UPDATE! August 18th, 2015
This one was really good to see. Finally saw the words I needed to hear from Yoshi-P himself.
Housing-related
1:42:17
Q: Do you have any plans to increase the number of furnishings we can place in our house?
A: We’re currently working on features that will automatically relinquish houses that haven't been used in some time, as well as a feature for moving your house, and thinking of increasing the cap after this, so please give us some more time. We’re first going to deal with the shortage of available land.
1:43:01
Q: I really love the scenery in the new areas. Do you have plans to introduce a housing ward in Ishgard?
A: We’ll first implement a feature to automatically relinquish unused houses in order to increase the availability of land. In parallel, we’re also working on quality of life improvements for the extended wards. Once these are complete, we’re move onto optimizing the servers so we can increase the amount of furnishings that can be placed in houses. Without taking care of these first, players won’t be able to transfer their houses without relinquishing their existing house first, and this also creates a situation where it leaves an unused house. We'll be progressing with this one step at a time, and will be gradually applying changes from Patch 3.1 onwards. The Dragonsong War hasn't ended yet, so it’ll take some time before we can add a housing ward in Ishgard.
1:44:46
Q: Can you make it possible to share a house with our Eternal Bond partner?
A: While this is not limited to Eternal Bond partners, we are planning to implement a system in Patch 3.1 for housemates. With this system you’ll be able to give permissions to share gardening, and chocobo stables, as well as allow others to place furnishings.
UPDATE! August 10th, 2015
SourceJPGames.de: Several servers have an overpopulation problem. Would you consider letting people change the server for free from a high-traffic to a low-traffic server?
NY: If you move people from the busy server to some empty server, then we have to have some reward, otherwise they won’t do it, because people want to go to the busy servers. There are so many people there, it is more easy to team up with other players. In the team we think about support for moving a complete Free Company, so we are already aware of the situation and think about something, but it will take time.
Not exactly a complete solution but If we could transfer our whole FC, Gill and all, I know we would all chip in for this! This isnt going to fix all the issues but as long as it doesnt come with a $100+ price tag, it will be a good start, especially with the upcoming EU Data Center!
This is the most promising thing I have read regarding houses! Hopefully we can see some more people in houses by Patch 3.1/3.2. I also like the plot transfer system, this allows for upgrading and that is a great thing!MMORPG.de: A lot of players complain about the housing situation. They want to buy a house, but it is impossible to find free plots on some worlds. Are there any plans to improve the situation?
NY: Yes, we are working on it, and there are three phases. The first step is working on abandoned houses, so there’s no owner, or player there actually. The second step is to make it available to players that they can move house. There is no system in game yet that can help you to change the house, so we want to help and support this in the game. With these two steps we will be able to have some empty plots. Then we want to see if we have to open up an Ishgard plot or add more plot to the existing areas. That is the third step. We want to be careful here and judge the situation first. We are working on step 1 and 2 already. There will be some updates, probably in patches 3.1 to 3.15, around this time.
UPDATE! July 11th, 2015
Q63. I really love the scenery in the new areas. Do you have plans to introduce a housing ward in Ishgard?
A63. We’re currently working to solve the inconvenience in the extended wards, so we believe it’ll be after this. This is because we think we first need to create a transfer system for players who wish to move to an Ishgard area.
UPDATE! May 11th, 2015
Glad to hear them acknowledge there IS a shortage of housing. A nice change from the "its fine and working as intended" they said when they released Personal Housing. Anyway, here's the new quote and the source.
SourceThey have plans to add housing in Ishgard but in 1-2 years at earliest. There's not enough land right now so they plan to work on that first. If you're not sure about spending money on housing just buy a large one now.
UPDATE! April 27th, 2015
Unfortunately due to the way personal housing is not personal, I cannot get one. Out of all the wards in all the districts in all the City States, there is a total of 5 houses still up for sale on Balmung in the "Free Company" sections. Three are Large houses at 40+mil a pop, the other two are medium houses for 38mil a pop.
I love this game and pretty much everything about it but this one feature makes no sense to me. I know i'm not the fastest to get things and I really am not bothered by that but I really feel slighted and punished for not being in the top tier of people who get everything done in the first week after the patch drops.
Is this truly what Yoshi-P wanted? Is there any way to add a few sections full of only small houses for personal homes? Can the dev's please revisit how this is functioning and look into future changes to "personal" homes? I guess I could pay $80+ to transfer me and my family to another server that is lower population just so I can get a home but at that point, I cant even take my Gil with me!
I know this has been mentioned before and I know they have already said they want to reward people who have the money. For me, money was NEVER the issue, availability was. So it has come to pass that i plugged away at the game long enough to get a home of my own and cannot get one because they are sold out. Best I can do is buy one from someone selling the plots in PF at prices much higher than they should be.
EDIT:
Been seeing people saying a few things that I felt needed a little clearing up. Things like "its your own fault for picking a populated server" or Money WAS the issue if you didn't even have it till now" etc. I made a post that got buried rather quickly that I will add below because I think it further elaborates on these issues.
I sincerely hope that during 3.0 they take the time to redo the housing system to make it more available for everyone. To date the last responses we had from devs regarding this is "Working as intended" and "The team that did housing is doing the Golden Saucer content right now and will not be available to even look at it until after Golden Saucer is released".
TL;DR
Please Devs, can we get a more recent response to this situation. Is everything still "A-Ok" or has this finally been recognized as an issue that will be looked at. Not looking for any details even, I just want to know if I can get my hopes up for a personal house or if I should not even bother saving my Gil anymore. Please, unlike the new jobs being "gated" this WILL affect new players by way of locking them out of what is becoming a large portion of content. I really want to get our FC house too so we can explore Heavensward in our own airship.