Dead from Plot hunting and I ask YOU a Question

[ItMe]

They have more houses than you can imagine. It's their business to know these things.

Wow, you're right.
If they have loads of houses, it kind of calls their whole idea into question.
Thet they have bought loads of houses shows how much buying power players can get. Thus in order to for their Gil sink idea to be effective, house prices would need to be prohibitively high.

I know that they aren't alone in this. There are many other individuals who basically own every house in multiple wards.
Instead of making more houses available, wouldn't it be better to simply limit the number of houses someone could own? (Counting houses account wide so someone couldn't just own a load of houses across their alts)

[Yshtola]

I started on Ragnarok in 2012 and played on one of those legacy worlds. Neither I or another german player had such amounts of money.

November 2012 was the last savestate for ARR and I accumulated about 6 Mio Gil by Farming the one and only FATE Atomos and playing the game. The effort to acquiring money was the same as today. Furthermore SE took away 90% of our money in ARR for deflation purposes. So I only started with 600k (not much in comparison of housing- and marketboard-prices)

I would heavily disagree with your statement regarding today's difficulty with making money. The amount of cash people carry around nowadays is nothing like what it used to be during ARR.

In 2.3 where housing was implemented, only the richest could buy small houses. Therefor the reduction of the prices were liked by the playerbase (at least what I can tell).

First of all, thank you for all your time in investing such amount of time to gather all these information.

Your idea was to increase prices as a gilsink and to lower the amount of housing-buyers.
I agree that we need a gilsink.
In my personal calculations I don't use dark matter as a sign for Inflation. I like to use the prices for RMT as a factor, because our real World currencies are way more stable and there is always an demand for ingame currency.

Can't speak for Ragnarok, but even very casual FCs could afford a small house on Gilgamesh. Hell, I recall me and a few friends ended up buying a Mist 1 in a matter of 2-3 weeks just ahead of patch 2.3. As I've written, some people might have appreciated the reduction, but it's far from rewarding when SE is diminishing the efforts of hundreds of FCs by slashing the prices.

My suggestion wouldn't lower the amount of buyers. What it aims at is progressively prevent the 40 players on certain servers from being able to purchase a house the moment it becomes available. I can see why you would use fiat, but it doesn't line up with what I am presenting. Are fiat currencies more "stable" than gil? I guess it depends on what your currency is, but it doesn't matter. If you know the right people, you can buy a million for a dollar. If you don't, you're gonna be looking a spending anything between 2 and 6. There used to be a time where a million could only be purchased above 15$ after midnight on Balmung. Long gone are these days, but using fiat as a way to gauge inflation in FFXIV just doesn't really work.

But I don't share the second part: increasing prices to lower the amount of housing-buyers. True is that plots will be left to buy if they are too expensive. And someday they will be bought by the most wealthy players.

It is fallacious to think "rich players" are interested in owning multiple houses. The very few individuals or FCs that are interested in managing multiple plots are a non-factor in the current environment because of the sheer amount of plots compared to the ARR era. Besides, the very reason behind housing is to take gil away from rich players while less fortunate players can just wait a bit. After all, the devaluation timer is still present, it's just inefficient on North American servers.

Did you read your linked article? I did and he wanted to show us, that using RMT isnt cheating but instead a way of thinking outside the box by comparing worktime investment in real life and in grinding (boring stuff). Using RMT is a way to decrease the time wasting in boring content and instead skipping right into the fun part of the game.

If we use this explanation of ppl using RMT we can safely assume that owning and using a house is kind of the fun part and collecting all those money the boring part. Increasing prices would only increase the boring part and make it way more incentive to buy Gil via RMT.

I did and I think the same way to a certain extent. If whatever I'm doing ingame doesn't reward me with X amount of gil per hour, then I'm looking for something that is more efficient. As written in that paper, make things too easy (as they are now) and RMT thrives. Make things too difficult (2.1 price chart) and RMT thrives.

We don't want to increase problems, we want a better game. Thats why other ideas would be better.

Personally (and as an owner of a privat house) would wish, that playerhousing should be in an own instance for each home. Owning a house would only increase the space in the database because not every instance must be loaded at all times. With this Update ppl could buy more than one house to decrease their money.

What problem would arise? What other ideas are as simple as altering the sticker prices?

Every time someone suggests something, they never talk about the investment SE would have to make. In this case, they have already stated that a full blown instanced housing system (actual houses, since apartment are a form of housing) is not something they want to pursue.

There was another cool Idea:
You could buy a simple plot and upgrade it like in Animal Crossing. So everyone could get at least a small patch and wealthy players can upgrade it into a mansion or castle. The Elder Scrolls Online showed us what some engines can do with instanced housing.

PS: Sorry for late editing. You still cannot edit on Smartphone...

Again, that would require a full blown instanced housing system and that's just not happening considering the producer has said he's not interested and how they have doubled down on the ward based system since 2013...

That doesn't really address most of my points. If base housing prices are heavily increased, how does the devaluation timer help poorer players? If anything it helps the richer players by ensuring the price range of the plot remains well above affordable for many while still easily being purchasable by people who have many millions to spare. I mean forgive me if I'm majorly misunderstanding your profile tag, but you own like 48 plots, right? So you have more than enough gil to buy houses left and right. Meanwhile just to buy a small as a newer player I had to borrow like 2M on top of what I already had. So if these higher prices had been in effect at that time, a player like me couldn't have gotten a house at all, while a player like you easily could have gotten their 49th house. So I don't really see how this actually opens up the market, especially when the alternative of just adding more plots overall already exists.

Heavily increased? Are you mad?

The goal isn't to help poor players since they can already purchase apartments and FC rooms at a fraction of what a house cost. I don't know how you came up with that conclusion since what was brought forward is exclusively to prevent 40 people from trying to purchase a plot the moment it goes up for sale. You know, as it was originally intended...

My FC doesn't really care about expanding beyond what we have and the amount of FCs or players like myself barely represent 1% of the available plots across all servers. You can complain about the 1% all you want, but you should take a few step away from the tree you're starring at and look at the thousands of plots that are empty or the thousands of players who rely on emails to be reminded that their house is about to be demolished because clearly they really use it.

Wow, you're right.
If they have loads of houses, it kind of calls their whole idea into question.
Thet they have bought loads of houses shows how much buying power players can get. Thus in order to for their Gil sink idea to be effective, house prices would need to be prohibitively high.

I know that they aren't alone in this. There are many other individuals who basically own every house in multiple wards.
Instead of making more houses available, wouldn't it be better to simply limit the number of houses someone could own? (Counting houses account wide so someone couldn't just own a load of houses across their alts)

We are not the norm. If it were for me, I'd go straight back to that 2.1 price chart, but I can see how unpopular that would be due to how entitled players are nowadays. Personal housing is the bulk of the problem with housing and there are already restrictions in place to prevent multiple personal house ownership. You can take away the FC houses owned by the "same" FCs tomorrow and you'll be back to square one by the end of the week.

[Veloran]

But increasing the price doesn't just delete the 40 people waiting to buy a plot the moment it goes up for sale, it just narrows the pool of people who can afford to be waiting. That is to say, all 40 of those people still want a house, but then you'll just have the 20 who can afford to endlessly click doing so. The demand hasn't actually changed at all, in fact it's only bottlenecking the supply. And where are these "thousands of empty plots"? Part of the issue is that on some servers plots go up for sale so rarely that competition is massive, and the devaluation timer never even has a chance to kick in because the plot is bought instantly the moment it's actually buyable. And I don't see how adding more wards is just "kicking the can down the road" - Yes player populations are always increasing, but that most often results in adding more servers, while others are hardcapped for the creation of new characters, meaning adding more wards on congested servers isn't just a pointless effort.

[Yshtola]

But increasing the price doesn't just delete the 40 people waiting to buy a plot the moment it goes up for sale, it just narrows the pool of people who can afford to be waiting.

Exactly. You're the one implying I was.

That is to say, all 40 of those people still want a house, but then you'll just have the 20 who can afford to endlessly click doing so.

Make it more expensive then. You missed the part where I talked about player entitlement?

The demand hasn't actually changed at all, in fact it's only bottlenecking the supply.

The demand for housing was just as strong in 2.1. The supply wasn't "bottlenecked". You either paid what was on the placard or you waited the 90 days for full devaluation. Now devaluation has been shortened, yet you would complain. Once again, did you miss the part about player entitlement?

And where are these "thousands of empty plots"?

Funny how you like to cherry pick what you're replying to. If you want to ignore how players own houses for no practical reason and rely on reminders to actually enter them, that's your choice... I guess. Ignorance is bliss?

Anyhow, there is still thousands of plots on every single Data Center, minus the North American ones for the sole reason that auto-demolition has been stopped for the past 4 months. If you want to get into the NA situation, we can do that, but you seem unprepared.

Part of the issue is that on some servers plots go up for sale so rarely that competition is massive, and the devaluation timer never even has a chance to kick in because the plot is bought instantly the moment it's actually buyable.

Thanks for answering yourself. I'm glad we could come up with the common conclusion that devaluation isn't even capable of doing it's job due to the low prices.

And I don't see how adding more wards is just "kicking the can down the road" - Yes player populations are always increasing, but that most often results in adding more servers, while others are hardcapped for the creation of new characters, meaning adding more wards on congested servers isn't just a pointless effort.

If you can't see how ridiculously affordable house prices don't correlate to kicking the can down the road, logic is futile.

[Veloran]

Your arguments make no sense. One second you're saying to wait for the devaluation timer or you're entitled, the next you're saying the timer doesn't work anyway because people just insta-buy without bothering to wait for it. Guess what, upping housing prices isn't going to stop insta-buying, it just ensures that only the richer players will do it. Again, upping the barrier to entry doesn't erase demand, the number of players that can't get a house would only increase. Sure you know a lot about housing, but clearly it's from an incredibly skewed perspective if you're going to go around saying that 20M for a SMALL is something that's actually reasonable for the market and playerbase.

[Yshtola]

Your arguments make no sense. One second you're saying to wait for the devaluation timer or you're entitled, the next you're saying the timer doesn't work anyway because people just insta-buy without bothering to wait for it. Guess what, upping housing prices isn't going to stop insta-buying, it just ensures that only the richer players will do it. Again, upping the barrier to entry doesn't erase demand, the number of players that can't get a house would only increase. Sure you know a lot about housing, but clearly it's from an incredibly skewed perspective if you're going to go around saying that 20M for a SMALL is something that's actually reasonable for the market and playerbase.

Once again, you cannot even come up with a proper reply. Let's just pretend you simply misunderstood instead of acting like your back is against the wall. The devaluation timer, as it is right now, is not effective. Why? Because you have 40 players with enough gil to purchase a small plot on certain servers. So yes, thank you for yet again proving me right.

What I am presenting is a way to prevent those 40 players from trying to purchase the same plot as soon as it is available. Would it get rid of people camping for half a day? Probably not all of them... for some time that is. Definitely not if auto-demo remains off, but I have good faith that once the wealthier players no longer compete against each others, you could finally see the devaluation shed off a couple millions until it reaches the minimum value.

Is it clear now or are you truly incapable of comprehending that the reason why players, like you, feel so entitled to being able to purchase a small house is due to the ridiculously low prices? 20m is nothing in this day and age and a, theoretical, fully devalued plot at 10m would still be very easy to obtain for any player who's even remotely determined to get one.

You have players dropping, at the very least, 350m for just the ability to relocate to a Mist 5/35 or a Shirogane 30/60. LB 11/41 is easily sold/bought for 150m on certain servers.

This random timer did stop players from buying up houses just to make a profit, but people botting on a placard is not equal opportunity nor is it healthy to camp there for the honest players.

It really is a damn joke that small houses only cost 3-4 million when so many people are out there looking for one. Higher prices are the only solution which would work for everyone. If you want a house, make more money and that's it. Anyone playing the game can make gil. It's fair.

I wouldn't say it stopped. If anything, players are just selling relocations and FCs are the defacto option for players interested in reselling plots.

I'm glad someone else understands that there is value in working towards a goal instead of kicking and screaming on a video game forum.

Yo, Olive Oil, sorry your friends left pre-Stormblood. That sucks

If you ever got the time, or your friends depart for elsehwere make an alt on Excalibur. I got a friend who's ambitious, maybe you could teach him a thing or two.

New phone, who dis?

Eh life happens. Thanks for the invitation, but just like Dido, I will go down with this ship (Gilgamesh).