Instanced Housing: A Boon For Players And Profits Both

[Angellos]

Imagine the following scenario if you will:

Throughout the game there are housing wards that can be found: The Lavender Beds, The Mists, The Goblet, The Empyreum, Shirogane. However, it does not have to stop there. With instanced housing, you can introduce new housing wards easily: Amaurot, Sharlayan, Garlemald, Ala Mhigo, Thavnair, so on and so forth.

How does any of this profit the company? It also allows for the introduction of special homes. Imagine players being able to purchase special housing vouchers off of the mogstation: $25-$35 to purchase special housing such as a Sky Pirate Airship, a pirate ship, an Amaurot suite, a Crystarium home: A fae dwelling on the first.

What more? You could offer players special 'item limit increase keys' on the mogstation, that increases their housing item limit by 50 and 100 respectively.

This will generate a MASSIVE amount of income for the company, as well as giving players a tremendous amount of options for housing.

"But what about my outdoor decorations?"

How it would work:

You would click on the placard outside of the house you want to go to. The placard would then bring up a list of everyone who owns a house at that plot. You can see the house greeting/name from this placard. Simply cick on your friend's name to enter the plot. Tada! Outdoor decorations. Just change the front door to open when (any) player clicks on it and click it again to close it.

It is senseless to just keep adding wards and it seems like more trouble than it's worth. With instanced housing, everyone can get a home. Furthermore, it creates a much needed gil sink for players to spend their gil on. The more gil players are spending, the more they are selling, the more it evens out prices on the marketboard: Crafters will have lots of ways to make gil again with the demand of housing items.

This system CAN work for both the players and for the company. With the revenue instanced housing can generate through the mogstation, the company would have more than enough funds to upgrade their hardware to help support the system in the future.

The lottery has already failed. It's time for instanced housing.

P.S. Please add the ability to add decorating privilege's to another player for free company rooms and apartments.

[PredatoryCatgirl]

RMT for housing is bad when players do it. SE doing it won't make it any better.

[Angellos]

RMT for housing is bad when players do it. SE doing it won't make it any better.

Every other game does it, and it works out VERY WELL for everyone involved, actually. From EverQuest II, to Elder Scrolls Online: Their housing is amazing and they sell special homes on their stores - and item limit extenders.

You can still of course buy plenty of houses in game with in game currency if you're short on funds IRL. I'm not saying to make every house that way, just special houses. Something to save for in the future.

The reason why players selling houses via RMT is so awful, is because it's for absolutely INSANE PRICES (Like $500 IRL dollars.) It takes housing away from people who tried to obtain it the right way, and that money isn't going to the company. It's comparing apples and oranges here.

Offering special houses on the mogstation: Every player has the opportunity to buy one for a reasonable price, the company gets the money so that they can invest in upgrading current and future systems/hardware, and it takes nothing away from anyone else. It doesn't rob anyone else of the opportunity to get that house. They're not remotely the same thing.

[Oizen]

I mean if more people had access to housing, more people would likely purchase furniture from the mog station.

Hire me Yoshi p

[Seger]

I would 100% pay fat cash for a legal way to buy houses in this game.

[Shibi]

Every other game does it, and it works out VERY WELL for everyone involved, actually. From EverQuest II, to Elder Scrolls Online: Their housing is amazing and they sell special homes on their stores - and item limit extenders.

But both of those are dead games.

In fact, as I played EQ2, it started going downhill once that cash shop really started to be populated with houses and the like by SOE.

Maybe we should be careful what we wish for. US$50 houses in Mogstation and would the rush for money make the game die off like EQ2, Rift and others that went that route?

Money is a drug to corporations, and they would plow all their resources into milking $50 houses and put zero resources to new content.

[Angellos]

The game isn't dead because they offered houses on their store. EverQuest II didn't take off because they rushed to try and finish it before World of Warcraft dropped - and their launch wasn't great because of it. So everyone had gone to WoW. Then after SOE sold the title to Daybreak, that did it in for good. Elder Scrolls online was a hot mess when it first launched, which lead to a lot of people not caring for it: And the models and physics are a bit dated. Yet, that game didn't hit mega popularity because a lot of people don't like real time aim-based combat with a reticle. They find it very tiring, and not very fun. (That and you have to have a sub just to get a crafting bag, which means your bags fill up before you finish one dungeon.) There's a lot of reasons why those games failed: but none of it has to do with having houses on their store.

Oh, and I didn't say to charge $50.

EverQuest II charged about $20-$25 for their houses and they were hot sellers. No one quit playing EverQuest II because they had housing options. (Because they had LOTS of housing items for in game currency.)

"I'm gonna quit this game because they have extra things on the cash shop that don't give me an advantage over anyone else at all and are purely cosmetic." - Said no gamer ever.

[Sindele]

Instanced housing doesn't solve the problem of needing servers to run the houses on. Several servers have reached housing instance capacity during 6.0 and 6.1 - it's really not a joyous experience to be stuck outside your house trying to enter it and just kinda hoping that you manage to get in before someone else gets into theirs.

You can't provide an uncapped supply if you can't even handle your current demand.

[Avoidy]

I love the idea of instanced housing. I also love the idea of instanced housing in loads of different zones.
But the idea of selling that solution to players... I don't know, dude. Creating a bad (housing) system and then selling players a solution to it is why I left garbage freetoplay games behind. We already pay a monthly sub. Every live letter they talk about how successful this game is and brag about its player count. Square gets enough money from its ff14 players as it is. They should just fix the housing that they advertised without selling the solution to us imo.

Saddest part is, I know it would sell well if they implemented it too. People just want a house that badly. Hell, I'm fundamentally against it on principle but I know if it only cost like 5 bucks or something, I'd be tempted as hell. I hate admitting it but I've gotta be honest.

[Besame]

IMO, paying for something that has been touted as "included" in game for yrs is not smart. I'd suggest Mr. Yoshi change wigs and get with the times, toss the bandaids and make housing better for real.