Anyone Buy a House Yet?

So the internet blew up when the housing patch was released, and most of it was negative. From what I have been hearing the houses are far more expensive than players thought they would be and were beyond upset. I thought the housing thing was a nice little feature, not the point of the whole game.

Did anyone get a house? Can we see your awesome decorations if so?

I haven't even bought a room yet, let alone a house.

Nope. I've been looking forward to personal housing since release and during a recent period of FF14 addiction I was able to save up a bunch of money, at least for me, thanks to the fishing additions in patch 2.3. I figured that would be enough as Yoshi mentioned something about 850k for a small or something. Seemed reasonable enough. I'd hoped to get a medium I guess.

...but then they ended up being way more expensive and having almost no new plots. Even after they add even more wards with 2.4, it'll probably still be no where near enough.

- I think Large houses should be reserved for Free Companies only. This will give people incentive to join a FC and give FC housing more cool unique features (like the Airship building stuff perhaps) I'd probably suggest they add maybe 2 new basic layouts for Small and Medium each I think. Change the stairs location or make it a smaller floor plan but 3 stories tall etc. Needs more variety.

- To coincide with the above change, a new ward design specifically for personal housing for each city state. It would have no Large plots and thus should allow for a couple smaller plots. It also feels kinda meh that the FC areas are the exact same as the personal areas.

- Make them a bit more affordable. I think 750k - 1.25 Mil for a Small and 1.5 mil to 2 mil for a Medium seems reasonable to me. That doesn't even include the cost for the actual house itself which I might not agree with. If a Medium costs 500k then that should be factored into my cost suggestions above. Apparently some people are crazy and play every day for hours for months and months and making 10+ mil is no biggie for them. It's not that I think everyone on the server should be able to easily get a house, but you shouldn't have to be a psycho who hunts down post-patch market exploits all day for a few weeks to get a house.

I'm just disappointed I guess. I know the prices will almost certainly come down. They seem to put this sort of stuff in at super high prices initially to drain the gil out of the crazy hoarders. They'll add more wards but it may still not be enough. And on top of that, I don't think the houses have much practical use at the moment. I keep asking for storage furnishings so I can organize stuff the way I like or weapons and armor displays so I can decorate my place with cool stuff. Mount big fish I catch on the wall. But they kinda keep saying they can't/won't do that stuff because of server limitations. So dumb.

Still eagerly awaiting Patch 2.4 and the new expansion announcement though!

@seikenfreak: Those all sound like reasonable criticisms to me I think I'm more shocked at how important this was to people. It is one of those things that I can't wrap my head around. I saw posts on the main forum of people saying they felt betrayed and would be cancelling their subscription. That seems a little extreme to me. Anyways great post, good job summarizing all of the complaints.

@chemystery said:

To be honest, I'm glad the people who want houses are raising hell, as that should keep the devs on their toes given that this was a sort of lazy implementation of what they initially promised.

That said, I never cared about housing outside of our Free Company house.

As it stands there's now three types of personal housing in the game available to people. There's the Free Company house, the individual room inside the Free Company house, and a single personal house. The options for customization aren't really robust enough for me to warrant giving much care to any of it outside of the Free Company house---which I only wanted to facilitate interaction and act as a sort of social hub for our members (which it does wonderfully). We have some cool neighbors, great placement in relation to a marketboard and a perfectly compact house for our active members. We're literally in the center of probably the first and most prominent housing ward in the game.

@snakelinksonic: I actually visited our Free Company house for the first time the other day. (I'm Thail Ashlain). Our house looks pretty amazing if I do say so.

Is there a place to easily see the prices of all available houses in an area at once? I'm finding it incredibly difficult to scout out prices by legging it from placard to placard.

@pierre42: go to main town aetheryte. You'll see the open lots and thdir current prices.

Yes, I bought one the day the patch came out for housing. Cost me around 2.5 million gil.

gold is super easy to come by at that point in the game. But considering the house is basically nothing, you kinda have to be into role playing I'd think to really get any measure of satisfaction spending that kind of cash.

@bargainben:

Sure but there's mechanical benefits as well.

Freaking dyed chocobos man.

My wife and I bought our first house a year and a half ago. And now the upkeep never ends...