Even though I'm trying to keep some optimism about the situation, I want to throw out here that the talk of huge FCs being the bad guys is kinda baseless.
A few days ago, I was speaking to someone who is a member of an FC that has almost 400 people in it, with at least ~100 those 100% active, likely more; at the time, I didn't ask for exact numbers, because I didn't care. I looked at their FC on the Lodestone, and I knew how many active Binding Coil groups they had. As an FC, over the past few months, they only pulled together just over 30m gil - I don't think they played the markets the way Ashren and his group did before they crashed.
Sadly, I've been watching the markets for the past week or so, working on flipping Philosophies for gil, and the market is steadily getting lower as more people reach fifty, grind dungeons or grind out gathering professions and sell the materials which was the other profitable market I was watching. I'm guessing more and more people were doing such things in anticipation of getting FC housing and getting furniture made.
I think there were a few major flaws in how Squeenix came to their numbers.
The largest, most glaring one in the hours before the servers came down for maintenance is that I don't think they did another huge purge of gil sellers and bots before running their final math crunches to create the numbers they posted. I had a very hard time maintaining any sort of conversation in tells tonight because every third or fourth tell seemed to be a damn gil seller offering me a Christmas special; the frequency has nearly tripled, it feels, since the patch notes were posted. It's like these "companies" have been sitting on this gil just waiting for these metrics to be announced so they could try and lure the desperate into purchasing their wares - if an FC had everyone buy just a little bit of gil, it might be harder to trace, right? *rolls eyes*
I also think their maths may have been off in general. I'm hoping it wasn't horridly basic, such as flat out amount of gil in circulation/active accounts=average amount of gil player possesses. This doesn't factor in players who may have quit the game but had bought larger chunks of time, or forgot to cancel their subscriptions, etcetera, and aren't actually part of the active population. As mentioned before, if they didn't do a massive bot/gil seller purge, this means the amount of gil in circulation was inflated to begin with, and it also gives skew to the number of active players, because they're not really players. Hell, even if their maths weren't as basic as that, there's a chance they didn't look at these things and still ended up with skewed numbers!
Jokingly, I've been saying they did their maths in Yen, and if they'd done it in USD, we'd all be fine. Oddly, someone challenged me to give them actual numbers in this, and the results were kinda disturbing. If Squeenix had used USD for their housing cost maths instead of Yen, the cheapest small house would start at 194,460 gil while the most expensive large house would start at 3,038,438 gil. With a competitive auction system, these prices would be great, and we'd still see a ton of gil drain out of the economy because people would be fighting over houses, and it would be glorious and the way the Twelve intended. *coughs* >.>
That aside, I do think they messed up somewhere in their economic equations. If even the Japanese servers are bitching, they did something wrong, and they're going to realise it sooner or later. Especially when people just don't use the one thing they've put the most effort into the past few months (okay, it might not be the one thing, but it seems to me like they've dumped a ton of time and effort into the housing zones).
As much as I'd like to think the changes to the various quests and such are going to give us more gil...I don't seeing it being enough to handle these costs for FCs. Not for casual FCs, at least, and maybe not even for hardcore FCs without a lot more work than they already do. It will help, sure, but I doubt it will be enough to go from being able to make a couple million in a few months to tens or hundreds of millions.
Ultimately, I hope they adjust the pricing of the plots. Either by just making them more affordable, or by going to a staggered system like Kieron suggested. My FC is still going to actively work on making money, even though currently there are only a few of us, with the idea that we'll look at where the fund is at when the 90 day decay marker hits; hopefully, we can look at it sooner because Squeenix realises it's mistake and corrects it.
A few days ago, I was speaking to someone who is a member of an FC that has almost 400 people in it, with at least ~100 those 100% active, likely more; at the time, I didn't ask for exact numbers, because I didn't care. I looked at their FC on the Lodestone, and I knew how many active Binding Coil groups they had. As an FC, over the past few months, they only pulled together just over 30m gil - I don't think they played the markets the way Ashren and his group did before they crashed.
Sadly, I've been watching the markets for the past week or so, working on flipping Philosophies for gil, and the market is steadily getting lower as more people reach fifty, grind dungeons or grind out gathering professions and sell the materials which was the other profitable market I was watching. I'm guessing more and more people were doing such things in anticipation of getting FC housing and getting furniture made.
I think there were a few major flaws in how Squeenix came to their numbers.
The largest, most glaring one in the hours before the servers came down for maintenance is that I don't think they did another huge purge of gil sellers and bots before running their final math crunches to create the numbers they posted. I had a very hard time maintaining any sort of conversation in tells tonight because every third or fourth tell seemed to be a damn gil seller offering me a Christmas special; the frequency has nearly tripled, it feels, since the patch notes were posted. It's like these "companies" have been sitting on this gil just waiting for these metrics to be announced so they could try and lure the desperate into purchasing their wares - if an FC had everyone buy just a little bit of gil, it might be harder to trace, right? *rolls eyes*
I also think their maths may have been off in general. I'm hoping it wasn't horridly basic, such as flat out amount of gil in circulation/active accounts=average amount of gil player possesses. This doesn't factor in players who may have quit the game but had bought larger chunks of time, or forgot to cancel their subscriptions, etcetera, and aren't actually part of the active population. As mentioned before, if they didn't do a massive bot/gil seller purge, this means the amount of gil in circulation was inflated to begin with, and it also gives skew to the number of active players, because they're not really players. Hell, even if their maths weren't as basic as that, there's a chance they didn't look at these things and still ended up with skewed numbers!
Jokingly, I've been saying they did their maths in Yen, and if they'd done it in USD, we'd all be fine. Oddly, someone challenged me to give them actual numbers in this, and the results were kinda disturbing. If Squeenix had used USD for their housing cost maths instead of Yen, the cheapest small house would start at 194,460 gil while the most expensive large house would start at 3,038,438 gil. With a competitive auction system, these prices would be great, and we'd still see a ton of gil drain out of the economy because people would be fighting over houses, and it would be glorious and the way the Twelve intended. *coughs* >.>
That aside, I do think they messed up somewhere in their economic equations. If even the Japanese servers are bitching, they did something wrong, and they're going to realise it sooner or later. Especially when people just don't use the one thing they've put the most effort into the past few months (okay, it might not be the one thing, but it seems to me like they've dumped a ton of time and effort into the housing zones).
(12-16-2013, 03:26 AM)Kieron Lohengrin Wrote: Squeenix's mistake was gating all the cost in the initial land purchase. They should've staggered it out for QoL services once you got your land - instead of making it a flat 200mil for the lot, they should've made it 50 mil for the lot, 50 mil for airship garage, 50 mil for retainer / market board / GC / teleport / NPC stores accessibility, and so on.I do like that idea better. Staggering out the costs a bit more, though 50m for each service is a bit much. General staggering would have been a much better idea overall, rather than tossing all of the money down on the lot from go. It would have given FCs more options about how to handle the situation rather than making us have to sit here and go "Okay, so how do we come up with these millions?" and figure out a timeline that's much longer than any of us expected.
As much as I'd like to think the changes to the various quests and such are going to give us more gil...I don't seeing it being enough to handle these costs for FCs. Not for casual FCs, at least, and maybe not even for hardcore FCs without a lot more work than they already do. It will help, sure, but I doubt it will be enough to go from being able to make a couple million in a few months to tens or hundreds of millions.
Ultimately, I hope they adjust the pricing of the plots. Either by just making them more affordable, or by going to a staggered system like Kieron suggested. My FC is still going to actively work on making money, even though currently there are only a few of us, with the idea that we'll look at where the fund is at when the 90 day decay marker hits; hopefully, we can look at it sooner because Squeenix realises it's mistake and corrects it.