Balancing Rental Airships vs Player Crafted Airships in FFXIV Patch 3.1

Game: Final Fantasy XIV
Time: 2015-11-02 14:50:18
Views: 1517

Let's all point and laugh at Voclain, who paid three times what his plot was worth and spent tens of millions of ffxiv gil on parts and has been getting up at 3 AM for the last two months to dispatch and level what are now apparently the game's most expensive and complicated glamours+retainers.

So, you can go through all that trouble, or you can just walk up and rent one. The question quickly becomes, why go through all that trouble?

You'd probably say, "dusk leather sells for 10 million, you selfish cad!", and it is true. Sort of. Well, it was true. I did sell one, and it was for about that much. They're down to three mil on Famfrit. They'll be down to nothing in a month. In short, there was a window of extremely profitability for the earliest of the early adopters, and that window will be shattered forever long before patch 3.1 hits.

When that window breaks, crafted airships become tremendously expensive investments (5-20 million ffxiv gil, and hundreds of thousands of FC credits) without returns that could ever possibly compensate for the effort involved in them.

A player should want to use a free company(FC) airship to explore 3.1's hidden island content, without physically being forced to, or they become gargantuan wastes of time and effort.

Most of you, rightly regarding these things as toys for officers in rich uber-FCs, will receive this idea with a certain contempt. You will kind of want them to be useless. While this sentiment is understandable, given how dumb the housing system is, it isn't rational. It's emotional. You know, rationally, that massive grinds in these games should have some kind of payoff proportionate to the effort involved, especially of large groups of people were busting their buns to attain them.

Wanting free company(FC) airships to be useless, expensive glamours is as irrational and unfair as wanting to gate content for players without access to them.

Note:Players crafting their FC airships just now and in the future will never make their money back. Dusk Leather will be cheap pretty dang soon. Crafted airships will be functionless glamours that take a bazillion ffxiv gil.