Community is amazing especially the PS4 players, the world is gorgeous, the content additions remind me of the way Trion use to update Rift, The crafting is creative.
That being said the mechanics just do not work for me, maybe I am just getting too old, but it just does not flow naturally for me.
Indeed, they could have made the separate housing districts added -- the subplots -- able to be claimed through real hard work either through challenges or time rather than get home from work only to feel like one is going back to it by making virtual money after making real.
This would instantly bring down the amount of houses needed as it has loft requirements. But it could be a different path to owning a house in addition to simply paying if you don't want to work for it. Heck, they could've even had some type of phasing technology or found something similar, much like how WoW is giving everyone their own garrison so long as their character is level 90 and has the expansion. Being two different games, it's obviously not the same... but the idea is, and they could've come up with better solutions themselves.
In fact, one could go as far as to say that simply paying gil is too easy; you are either the 1% or not when it comes to most aspects of it. The 1% has to do nothing -- I had hundreds of millions of gil going into 2.0 even with the 90% reduction due to multiple characters and being a part of gil making linkshells. I've made thrice that easily since due to having everything maxed when the game started on multiple characters, having two accounts, and obtaining extra retainers. To add to this, I did practically no work and made anywhere between 2.5-5 million nightly mainly do to complex macros and a check list of materials I needed to stock once a month.
I did not earn my house; I did not earn my FC's house(s). I paid for them in full, but I did nothing compared to the hard work others are doing just to scrounge by. Friends who spent 7 hours farming a day just to sell things that may net them 100,000 gil in a few day's time, if the market is favorable. Only to see it vanish instantly due to other expenses. This represented far too much of real life to be a fantasy game or an MMO that should be (in my opinion) about entertainment and forgetting this 99% or whatever nonsense -- at least when it comes to a big feature within the game.
This also brings about problems with older servers that should never have been. Once servers were merged and transfers became open, it's safe to assume that economies have matured on most all realms. Every server has their 1%, but on older servers prices are much higher than on newer ones. Which means people have to work twice or even three times as hard. Fine for the first round, perhaps. But there were many accounts -- far before even alpha -- where the Producer Director said that the cost of a house will be no more than what you can make on two play throughs of the entire storyline. I don't know about you, but I've never made tens and tens of millions of gil by collecting storyline only quest rewards. He reaffirmed this multiple times, even up to the launch.
In addition to that, he again confirmed that prices will be much lower than Free Company housing once Free Company housing was introduced and said that we should all "please look forward to it". Now his latest quote is that he was take out of context or that there was a miscommunication in translation. This is an insult of the player base's intelligence, especially for those of us who have read every. single. detail. about the game's production starting from when the new team took over in 1.0 and participated in forum discussion and voted on what we'd like to see in 2.0.
But I digress, the way they handled the housing issue is deplorable and counter intuitive to their overall goal of being an accessible and entertaining game. Gil does not equal challenge, and vasts sums of it is simply an annoyance when most people have to do insane amounts of work while the 1% just sit back and snicker. I personally bought several dozen rooms for friends in our mansion; I was saying "oh yeah, I have all these quotes and such, Yoshi-P, man... making the dream game, the Final Fantasy we deserve!" I made them all of their furniture. But now my main RP partner has quit, most of my friends have, and I'm left only with remember of the myriad of "pretty talk" that was given just to get people interested.
It really sounds like you need some perspective.
I was wondering why the housing situation on your server is the way it is. But soon it dawned on me: you're a legacy player on a legacy server. Moreover, you were rich coming on to 2.0 and are much richer today.
Legacy servers are interesting (read: a mess) because the sheer amount of gil in the circulation on those servers is, frankly, massive. While the amount of gil entering the circulation is equal to that of non-legacy servers, the amount you started with is on a completely different level.
This taken into consideration, it should be in SE's (and the game's) best interests to find a way to remove as much from that gil bloat as possible. Frankly speaking, housing is the gil sink harnessed for this very purpose. The fact is that SE needed a massive gil sink for legacy players like you. That gil sink is the housing system.
Is this fair? Maybe not. Yet is it fair that legacy players get to start with hundreds of millions of gil while new players joining legacy players can have none of that, and most likely never will? It isn't fair, but any new player joining a legacy server should have figured out the repercussions of joining a legacy server in the first place.
Indeed, as long as this game were to simply have features that use gil as a currency, new players on legacy servers would be screwed on a certain level (perhaps permanently). Meanwhile, if gil wasn't used as a currency then all the hundreds of million of gil the legacy players started with would be useless. I wonder what the legacy players would have liked of that. SE would have focused on the new player experience over legacy player experience (you can insert entitlement comment here). Many legacy players did justify them playing a game that is so bad it's almost unconceivable as trying to "get ahead" in 2.0.
In the end the legacy servers are a mess. SE had no way to solve the legacy issue in a way that wouldn't have inconvenienced somebody. Frankly this was pretty obvious a year+ ago. They decided to tackle the gil issue by making houses cost gil. Unfair to new players, but helps to solve the issue more or less effectively. Yet, housing is a rather harmless feature for that purpose. It's vanity at best, there's not much utility and it's not much more than a e-peen stroker at the very core.
Fast forward to the new servers (where vast majority of the playerbase plays). The plots do sell, but not so fast that somebody couldn't grab a plot for themselves, as long as they had the minimum ~5m gil. Making gil is extremely easy. I've made 4,5mil so far, with 1,5m of that in the past few weeks. I play few hours a day; sometimes I don't play at all. In total I have probably 5 months of playtime under my belt out of the year the service has been live. On my server making money takes time, "real hard work", and in fact takes some skill. Indeed, some players find themselves "grinding 7 hours a day for 100k" while some others, like me, would laugh at such measly profits. This is without all crafters at lvl50, much less any craft at even the stage I could make two star stuff. Granted, in your case you have no real experience of what it takes to work for money in this game on a level that most of us do it. You only have second-hand experience of players that either seem to have made a grave mistake by joining the legacy servers where people sport hundreds of millions of gil the moment they log in at the start of 2.0, or they really suck at making money efficiently (which is funny considering you're acting as if making money takes no skill).
I guess the lesson to be learned here is that a "normal" ARR player can keep laughing at the mess that the legacy servers are while working on a house of their own which takes some time and hard work but not extraordinary amounts that would make housing only a feature for the 1%.
In my opinion legacy players should have been given only a title and a fancy hat in 2.0, not all the gil and levels. Of course the sh*tstorm would have been amazing to watch too.
Using LOL is like saying "my argument sucks but I still want to disagree".
Comments
Community is amazing especially the PS4 players, the world is gorgeous, the content additions remind me of the way Trion use to update Rift, The crafting is creative.
That being said the mechanics just do not work for me, maybe I am just getting too old, but it just does not flow naturally for me.
It really sounds like you need some perspective.
I was wondering why the housing situation on your server is the way it is. But soon it dawned on me: you're a legacy player on a legacy server. Moreover, you were rich coming on to 2.0 and are much richer today.
Legacy servers are interesting (read: a mess) because the sheer amount of gil in the circulation on those servers is, frankly, massive. While the amount of gil entering the circulation is equal to that of non-legacy servers, the amount you started with is on a completely different level.
This taken into consideration, it should be in SE's (and the game's) best interests to find a way to remove as much from that gil bloat as possible. Frankly speaking, housing is the gil sink harnessed for this very purpose. The fact is that SE needed a massive gil sink for legacy players like you. That gil sink is the housing system.
Is this fair? Maybe not. Yet is it fair that legacy players get to start with hundreds of millions of gil while new players joining legacy players can have none of that, and most likely never will? It isn't fair, but any new player joining a legacy server should have figured out the repercussions of joining a legacy server in the first place.
Indeed, as long as this game were to simply have features that use gil as a currency, new players on legacy servers would be screwed on a certain level (perhaps permanently). Meanwhile, if gil wasn't used as a currency then all the hundreds of million of gil the legacy players started with would be useless. I wonder what the legacy players would have liked of that. SE would have focused on the new player experience over legacy player experience (you can insert entitlement comment here). Many legacy players did justify them playing a game that is so bad it's almost unconceivable as trying to "get ahead" in 2.0.
In the end the legacy servers are a mess. SE had no way to solve the legacy issue in a way that wouldn't have inconvenienced somebody. Frankly this was pretty obvious a year+ ago. They decided to tackle the gil issue by making houses cost gil. Unfair to new players, but helps to solve the issue more or less effectively. Yet, housing is a rather harmless feature for that purpose. It's vanity at best, there's not much utility and it's not much more than a e-peen stroker at the very core.
Fast forward to the new servers (where vast majority of the playerbase plays). The plots do sell, but not so fast that somebody couldn't grab a plot for themselves, as long as they had the minimum ~5m gil. Making gil is extremely easy. I've made 4,5mil so far, with 1,5m of that in the past few weeks. I play few hours a day; sometimes I don't play at all. In total I have probably 5 months of playtime under my belt out of the year the service has been live. On my server making money takes time, "real hard work", and in fact takes some skill. Indeed, some players find themselves "grinding 7 hours a day for 100k" while some others, like me, would laugh at such measly profits. This is without all crafters at lvl50, much less any craft at even the stage I could make two star stuff. Granted, in your case you have no real experience of what it takes to work for money in this game on a level that most of us do it. You only have second-hand experience of players that either seem to have made a grave mistake by joining the legacy servers where people sport hundreds of millions of gil the moment they log in at the start of 2.0, or they really suck at making money efficiently (which is funny considering you're acting as if making money takes no skill).
I guess the lesson to be learned here is that a "normal" ARR player can keep laughing at the mess that the legacy servers are while working on a house of their own which takes some time and hard work but not extraordinary amounts that would make housing only a feature for the 1%.
In my opinion legacy players should have been given only a title and a fancy hat in 2.0, not all the gil and levels. Of course the sh*tstorm would have been amazing to watch too.