Gil and 2.1Follow

I feel really torn on this subject...on one hand I feel bad for people who play the game they way they want and don't have a lot of gil so they are completely shut out from housing. They have no chance of ever amassing enough gil to acquire a house as it currently stands. I get this fustration because personal housing is something I'm very interested in...I like having my own space in an MMO and being able to upgrade it etc is fun for me and helps in the immersion of the game.

So on one hand I get why everyone is so upset about the housing costs. I want to be able to experence this content if I choose too.

On the other hand though I don't get why everyone feels that they should have access to everything in game right away.
This is only free company housing and not personal for all we know (or at least all I know about this) the personal housing could be released and be 500k for a plot. Is everyone still upset then? Or is the issue really that we just can't have a house yet? My free company is a legacy FC (I played 1.0 but not long so I'm fresh since ARR release) and we could afford a house but are waiting because there is no point yet.

Is it not allowed that SE would add content that is very difficult to achieve unless you are a hardcore player? Is that wrong? I like having long term goals I have no need to buy a house today when I have no intention of leaving the game for a long time.

Most of us played FFXI I played for a very very long time but I never ever even got close to getting a relic weapon, it was always a goal that I would get to one day. Why is it that we think in an MMO we should have everything right away?

My biggest complaint about FFXIV is that its too easy (I don't mean the fights specifically because some are very challenging) I mean is everything is easy. Almost everyone I see on my servier has the same gear which is mostly BiS because even being a casual its not hard to get (even PUG coil groups can do Turn 1-3) and even running WP can get you myth to get 1 piece of i90 a week more or less.

Does not having a house ruin the game for you guys or something? We didn't have houses in 2.0 and the game was fun then how has it changed now that housing is out there?
In terms of gil making...I try to sympathize with people but in my experience the people who don't ever have gil in my LS's are the people who teleport everywhere (even short runs from Grid to fallground etc etc) they buy HQ gear for each level and they buy almost everything off MB. (not saying this is bad just a different playstyle). The people with gil in my LS' are the people who take the time to earn it...which it is not that difficult to earn gil even if its just running leves, treasure hunting, farming etc etc.

I don't understand why we are expected to be given gil for doing everything in game...and why should the people who take time to earn gil not be rewarded for it?

I do agree however that the market is certainly in a bad way atm ...the problem to me isn't housing alone its that at lvl 50 there is basically nothing you need the mb for except for maybe food. There is no real gear that is useful that can be crafted.

I have 2 DoW classes at level 50 and 3 DoH and 1 DoL at level 50 (I play a few hours 2-3 a night but I don't waste much time online I log in and accomplish something) My DoW have zero crafted items on them both are i80+.

In FFXI because we had to party up we had to always keep up on gear etc because we'd have been labelled as a gimp and not get invites in FFXIV...DF eliminates that...I can show up to a dungeon in my bathing suit and nobody says eff all if we don't wipe.

I kinda went off on a tangent there (the side effects of typing a post while at work) but thats my thoughts on it...

Update: The item I got from a map three days ago that was selling on the lower end for 140k is now selling for 70k... I had to undercut YET AGAIN in an effort to move mine...

The item had sold for around 170k as of four days ago... so the value of that one thing has plummeted by way more than half since then, and it's still falling...

This is why housing is such a mess. The more time passes, the more expensive it's getting, despite how much SE has lowered prices.

You are not a large enough sample size.

As much as I hate to back ****** up while he's being such an ***... until today I've farmed a Pieste map within 5 minutes every time and a map of some sort by the second node every time. However, today I spent an hour mining for one and it just wasn't happening so I gave up until tomorrow.

Content players can't voluntarily access is a bad thing. Everyone pays their sub fees. As such, it's not unreasonable to expect that part of their contribution goes toward the creation of all content. As an alternative, it sure would be nice to have a tiered sub system where you could check off all the parts of the game you'd like to play and if you don't pay for that particular section, you can't access it. I know straight up I'd uncheck BC, CT, Housing, and PvP to either show disinterest or no confidence in their current iterations. On the other hand, SE would also know my interest lies in open world content, crafting, stories/questing, and to a lesser degree, dungeons. This'll never happen, of course, but it sure would give SE an idea of the game points players want and enjoy as well as cluing them in on what's failing. Just pulling server data can be a bit deceptive even though it can be a useful tool.

But in the case of housing, it can have its hardcore elements, but the problem here is that it lies in the accessibility. I'd argue all land should've been the smallest from the start, but with room to grow and expand based on the owning group's willingness to contribute to such. The houses could grow wider and taller as a result, culminating in the mansions I'm sure a lot aspired to and hoped for. It would take time. It would take money. Certain pieces would take the combat efforts to attain. In the end, we got what we got, though, with perhaps the best reasoning for it being their servers suck. I'm sure the selective sub model would start looking more appealing to people now, as outright quitting doesn't really tell SE, or any MMO dev, much.

Basically, if you're hardcore about something, it should be more about milking every single drop you can out of the content. Not just getting in line and having the patience to milk the cow. People wanted to have fun on Dec 14, not March 14.

Ya, the other day I harvested 150~ rosewood logs before I finally found a peisteskin map. That's about 36 nodes before it popped.

So, I came back after a week of visiting family, and the prices on the items I craft/sell for profit have dropped to close to half of their price (and almost no margin). No idea how I'm gonna make any money in this deflationary economy.

At least shards are cheap for now. I made sure to stock up.

Again, that's just you not liking the requirements. It has nothing to do with being good or bad design. The devs wanted players to have to work to get housing. You don't like how much work it takes, that doesn't mean the design is bad, it means that you're reaction to it is. Seeing as how you didn't understand my first post (as evidenced by your misguided response) I don't expect you to understand this one either.

Exactly.

I love FFXIV, and I think the world of this dev team, but the housing system (with prices as they are) is VERY bad game design.

And again, you fail to grasp the counter point that everyone else is making. So when you can figure out exactly what that point is, feel free to come back and try to rebuke it. Your point is so unbelievably close-minded and overly literal that it pretty much defeats itself. Literally any content in any game ever is accessible to everyone if they play the game enough, that doesn't mean that it's good game design or truly something that the average player will ever achieve. Making something challenging to achieve is awesome. Making it nothing but a seemingly endless monetary grind, especially when it was repeatedly marketed as something that casual players would be able to enjoy when released, is just cruel and poor implementation.

Is it accessible to everyone? At this point in the game, absolutely not. The proof is as simple as taking a stroll through the housing wards on every server. If it was accessible to everyone, there would be more than 3-4 plots purchased on each server. Eventually it might become accessible to everyone, given enough time passing and players accumulating enough gil, but currently it's accessible to very few.

False. Prices were declining a bit, sure... that's to be expected as more people max various crafting and gathering jobs. But the market wasn't in free fall because there really wasn't anything big that everyone wanted to spend money on. Sure, some people spent money on crafted gear, but honestly, that wasn't a priority for most people because of what you can get as loot in dungeons.

Then housing came along... and suddenly, everyone starts saving. Everyone starts farming. Everyone starts crafting. Everyone starts digging up maps. Etc. The rate at which the economy has plummeted since the patch absolutely dwarfs the rate of its decline before the patch... it's not even close.

If you want to insist the economy was in free fall before the patch, then that's fine... but we need to invent a new term to correctly describe the relative change post-patch. How about, "light-speed travel into a black hole."

And yes, the housing system is BAD game design, and not just in one way. The mere fact that housing is actually more expensive NOW than at its release shows just how poorly this content was implemented.

EDIT: I said this earlier, but the real tragedy is that housing should be fueling the economy, not suffocating it. If housing were made more accessible, then SE could create all kinds of furnishings, accessories and sub-systems that would reward farmers/crafters/gatherers and stimulate economic growth. The way it is now, you've got all of this awesome content potential that's completely walled off to the vast majority of the playerbase... and because the economy is sinking so much faster than SE is lowering prices, that wall is only getting bigger, and the content is only becoming less accessible.

It's not just bad design, it's shockingly bad design.

Edited, Jan 4th 2014 11:13pm by Thayos

You have a very warped opinion of your own and everyone else's points. No, the economy was absolutely not in free fall prior to 2.1. I played the market boards on a daily basis, and could sell almost anything I listed without having to undercut others 10x a day. Prior to 2.1, I could sell crystals for 100-200g each consistently. Post 2.1, within like 2 DAYS of the patch, crystal prices plummeted to under 20g. Now, I can't even sell raw materials, the most useful items to any crafter as well. I've had to repeatedly undercut every single day on almost every single thing I try to sell. That never happened before. The economy tanking is directly related to the housing prices, and if you're too oblivious to see that, there's really no reason to continue this discussion.