FFXIV Patch 2.1 launches tomorrow. Tonight the game is offline in preparation, and our community (KGC) is preparing to go in and enjoy ourselves. We were a bit shocked this week to learn that housing prices are… a tad out of our range. We have been preparing for the last few months diligently to raise the funds necessary to buy the biggest guild house. We figured something like 20-30 million would be realistic. Turns out, the housing we want costs 100,000,000+ Gil.  To say we are disappointed is an understatement.
Most of us have stuck it out in FFXIV for housing and the hope that one day there will be neat Final Fantasy themed content. If we’re unable to get the house we want, we’ll have to settle for a smaller house, PvP arenas, and some of the small-group dungeons.
Some of the neat features I think are worth noting:
Level 50s doing low level dungeons will be able to make as much gil as when doing high level dungeons.
Bottom line, I love when themepark games make things more accessible and thempark’y. I wish every dungeon in the game gave max-level players the loot they want. Why not? Why not scale dungeon difficulty and drop tokens? If I want to go to Disneyland and ride Thunder Mountain Railroad and Splash Mountain all day long, that’s my prerogative. Disney doesn’t tell me I can only ride it twice, or at the beginning or end of my day. I know it’s an awful example, and the themepark metaphor can only be carried so far, but that’s my MMO themepark philosophy.
Holy was nerfed because speedrunners placed a lot of pressure on White Mages to DPS. Healers are healers, not DPSers.
This one’s pretty funny. I’m a White Mage, and rarely did speed runs, but I still felt pressured to holy spam. I say remove it altogether. I love well-defined class roles.
Tomorrow I’m going to try out the PvP and give you my impressions along with housing (if we get one) and other changes. Stay tuned!
I suppose that it is easy for someone who is not playing the game to look from the outside and critique, but is it necessarily a bad thing that the biggest guild house in the entire game takes more than a few months to save up for?
In theory these MMO’s aren’t specifically designed to keep a player’s interest for only a few months, and as such it seems that having one of the greatest attainable goals in the game take longer than that to achieve might actually be a reasonable method to foster longer term interest in a persistent world.
…just playing the dev(il)’s advocate of course! 😉
I stopped playing a while back but I know several people would spend lots of time grinding money by remaking characters and doing quests or something up until level 10. Some people would also do various things with multiple accounts. I don’t remember all the details but it apparently made them a lot of money.
I wouldn’t do extreme stuff like that for several months just to be able to afford a house. Maybe I’m in the minority but that isn’t my idea of a good time and not something I want to do just so I can have some place to hang various tchotchkes and get bored of the next day.
Some people may like it and see it as some kind of status symbol, which is great for them, but I just see it as other people being able to tolerate mind-numbing tedium better than others.
I agree with Graev here…also if people want some kind os status symbol then they should reward FC houses after a difficult FC “achievement”..like complete all turns in coil. Gil and general ingame currency is not something that should be used for gating features. I expect the spam from RMTers to be even higher than before…and it was already the worst I had in an MMO
Do they allow for housing size upgrades over time, that is buying a small FC house to start and increasing its size over time?
BTW here is a patch notes screen grab that might help putting the housing costs into perspective.
http://i.imgur.com/ZnweVVg.jpg
Keen, I want to ask you a serious question because it has been on my mind a lot lately. I too am huge MMO fan, the MMOs I truely enjoyed were WoW from (vanialla to BC) and Age of Conan for about 6 months. I have tried so many mmos since then, WAR. LOTRO, I have even tried going to back to WoW once. It just is never there for me and I keep saying, it is the game and not me. However I am getting older, I am 21 now and I cant help but feel maybe it is me wanting to relive that feeling I had when i was 14 – 17 that WoW gave me or that AoC gave me, but in reality I have out grown MMOS all together. I am trying to figure this out because I keep wasting time hoping and dreaming a MMO will come out that sparks that feeling I had so long ago and for so many (6 or 7 games) that has not been the case. Is it really the games or could it just be us and our heads not prone to going wild in this new fantasy land… It was something that popped up in my head and I wanted to ask if you could maybe touch base on that subject. I am planning on trying LandMark and for me my last hope is definitely in EQN but if that doesn’t do it for me.. I am going to go ahead and say i have just outgrown the MMO genre.
Yeah, it really is the games. I go back and play older games and I fall in love with them all over again. The only thing I don’t like is their dated interface and controls.
I love MMOs just as much as I used to, I just don’t love what the industry has done to them.