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(05-03-2014, 05:15 AM)synaesthetic Wrote: I don't understand why you have to be level 50 and reach a GC rank to buy a house. Are all the normal people in Eorzea homeless? Why can only demigod badasses buy a friggin' house?Probably too much. Â From what I understand, personal housing isn't going to be the open-world housing we already have (which I kind of liked), but more like a tenement space like it was in FFXI. Â It's also horrendously expensive for something you can't even use on your alts.
Also yeah it's really expensive... those price ranges should have been the ranges for free company housing, with the largest FC houses topping out around two or three million.
I'm basically of the opinion that everyone ought to simply get a basic starter house automatically, right from the start, right at level one. If you want bigger and better houses, then you'll have to pay. Or raid. Or do quests. Or engage in the content in another way.
I'm fortunate in that I don't really care as much about housing as I used to, so this doesn't bother me so much, but it's still pretty silly. I just really don't get why Square keeps operating out of the How to Build an MMORPG, 2006 Edition.
As to the post above, the weird thing is, Final Fantasy XI had free, personal housing for each character in 2004. Â Which means they essentially decided not to go that way this time through. Â That seems strange to me, functionally, since Square is supposed to make more money allocating us 7 more slots for alts per server. Â Not only that, but they've made sure it's almost impossible to start an alt (due to server restrictions), it's ridiculously difficult to operate one (almost nothing is shared between characters, including friends' lists if I understand it correctly), and it honestly isn't necessary to have one (since all characters can be any class they want).
You'd think they'd want people to pay those couple extra dollars a month. Â I'm about to reduce back to the economy package simply because it's too hard to make an alt and not necessarily beneficial to keep one.
I'm not as big on the concept of player housing and, if I'm going to be honest, I'm actually not happy with ANYONE's housing options for characters. Â I'm an architectural designer by trade. Â The idea of us all having to get our own personal spaces in the suburbs that none of the NPCs seem to be able to own is very eerie to me. Â Why can't I, as a character, have a rundown studio space above a bar? Â Or live in a high-rise penthouse once I have a ton of money? Â Or make a hovel in a sewer? Â Why do games, where this kind of thing just requires a little extra programming (I could generate five apartment-style layouts for the game in a month in Max, and I'm not even a game designer).
More than that, what's the point of having player housing? Â To store stuff? Â To get people together in your private room? Â There's not enough real benefit to having one to justify the cost. Â I'm seriously thinking about the RP implications of Ignacius getting a house. Â Why would he? Â He's a traveling mercenary sellsword and a hitman, he probably lives out of hotels. Â And the hotel rooms are free!
I guess I just think housing in games these days is both too much of a hassle and, at the same time, not really used to its full potential. Â There's too much convenience in modern MMOs to make your own personal space really worthwhile. Â I think developers these days need to try harder to make those spaces useful and desirable, especially if they're going to make us pay to have/upgrade them.