This past weekend Square Enix hosted their Letter from the Producer Live Part IX. For those of you unfamiliar with the live version of the producer’s letter it is a long question and answer session with the questions coming from a thread started on SE’s forums a few days in advance. This weekend’s Q and A covered a range of topics including duty finder tweaks, class balances, and the economy. The bulk of the live Q and A, however, was spent talking about Final Fantasy XIV:ARR’s upcoming housing system.
The biggest change to the economy so far was discussed towards the beginning of the recent live letter. The end game instances now drop gil from the monsters when you kill them. Each kill averages 40 to 50 gil per mob. This translates to a few thousand gil per run. When you factor in most players run around 9 level 50 instances a week in order to cap out on their Allagan Tomestones what seems like miniscule amounts of money can quickly add up to tens of thousands of extra gil per player coming into the game... legitimately I might add. Those of you that were squeezing by making your repair bills and teleportation payments should find that you have more than enough gil to sustain yourself now.
)
Changes to the duty finder were also addressed early on in the letter. SE recognizes the difference between power players that are trying to optimize their time and earn their Allagan Tomestones as efficiently as possible, and the casual gamer who wants to enjoy the content and not skip as many trash pulls as possible. Since these two agendas do not always run in parallel conflict can occur within the duty finder groups. SE plans on adding in a way to declare which type of player you are and have the system group players of similar play styles. SE also plans on creating additional ways for players to earn Allagan Tomestones. Once daily they will reward players for completing leveling dungeons, high level dungeons, story dungeons, and guildhests. They will also reward players for completing primal daily quests, new high level dungeons, the Crystal Tower, treasure hunting content, and other areas. I was happy to finally have Wanderers Palace drop tomestones of mythology and philosophy and alleviate some of the stress on Ampador Keep. Adding in additional content to earn mythology and philosophy tomestones makes me almost giddy.
We will see plenty of endgame content added in that doesn’t require a player to be a raider to still feel like they are doing things that are relevant to the game. It is also nice to see SE incentivize the dungeons that players no longer visit because they have leveled through that area. I welcome my return to places with fun mechanics such as Brayflox’s Longstop and saving our goblin friends from themselves. This should also quicken the queue times for players that are visiting these places for the first time that didn’t purchase the game upon its initial release.
The bulk of this letter was spent on Free Company housing. Houses will require a fee upfront but will not require maintenance fees. Housing is something that the developers are designing so everyone that crafts will have something meaningful to do. In previous letters SE mentioned you could have cooks makes meals and lay them out on tables for decoration. They addressed this topic again in this live letter. You will be able to stack items on top of each other in the housing areas. 85% of all housing content will be crafted. Certain items are tagged as exterior only and others are tagged as interior only. Upon release of 2.1 there are over 40 exterior housing pieces and 180 interior housing items. In addition there are also attachments to your house that are not included in those numbers. There will be anywhere from 220 to 250 new crafted items released with patch 2.1. Crafters rejoice. Your hard work might start paying off. You too gatherers: SE hopes all this crafting will start to remove some of the glut of raw materials from the market and getting the gathering economy going again.
)
In order to purchase a Free Company house you will have to rank up your Free Company. To what rank they did not say. We could possibly see the addition of new FC ranks and the larger the house you wish to purchase the higher the rank you will need to obtain. Currently SE plans on having small, medium and large houses available and up to 30 houses per instance. While there is a deluge of new crafted items you will not be able to store items in the furniture in the house, at least not yet. They first need to establish that the housing areas will be stable and not consumed to much memory before SE looks to implement that type of storage feature. You will, however, receive a rested bonus if you log off in your home. They are also trying to put an Aetheryte into the housing area but are running short on time and not sure that it will make it in for patch 2.1.
