tehkei wrote: the biggest dissappointment is Yoshi lying about prices being lower than FC houses.
While I know everybody is ripping on Yoshi for this, and believe me I in no way agree with the mess that personal housing has turned into, I think everybody beating on about this one particular point exclusively is wrong.
Firstly, you have to remember that this statement was made back when the FC housing prices were *extremely* high: 300-600 million gil for a large house. His statement that personal houses would be cheaper than FC houses was in the context of these values.
Secondly, that statement was made back when Patch 2.1 was released. That was mid-December, nine months ago. Since then, gil has comparatively gotten extremely easy to come by. The addition of things like treasure maps, duty roulettes, trial bonuses, has made a large influx of gil on the market, compounded over the span of 9 months: Inflation. Even your average casual runs around with a hell of a lot more gil than they once did by simply selling stuff on the ward.
When you take inflation into account, these houses are indeed much more affordable than FC houses once were.
Anyhow.
The personal housing system does indeed seem to be a "last ditch effort". It feels like they intended for something better, but just couldn't make it work. It's already being added at the very end of this patch cycle when it was scheduled for over a whole major patch ago. They reached as far as it can go without holding back other content, and said: oh well, just flip the switch that lets single people buy houses - 5 minute change.
With the system they're probably stuck with, they likely didn't have much choice other than to make the FC and Personal house prices the same. You're paying for exactly the same thing, why wouldn't it be the same price? What sense would it make for a Medium House in Plot 11 cost 1/4 of the price simply because only a single person is paying for it?
I personally have no problem with the houses needing a moderate amount of effort to obtain them. Reasonable goals are worth striving for and can make the accomplishment feel worthwhile. I know everybody seems to feel like they were entitled to houses as some kind of basic right, but that's what the Inn rooms and Private Chambers were for.
That said, expecting a single person to cough up 30+ million gil isn't what I'd call reasonable. I would have personally pegged the prices at something like 1 mil for a small, 10 mil for a medium, and 50 mil for a large mansion (large are too big for one person really anyway, it's for the crazies with too much gil).
What I do have a problem though with is the insanely small number of wards. There are tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of players per server who will, either immediately or eventually, want a house. So they give us about 500 plots to share between everyone. To my knowledge, as of this morning, long before 90% of the server population has gotten to work (never mind returned from it), the majority of these plots are now gone. Already.
It's not enough, and frankly, I dont think doubling the number of wards is enough either. We all knew it would be like that as soon as they explained how they wanted to do housing. The only answer was for them to instance off the personal housing wards, aaaaand.... they didn't. This is a problem that they may not ever be able to fix now that they've released it, constantly adding new wards as they fill like some kind of band aid.
I also don't like the lack of any features that make the housing unique in any way whatsoever. It's literally just an FC house for one person. People have technically been able to do this for months by just ranking up a solo FC. We were supposed to get granular controls, set who can and can't enter your house or edit the furniture. What about co-ownership? They have a marriage system being added in about a month, why can't you co-buy, co-own, or otherwise share a house? Why is there no way for friends or linkshells to easily buy houses located together as neighbours? This is something instancing was desperately needed for.
No, prices aren't the problem here. Yoshi "lying" about the prices being cheaper than FC houses are the least of everyone's problems. The real problem is the extremely half-assed implementation on something we've been waiting NINE MONTHS for.
SE were quiet about personal housing for months, so we were all suspicious something was up, especially as the patch date drew near and we hadn't heard anything about it. The real failing here is not informing us. I know people would have been disappointed if you said "hey, look, its turning out to be too hard to do those things we promised, we're going to have to scale it back" -- but that would have been a hell of a lot more controllable than the incredible meltdown they've caused today.
/TL;DR:Ketpost.
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im aweful
