72,000 House for 300,000 (NA) Accounts..How is this right SE??

[HyoMinPark]

Personal housing was a mistake and it should have been kept to FCs only.

Disagree. Because then players would either just make a shell FC for a house (and there would still be shortages), or just be stuck with apartments, which are shoddy alternatives since they're basically just more expensive FC rooms with less benefits than an actual FC room.

[Besame]

Housing is one of the attractions for MMOs to me so I wouldn't be playing if I had no house. I spent a lot of blood, sweat and tears (gil) on mine hehe. It is my hideaway and a place I can do as I please. As a mature (age-wise) player here, I cannot stand FCs filled with kiddies so I would not want to be forced into one. I have enough trouble coping with cross server behaviors from people in dungeons. I like my friend's small fc just fine

[Caitlinzulu]

I totaly agree. Instanced would solve every thing im totaly in favor of that,,But Se seems dead set on this ward crap..well if there gonna stick with this system hen its time for them to "Man up" and supply whats needed and stop trying to make people settle for little fixs..

Side note: I take none of this personal unless im attack which you have not done, So just cause we disagree on certain things dose not mean i look down on your post in any way, you have alot and i mean alot of good points in your post

Well again the 'instanced housing will solve everything' arguement, well even instances need server space and processing power, so SE would have to keep that under control or risk server instability. Would you accept a message like "sorry cannot process your housing request due to server load"?
Or to reduce server load reduce the amount of items you can place?

[Solarra]

...again the 'instanced housing will solve everything' arguement...

You forget, we already have instanced housing. House interiors are instanced and so are apartments.
Why do we see fully instanced houses as a solution?
Because the wards are persistent, they are always there. fully loaded and using resources even if no one is actually using them. That's why the limits on how many outside items we can place are so much stricter than the limits on what we can place inside. Fully instanced housing would be much lighter on resource use.

The devs have already said they can increase the number of apartments to meet demand (but I'm not sure if this actually happened). The trouble is, apartments don't offer gardening and the interior is only the size of a FC room. Even worse, Yoshi P stated they are going to add more wards with the new patch, but have no plans to improve or expand apartments.

They are probably never going to be able to add enough wards to meet demand. They were a great idea, but in practice they leave the majority of players homeless and cut off from activities like gardening and building airships.
The devs seem heavily invested in the present system and determined to stick with it despite the fact that new wards will not even make a dent in demand on the more populated servers.

I'm not saying we should get rid of the wards but I don't see any point in adding to them when it clearly won't solve the problem. Developing good quality instanced housing alongside the wards would seem to be the most sensible solution.
Housing was heavily promoted when SB launched, so Siniztor is right, it's time they made it available to more than a tiny minority of players.

[Mithia]

While I am not sure who is writing that advertisement for gamestop, the SE store gives a different description. There it purely states "A new residential district: Shirogane" among its features. https://store.eu.square-enix.com/eu/product/425194/final-fantasy-xiv-stormblood-pc

If we then look at patch 4.1 when it actually gets released I believe SE always used the words, "players will be able...", because there is a limited supply doesn't mean players aren't able to obtain a house, if you didn't receive one now then you will be able to receive one later.
Now that the demolition timer will be activated again, you will find it much more frequent that players will be evicted from their houses due to their long breaks or as before, server transfers. Be patient, check the aetherstone in your capital for available houses frequently and then just snatch it up.

Secondly, there may be plenty of accounts per server, but how many are actually active players, this is why when the game developers asked the player base which housing model they preferred, we ended up with the current one, because it allows the active player to have a cosmetic edge over the ones who take a break, imagen 9999 wards, where there are at best 2-3 active players in every ward. Sounds not so enjoyable to me, now at least I have the opportunity to interact with my neighbors when I idle at my estate, and yes, we do interact.

[Solarra]

imagen 9999 wards, where there are at best 2-3 active players in every ward. Sounds not so enjoyable to me, now at least I have the opportunity to interact with my neighbors when I idle at my estate, and yes, we do interact.

Your description sounds like my ward. It's full and has been since I bought my house over a year ago, but you wouldn't know it. One neighbour I see regularly (about once a month) does not speak my language but we do 'wave' when we pass. I have spoken to two other people in the last year and I occasionally see a couple of others at the MB. I get that you personally have an active, vibrant ward and don't want to give it up, but if my house was moved to an instance I probably wouldn't notice. It makes no sense to me for the devs to keep investing in the present system simply to benefit a small percentage of players like yourself while keeping the majority locked out.

As to nit-picking about the wording on the advertisements, I don't think it's helpful. It is not an outright lie, but going by the reactions of my friends and FC members, it is misleading and leaves people feeling they were deliberately misled.

[ManuelBravo]

When you step back and look at the big picture it makes sense. What many people a problem understanding that instances would take a lot more space. A type of valid solutions would have been to make it a form exclusive or additional content. While it may seem unfair to most SE does have a form of instances in inns, apartments, and FC rooms. Now most people really just want to be creative and have access to some of the perks, such as gardening and over all decorations. The only reason I even got an FC house was really for the benefits of FC options vs personal housing. IF people really want to decorate would it not make more sense to just go play the sims ? -.-

[Mithia]

It makes no sense to me for the devs to keep investing in the present system simply to benefit a small percentage of players like yourself while keeping the majority locked out.

This system was asked for by people who have stuck through the game while it was at its lowest and helped better it for us who followed after, SE is loyal first and foremost to those players, many of us come and go as we please afterall. So, housing is meant to be prestige, secondly people are not excluded from decorating, be it through apartments or an FC house. At the same time, SE is aware of the unfair way houses are going across the market, lets wait and see what their new system of obtaining plots is all about before we pick up our pitch forks and torches.

As to nit-picking about the wording on the advertisements, I don't think it's helpful. It is not an outright lie, but going by the reactions of my friends and FC members, it is misleading and leaves people feeling they were deliberately misled.

Its not about nit-picking, I admit that game stop is here giving false advertisement but that doesn't mean that its SE who is at fault here, rather game stop. What your friends, or FC members perceive is their fault and not SE, SE advertised correctly, the way you perceived it is something entirely different.

[Claviusnex]

Personal housing was a mistake and it should have been kept to FCs only.

I disagree. They should have had enough foresight to realize they would need a large number of houses to support demand whether it was FC's only or included personal housing as well. While I don't think they need a house for every character since some will forgo housing altogether, the system needs to be able to support that just in case.

[Claviusnex]

Well again the 'instanced housing will solve everything' arguement, well even instances need server space and processing power, so SE would have to keep that under control or risk server instability. Would you accept a message like "sorry cannot process your housing request due to server load"?
Or to reduce server load reduce the amount of items you can place?

A well designed instanced housing system could be designed to dynamically add and remove housing server resources as needed. The current static ward system can't do that and wastes server resources by the wards sitting idle most of the time. So yes instanced housing can resolve much of the availability problem.

It makes no sense to me for the devs to keep investing in the present system simply to benefit a small percentage of players like yourself while keeping the majority locked out.

Which brings up it doesn't have to be an all or nothing situation. There is no reason that a new fully instanced housing system couldn't run in parallel to the existing wards. If someone wants a ward house bad enough they can deal with the restrictions. For those that don't care and just want the benefits of a house they would now have that option.