Quote Originally Posted by Mimilu View Post
While I don't agree with the idea, wouldn't a more streamlined version of this be to just give houses a rent and let apartments be rent-free? Then, they would still have the appeal of being the free, eternal option, versus homes being costly and having the time requirement.
Like you said, 10k gil is easy to get, so why bother charging it?
Eh.... part of the problem with a live service is that you've got to do some form of cleanup, especially if you have something that isn't designed from the ground up to be always available to the player... so by factoring in a way for the system to remove unused resources (in this case, a long forgotten apartment) it helps make sure that people are actively using or are at least willing to continue to pay for the resource and it better frees up resources for others that want to use them.

AFAIK, SE never actually promised that a player would be able to keep their apartment for forever.