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[Column] Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn: The State of Eorzea's Housing
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Today we’ll be discussing the Great Eorzean Housing Crisis. We’ll be tackling what happened, what went wrong, and what Square Enix is doing to lessen the sting individual housing news has brought.
Read more of Victor Barreiro Jr.'s Final Fantasy XIV: The State of Eorzea's Housing.
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Comments
It is an issue of both price and availability and I don't think simply adding more housing wards will help either issue.
There is a wide disparity between the ultra wealthy of FFXIV and the average player, just like the real world (surprising I know!). They are assuming that because there are mountains of gil in circulation that everyone can afford a house. If this was the thinking then why make FC housing and personal housing so closely priced when one is purchased with pooled resources and the other with personal wealth.
And there are those who believe if you can't afford it, it's because you are simply to lazy to farm I would like to remind them that there are plenty of other gil sinks in the game (materia for Novus, food for Chocobo coloring/leveling, vanity items, minions, etc.) . And I assert that you shouldn't have to do things in A GAME that you may find tedious (SB'ing, farming, and Crafting) for hours a week to enjoy this one aspect of the game.
Even with gil aside, because yes you could scrape together 4+ mil given enough time, it doesn't address the issue of availability and neither will a doubling of the wards. Plenty of the folks on the lodestone (official forums), have done the simple math and that will only add enough plots for less that 5% of the population to have a house.
Are houses vital to gameplay? Depends on your definition, it's not vital to many aspect of the game but if you want a garden and chocobo stable, you need either a FC with a house or a personal house. And your FC house garden is very limited in space that creates a huge bottleneck for large FCs. And they've integrated gardening into many things making it hugely profitable, because supply is artificially restricted by there being so few gardens.
Why are MMO companies so retarded? Why are we getting this limited land thing in a game where housing is instanced? EQ2 had 0 problems to give everyone and their dog all kinds of houses - small, big, large, massive etc. Why is it so diffuclt to make housing not limited? Don't tell me their servers can't take it? It's just sad.
I am almost certain now that all MMO developers are naturally incompetent.
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Agree, eq2 housing is the best instanced housing ever made, rift comes next.
EQ2 gives you a flat or room from birth it's not hard.
I did not like the idea at all,i figured their ideas was to more or less make housing a GUILD idea with no real intention of player's having individual homes...without buying from RMT.
IMO this market is so flooded and SMART team would see the housing part of a game as a good selling point to gain customers and keep old ones.Not only the appeal of attaining a home but then adding content relevant to it such as crafting ect ect.
IMO it always seems to come down to greed and cheapness,not Square but ALL devs,that is why most don't offer any housing or any other content idea that costs money to run.This is an intense market,you want a large chunk opf the pie,wise up and take advantage of it while you can.The housing design is just one area that turned me away form the game as seeing i would not get one for a very long time.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I personally think getting the housing should be more tiered, like EQ2, with extra expenses/money-sinks in the form of decorations, etc. To have housing so restrictive and limited is just lazy/poor design, IMO. It's not like there aren't other examples of housing done much better that could have been drawn from.
In EQ2, you have anything from a small, 2 room ("living room" and "bedroom) apartment, up to ginormous multi-room and mult-floor mansions. They range widely in price, to the extent that players with less money, but whom still want a place to call "home" can afford it (to expand to larger ones later) can do so... while people who have tons of money, or guilds who have pooled together funds, can get the larger ones. Oh, you can also own multiple homes in EQ2. Some examples of what EQ2's player housing allows you to do... and it's been like this for years now.
LoTRO has a nice setup, too. You have neighborhoods, which are instanced, with additional ones spawned as existing ones fill up. Within each neighborhood is a range of homes, from small less-expensive ones, to larger, more expensive ones. Again, it's not prohibitive. I never had a lot of money in LoTRO, and I was still able to afford a smaller home, and decorate it the way I want.
RIFT has a very nice personal housing system, too.
So, yet again, we have Yoshi-P making needlessly restrictive design choices for a widely requested system, despite there being a number of examples of how it can be done in a more inclusive, more expansive, and less prohibitive way. As with other design choices he's made, Yoshi-P has created an unnecessarily limited housing system in ARR... for absolutely no good reason.
What's the definition for "wealthy" in FFXIV, anyway?
Short of a lottery system, there's no realistic way to offer housing with this kind of system without a lot of people being left out for purely economic reasons. Methinks they should have gone with instanced housing, and since inn rooms are already an in-game thing setting up an expanded version with per-player modifications should have been much less painful than trying to roll out a bidding-war-driven limited availability system like they did. IMO they should have gone with customizable inn rooms for personal housing (like a huge number of MMOs already do) and reserved the fancy housing zones for either ultra-wealthy players that just want to sink the gil in an effort to show off, or free companies that can actually make effective use of the extra features.
I have enough gil on hand and with retainers to comfortably afford a medium-sized plot on my server, but since I don't give a crap about the customization of a personal house, I'm not about to sink that kind of gil on a friggin' plot when inn rooms are free .
Good article, Victor, however Patch 2.4 WILL NOT be released around mid-October. My reference, based on FFXIV forum excerpt from: Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XVII Q&A Summary (09/11/2014) [forum link]
"We're planning to begin releasing information on patch 2.4 around Tokyo Game Show," which is around October 17th, "...and we'll continue to release information from that point onward."
Again, the Producers are being mum on release date specifics for Patch 2.4. but they will begin releasing information around October 17th.
I agree! I have been incredibly impressed with SE and how they managed to turn this game around.
But this Whole housing ordeal is just a total farce!
Why is this so hard to accomplish today, when SOE could do this more than 10 years ago already without problems??! /shrug
Agree with all above.
I mean why would SE not release housing for everyone since it's extremly easy to develop and SOE could do it a long time ago with their different engine, server system and everything.
I'm sure they are holding it back simply to screw with people.
We all know why.
They massively screwed up with the 1.0 version of the game, where tons of players had hoarded insane amounts of gil.
They screwed up even more, by letting these players keep their characters and all that gil to transfer over to the 2.0 version of the game, which immediately ruined the entire economy, creating huge inflation from the get go!
They desperately trying to get these people spend that gil, to get it out of the game. Which is simply not working at all. No matter what they have tried.
A lot of these players created their own private FC and bought an FC house for themselves and still have plenty gil left.
And because of these horrible decisions last year, we (the average player) are getting screwed over! /shrug
This would only be valid on the Legacy server where the prices are way higher than normal servers.
SE has statistics on all Gil earned and set different prices per server by using these statistics.
The prices might be lowered when they release more wards in 2.4
They didn't let 1.0 players keep all that gil. They cut everyone's gill down to about 1/10th of what they had in 1.0. Basically, take whatever amount of gil people had in 1.0, and remove a zero. So, if you had 1,000,000 gil when 1.23 went offline, you had 100,000 when your character was brought back for ARR.
So, players did not have all that gil going into ARR.
That said... the housing setup in ARR is pretty awful, and they are way too expensive with too few options.
Bought my small shroud house next to the marketboard on ceourl with zero problems, for 1.68 mil.
Most memorable games: AoC(Tryanny PvP), RIFT, GW, GW2, Ragnarok Online, Aion, FFXI, FFXIV, Secret World, League of Legends (Silver II rank)
My enjoyment of this game is probably known within the confines of the FFXIV forum threads since even before the original was shut down. In those I've noted several things, such as me having several Builders of the Realm and the maxed amount of characters possible at max level in at least one class. Also, I've not been shy in that I've made hundreds of millions of gil in the original, and quite a bit thereafter since 2.0 was released.
That said, this land issue has made me quit the game temporarily based on me not seeing what I liked and believing it was horribly executed. Most of my friends -- who were really looking forward to this -- were ultimately lied to about prices, and the availability issue in addition to making it the same system as Free Company housing was highly disappointing.
I may have been able to cover the bill for out large Free Company housing when it first came out, but when I first logged on and saw the 50,000,000+ medium plots and the like, as well as most of the Free Companies snatching up the small plots (which no one can blame them, honestly), I knew it was just time to take a break from the game, let them iron things out, and if it's viewed as voting with my wallet... Well, more power to me and the situation, I guess.
Hopefully they get their server stuff down and come up with ways that allow players to get their housing. Phased neighborhoods might be interesting, if they could pull that off.
I felt like this housing news was a blow to my expectations as this is what I was waiting on for over a year. Being a 1.0 player and having been sold on the sanboxy aspects that the original game was supposed to bring, it seems like the dream of having my garden patch with chocobo stable is just never going to happen.
However making gil is actually not that hard if you put your mind to it so that's what I am doing now. Crafting my little soul out. XD By the time I can raise enough funds there should be a nice small housing plot available. I've waiting this long a bit longer won't kill me I guess.
I will say I was hoping that personal housing would have it's own wards, maybe in other places like Costa Del Sol for example, or even if they had to go EQ2's way and just have doors which leads to instanced rooms in the cities or something. Like the FFXI mog houses. I think honestly that would have gone over better then this.
But oh well. /shrug
(,,,)=^__^=(,,,)
Something like XI's mog house, or EQ2's basic apt would have been a great "starting point" for players. Each could have their own space to decorate, use as extra storage... and then decide if they want to save up for something bigger or not.
In my opinion, Yoshi-P was very short-sighted in his implementation of housing. It was underwhelming to me from when they first announced and explained the setup.
As it stands, I think XI's mog houses were far more interestingly and creatively implemented than XIV's version. Each decoration having some amount of storage capacity, the elemental influence which would impact a player's gameplay in some useful way (such as gardening success, xp, etc), quests bestowed by your moogle, items being found, and so on and so on. In ARR, something like elemental influence is all but ignored.
Thanks for the heads-up. This was written before that tidbit of info came out, so I appreciate the help collating the info.
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If really find it hard to believe it is a server issue that they cannot add more housing. We are not in the dark ages anymore, one server should be more than enough to handle housing for anyone. If it is truly a server limit than they coded very badly which there is no excuse for such.
I played their prior FF game, but never started XIV because from the start it has been the biggest fubar in the MMO space.
I don't find it that hard to believe. Has no one noticed how instanced this game is? Loading screens everywhere, smallish zones, invisible barriers... It's the game engine. It can't handle shit.
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