit the amount of time you can put a payment down for (or even increasing the price for every month you want to pay in advance), it could be a very helpful system, while not being game breaking.

Allow the option for people to open an upkeep donation box on their house, so that if a house is open to the public, and people enjoy using it for RP, gpose, or what-have-you, people can help that person maintain and keep that house.

I understand that some worry that this comes across like a punishment for people owning homes, but if the numbers are well balanced enough, an active player with a home shouldn't have any troubles paying. At most it would punish house flippers, people with a house on every character, and the people that are inactive in the game, but log in once a month at the behest of an email just to keep their house as a status symbol/trophy.

Until housing is no longer a finite resource, I feel like a system like this should be put in place

Adding: The argument has been made that people do not want to pay more after buying a house, but with a system like this, maybe the initial price of buying the house could be lower to counter balance. Keep in mind also, for the “buy it and done paying” mentality, would you then also argue that repairing your armor should be removed from the game? Once you buy that armor, why should we have to still pay anything else for it?

[Saraphin]

Allow people to pay in advance. This would be very helpful when it comes to real life emergencies. Let's say you have to stop playing because you have to switch jobs, and money is tight. By paying the rent for your house ahead of time, you could cement your hold on your plot for up to 6 months if you needed to, while your sub goes inactive, and you tend to your real life issues. It would be a good way to help people that know they might not be able to play, or even afford the game for a short time, but allow them to keep the house they worked so hard to obtain.

This would fully be a work around of the Auto-Demo, which was put in due to housing being at such a premium as it is. I cannot get behind this.

Also: most people that do have homes in game have scraped together the Gil, be it personal or FC gil, just to own one, adding fees has been shown to be something that the FFXIV community does not want for housing.

[Tempest222]

People already pay a monthly fee for owning a house, their sub. I don’t see how this would help anything tbh. Plus there have to be people who own houses who are not mega crafter/gatherers who were just barely able to afford to buy after saving for while and who would never be able to come anywhere near paying such high prices per month. I’ve been playing the game a few months and still only have shy of 1mil gil and I don’t see that number skyrocketing at any point as I don’t see myself seriously getting into crafting/gathering and I’d rather do other things with my login time than find ways to grind gil. Obviously nothing against players who do play in ways that net them enormous amounts of gil, but there have to be others like me who just don’t have deep pockets like that, and who play in different ways.

[StouterTaru]

I understand that some worry that this comes across like a punishment for people owning homes, but if the numbers are well balanced enough, an active player with a home shouldn't have any troubles paying. At most it would punish house flippers, people with a house on every character, and the people that are inactive in the game, but log in once a month at the behest of an e-mail just to keep their house as a status symbol/trophy.

Why not instead have an annoying, repetitive mini-game you have to win every 72 hours or your house is destroyed? That'll really stick it to them darn home owners.

[Mirch]

this is not a big deal to house buy/sellers, they got gil, lots of gil.
anyway, i like the idea, i support this.

[Senn]

I do not support a monthly fee of any kind for housing.

[AriesMouse]

I do not support a monthly fee of any kind for housing.

Do you intend to give a reason why? Again, it wouldn't be a large fee, so for any active player it would be incredibly easy to pay, something people wouldn't even really notice.
If you're going to disagree, at least give reasons why, cons you see in this system. I've stated some pros that could come from it, so refute them, if you disagree.

[Senn]

...

I don't want to pay more just to keep a house, whether the payment be in gil, gc seals, or whatever.