'No lotteries, and no onerous upkeep': World of Warcraft takes a cheeky potshot at Final Fantasy 14's egregious housing system as it readies up to unleash its own
It only took two decades, but Blizzard is finally adding player housing to World of Warcraft, which'll be coming with the Midnight expansion. That's still a ways away, but that hasn't stopped Blizzard from doing a big ol' blog post diving into the developer's core principles for the process, with enough word count to throw shade at one of its biggest MMO competitors.
The post goes over loads of stuff, which I'll get to, but as a primary Final Fantasy 14 gamer I couldn't help but have a chuckle at the segment titled A Home for Everyone. «As part of our focus on wide adoption, we wanted to ensure that Housing is available to everyone,» the post read. «If you want a house, you can have a house. No exorbitant requirements or high purchase costs, no lotteries, and no onerous upkeep (and if your subscription lapses, don't worry, your house won't get repossessed!)»
If you ask me, that's a clear stab at Square Enix's, quite frankly, atrocious housing system. It's taken many forms over the years, but its one consistency is that it's largely terrible. Years ago, houses would be priced based on server economy, which was changed to a flat rate per plot once cross-server travel happened. They're pretty expensive, too, ranging from 3 million gil for a fifth-class small plot, all the way to an eye-watering 50 million gil for a large house in a prime location.
The more egregious aspects of Final Fantasy 14's systems comes from actually obtaining (and maintaining) land, however. Houses aren't instanced, which already creates a supply far outweighed by its demand. It used to be hours of clicking on a placard while battling an invisible timer, waiting for it to end while hoping you'd be the first one to click 'buy' once it was finally up. It's since been swapped to a lottery system, where you simply chuck your money at an empty plot and pray that your number is the one drawn. A better system, but still not a good one. Oh, and you have to enter your house once every 45 days otherwise
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