Restrict Personal Houses to 1 Per Server!

[Zero_syndicate]

Instanced housing is a great idea, and its a matter of servers that is holding SE back from doing this. How many more do they need, how much time do they really need to spend on it, and is it really worthwhile or should they focus the resources to necessary game fixes/additions? Regardless of how much someone uses their 2nd, 3rd, or 4th house they should NOT be punished for it unless they're breaking ToS to get said houses. It doesn't matter how many houses someone owns if it was allowed to happen through normal means of playing they have every right to buy up as many plots as they want. Is it a morally good thing to do considering the situation housing is in right now? Not really, but you can't hold it against someone for playing the game how they want to play it within the rules of the game.

[Zero_syndicate]

Housing is something that isn't necessary to the core of the game and is a specialty option for players to do. So housing may not be the priority, we probably assume that is why Ishgard and Idyllshire (great places to have housing IMO) doesn't have housing. Point being that housing is in a pickle as there is a high demand and not enough supply and the cost to increase the supply might not be worth it financially, really only a possibility and not a certainty.

[TitaniaYaerem]

This won't fix the issue in the slightest, there are still way more players than their are available housing and then you gotta include FCs.

[anzamoni]

Their continual buff to jobs led to the balance disaster of Heavensward where Bard and Machinist completely destroyed Casters while Warrior dominated and Paladin fell into obscurity-- a trend that has gradually continued as Dark Knights drop due to being decidedly inferior. Regardless, which audience is better to potentially anger? The 10-15% of owners who exploited a known problem or the 85-90% who currently have nothing? SE stands to lose considerably more money from disappointed and homeless players compared to the Mateus couple who own twenty six plots between them.

How many are honest players though? A significant number of alt owned houses on the same server are intended for nothing more than a quick flip. Even if every single one of these players quit, it wouldn't come close to the numbers of players contemplating quitting now that Shirogane is gone.

I fail to see how class balance issues due to dev oversight and lack of testing can apply to housing. I still stand by and developers do as well, buff a class/feature up to the target level. This makes players happy because the thing they want got better, players on the once OP class are unaffected. Nerf a class that is out performing, people who play that class are upset.

Back on point, wiping out these alt owned houses doesn't solve the problem. It's hardly a drop in the bucket, the only reason it is being floated is because people think if a few hundred more houses open up on their server surely they will get one this time! Surely out of the 10k people and hundreds of FCs on their world without a house. Even if you assume 90% of the houses in the game are owned by 10% of the active accounts that is only 135 thousand houses freed up to be fought over by 635 thousand players AND their FCs. We need to focus on a long term solution, not a short term stop gap.

People are just so upset right now that they did not get a home that right now people are willing to punish other players who may have done nothing against the game rules. House flipping is against the games rules, and should be punished. I do not disagree with that. But to punish every player who has houses on an alt because some players who have houses on alts might be trying to sell it for a profit does not seem like a good idea to me. And the worst part about this is we do not have solid numbers on how many homes are owned by single accounts. Even if we just had a percent from SE 20%, 60%, 80% of total housing is owned by a single account with multiple house owning alts. Currently it is all just speculation and anecdotal evidence just like your insistence that the number of players that are actually going to quit because they did not get a house last night will out number those who would leave because they had their house and items taken from them. How many Paladins ACTUALLY quit when they said they were going to during HW when raids preferred WAR/DRK? What amount the Monks, or the Summoners who were going to quit because Egi's were small?

This Mateus thing, they did nothing wrong per the game. They didn't buy them all to flip them. To my knowledge most of the homes they owned had been vacant for quite sometime and they are not trying to flip them for money. They crafted and decorated most if not all of them. So instead of tearing away all the work they put into earning the gil to purchase those homes(I am sure they were investigated for RMT when that story dropped), the crafting and gathering to decorate those homes, and the time spent leveling the alts for each of those homes for a couple of people who would probably be more than happy to have used instanced housing if it were available.

Instead of striping people of things they worked for, how about we get a solution in place first? What is wrong with getting instanced housing and then applying the 1 per server rule? Because then legitimate players who own multiple houses can have their extra homes transfer to an instance, freeing up wards and they don't have to lose as much? I feel like more of these suggestions are about punish those who have than actually finding a solution.

[HyoMinPark]

I highly doubt that the developers wanted players to purchase 20 or more houses just for themselves or their alts. So your argument kind of falls apart there.

Will add more later; on mobile.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I fail to see how class balance issues due to dev oversight and lack of testing can apply to housing. I still stand by and developers do as well, buff a class/feature up to the target level. This makes players happy because the thing they want got better, players on the once OP class are unaffected. Nerf a class that is out performing, people who play that class are upset.

It doesn't. You simply used it as a point of reference and I commented. To momentarily deviate once again, you are mistaken. Heavensward led to an increased push towards "meta," where PF alienated certain jobs deemed too inferior. White Mage and Paladin suffered most noticeably. The people playing whichever job may certainly relish a buff, however those who find their preferred job increasingly less desirable aren't happy. In fact, there is a whole thread on the DPS forums about Black Mages due to how frequently shunned the role gets for offering next to nothing other jobs simply don't do better.

How many Paladins ACTUALLY quit when they said they were going to during HW when raids preferred WAR/DRK?

Shockingly few. Most either picked up the other tank or gritted their teeth and played their preferred job. Which suggests people who lost their extra houses and quit as a result would be a decidedly small minority.

Anywho, we've digressed.

While it wouldn't solve the housing issue, it would contribute to more plots being made available. No one needs more than a single house, especially in with a finite system like what is currently implemented. They worked hard exploiting a poor designed system that allows one player to own sixteen houses per server. And a good many did so with the sole intent on selling them for exorbitant prices. Since SE constantly likes to tout about their server stability limitation. It makes far more sense they try to ensure everyone has access to housing, not a select few who collect different plots akin to Pokemon. Citing punishment is rather hollow given how ineffectual its execution actually is. People simply post on reddit or other third party avenues to avoid detection. Per your initial post, yo advocated having GMs monitor the housing wards in the hopes of catching suspicious activity. You do realize that comes at an enormous cost, yes? Now these GMs need to be employed for several hours to maybe, possibly catch someone flipping a house.

This Mateus thing, they did nothing wrong per the game. They didn't buy them all to flip them. To my knowledge most of the homes they owned had been vacant for quite sometime and they are not trying to flip them for money. They crafted and decorated most if not all of them. So instead of tearing away all the work they put into earning the gil to purchase those homes(I am sure they were investigated for RMT when that story dropped), the crafting and gathering to decorate those homes, and the time spent leveling the alts for each of those homes for a couple of people who would probably be more than happy to have used instanced housing if it were available.

Actually, they aren't. I have seen their ward and the majority of houses they own are essentially storage. Regardless, the devs boast about their community aspect. Here is a ward where they will never be any neighbours. If anything, it only further advertises the foolhardiness of neighbours. Now I don't bear them any ill-will, and am perfectly fine with their gil be reimbursed. That being said, I also offer no sympathy towards were they forced to relinquish all but four (two personal; two FCs) so the remaining twenty four could go to people who have nothing.

Instead of striping people of things they worked for, how about we get a solution in place first? What is wrong with getting instanced housing and then applying the 1 per server rule? Because then legitimate players who own multiple houses can have their extra homes transfer to an instance, freeing up wards and they don't have to lose as much? I feel like more of these suggestions are about punish those who have than actually finding a solution.

Nothing is inherently wrong with that alternative though it doesn't change no one should own an entire ward.

[Anthodev]

Currently housing is limited, the number of players is not. Revoking homes is a very short sighted way to make very few players happy, and more probably unhappy.

I don't understand this point. One of the "issue" is that people are taking houses for their alts, locking out players for having a house for their main character. Which means that mathematically, more people will be happy to get a house than people being forced to cease the ones on their alts.

Currently housing is limited, the number of players is not.

You're also wrong on this point, the number of players (and characters) are limited by server. If it wasn't the case, the creation wouldn't be limited on "full" servers. A lot more people will be able to get a house with a 1h/account/server and may limit several effects: house flippers, RMT, a good amount of houses not being actively really used because on an alt.

[HyoMinPark]

Housing couldn't have been 1 per server from the get go because it was originally developed ONLY for FCs. The team was working on a personal housing system but players would not stop hounding about housing and the team just allowed players purchase FC housing. A few weeks later the prices were reduced leading to the current issue. So this is just as much the players fault demanding systems be rushed or scraped as it is SE's for not putting their foot down and saying that players would get it when it was ready.

Please read my post again. I already stated that housing was FC Only in the beginning; I was already aware of that. However, when SE decided to extend housing to individuals for personal use, they should have still implemented a one personal house per account per server limitation. The limitation already exists, in a sense, for FCs—an FC cannot have more than one FC house. Why was this not considered for personal housing? You cannot tell me that the developers are okay with one individual with 8 alts on a server owning 16 houses (one FC and one personal per alt); that is not the way they intended the Housing system to be used, and I feel fairly confident saying such.

As for pricing, uniform pricing between Free Companies, Personal Housing, and servers did not fully occur until 3.3. Housing itself was introduced back in ARR (cannot remember which specific patch off the top of my head right now). That isn’t “a few weeks”, and the current issue doesn’t really have anything to do with the current cost of housing: it has to do with an extreme lack of supply to meet an extreme amount of demand.

Punishing players for working within the games parameters will not end well, and it is not an exploit. Flipping said plots is an exploit and should be punished, I personally would go as far as having a task force to monitor and catch people doing it through third parties like eCommerce sites and reddit.

Incorrect; the housing system was not designed for one individual to own half of a main division or subdivision amongst their 8 alt characters. That is just as much of an exploit as house flippers. As for a “task force”, it would be impossible to monitor sites like Reddit, if not for the fact that several people do not use any semblance of username on Reddit that they do in-game. How do you prove the person is X character just from looking at a post and a username? You can’t, really. You can’t even prove if the post is legit—they could be a scam.

Imagine if you were to tell everyone that owned a vacation home that they had to either move into that one or sell it because they can only have one home due to the housing shortage. Its the same instance, these people earned the wealth to own a second home(leveled up and alt/fc and earned the gil), they may not use it as frequently as their primary dwelling (Spend most of the time on their main), and it is completely within the 'rules' for them to have that second or third home (The game allows anyone with a Rank 6 FC or level 50 with 2nd Lt. rank purchase a home). Let's go even further, out of 150 thousand (2200 plots x 67 servers rough numbers, doesn't have to be exact though) total homes taking those homes back from those greedy home owners means 75 thousand are free for purchase/use but we have half a million homeless. So you have a few thousand less home less people, but you have a few thousand angry homeowners that their property was seized and still have hundreds of thousands of angry homeless people. Its a drop in the bucket and thats assuming 50% of the plots are owned by people with multiple homes, I am sure it is no where near this number.

Okay, and this is not real-life, so real-life arguments hold no weight in a virtual environment. I have done rough math on current housing and plots: each housing area on a server offers 720 houses, with a total of 2,880 per server. Take a server from the NA data centers that has roughly 10,000 active characters that are eligible to purchase housing (i.e., are level 50 or higher). 2,880/10,000 = 0.288 > 28.8% of that server’s population will own a home. But that isn’t accounting for Free Companies, nor for people who have alts that own multiple houses, so the percentage is realistically going to be even lower.

If we want to talk about “homeless individuals”, that would leave 71.2% of the active, eligible characters “homeless.” Now, again, this is not real-life, and there really is no need for a person who visits on their 7 alts once per month while playing mainly on their main, to own houses. That is taking up housing that more active main characters could have. And those active main characters worked just as hard as those alts, so the argument of “those people worked harder for multiple houses” doesn’t work here. Other parties worked just as hard.

Currently housing is limited, the number of players is not. Revoking homes is a very short sighted way to make very few players happy, and more probably unhappy. I imagine the players losing their homes would be pretty angry, and then imagine all the other players rushing to log on to get one of the revoked houses and yet again, not able to get it because they were grabbed up by other FCs and players. It would be this exact same situation all over again, so instead of trying to come up with a short term fix that harms just as many if not more players than it helps why don't we stick to forcing SE to look for another solution.

Housing is limited, and that is why limitations should be put in place to prevent individuals from owning 16 houses on one account. Free up 14~15 of those houses, you have 1 angry individual and 14~15 happy ones. Again, I mentioned that in my first response to you. That is the exact opposite of what you are arguing. There are more people without a house than there are people with a house, so the number of people that would be happy about such a limitation is going to exceed the number of those who would be angered by being forced to pick 1~2 house(s) in an already extremely limited supply (for reference’s sake, there are only 190,080 plots between all of the servers in this game, and censes put active character counts at around 900,000). So I fail to understand your logic here, and I find it very faulty in this game’s housing situation.

Server population and character creation is also limited on a server-by-server basis: look at Balmung and Gilgamesh—there is zero influx of new characters on those two servers. They are capped; locked; closed. Even other servers have periods where players cannot create characters on them: Cactuar has been locked several times during peak hours, though not to the extent Balmung and Gilgamesh were before they were moved to congested worlds.

They tested the waters with an instanced form of housing the apartments, and if I remember correctly it was met pretty much with criticism and not much of it constructive.

Because SE made out apartments to be adequate substitutes for houses, and they are not. There are many reasons why, but I’ll just list the most obvious: you cannot use apartments for Free Companies.

It happens a lot people just come on here to rage and rant. Not to mention the number of people who would argue against instanced housing just a year or two ago despite it meaning everyone could own a home all because they preferred the appeal of wards. So you have people saying the instanced apartments suck(And they do to their credit) and that they want to live in a ward, not an instance. So it looks like SE was just following what the forums were asking for at that time BUT I agree with you that I believe I recall them saying they liked the wards but that doesn't mean they don't like the idea of having instances alongside Wards. Especially with the relocation feature they added you could feasibly move a house from an instance to a ward or vice versa.

Specifically addressing the “people want to live in a ward” part of this quote: I offered a compromise to that with my talk about a 13th Ward being added to existing housing areas that looked just like any other ward, but the housing plots themselves were instanced similar to apartments.

I get why people are frustrated, I am. I made sure that I and my girlfriend (The owner of this account, I was banned I guess for using bad words or something) had enough gil for at least a medium and if another friend got on I was going to give him some as well so we had better chances to secure a house. None of us could get in, her PS4 wouldn't download the patch fast enough and I kept getting server/lobby errors at 5AM with nearly no sleep and having to go to work shortly. I really do get it. I am not telling anyone to get over it or they shouldn't have a house I am saying it is a bad idea for the longevity of the game. Here is a game, that if enough people are upset with something the developers did, the developers will take away your thing to give to someone else. It isn't good for marketing once that gets out.

So why should we anger even more people by trying to get SE to revoke players items, when we could keep encouraging/hounding them to go with a solution that would make most players happy by providing everyone the option to finally own a home.

Again, free up 14~15 houses, and you have 14~15 happy players that own a house of their own, and 1 angry player who got mad that SE found out he was hogging the cookie jar and made him share an extremely limited supply.

I could see your argument if there was a million houses and only 650k players, but not everyone had a house. If revoking those plots with the 1 per server rule ensured everyone had a home, I would be more inclined to agree with you but what is being suggested here is lose-lose and would ultimatly just end up with us right back here the day after with people upset again that they didn't get a house, in addition to the people who lost their house.

No, if there were 1,000,000 plots and 650,000 characters, I doubt that there would even be an issue with supply and demand—especially if SE took measures to prevent house hoarding. Taking from those who have excessive amounts of housing and, for lack of a better metaphor, forcing them to share with others is not a lose-lose. It may be a loss for that one player, but it is a win for those who are given a chance at a house.

650,000 characters and 1,000,000 plots, even assuming there are a lot of alt characters in that number, would not be causing nearly the problems we are seeing now. Individual characters can only own a max of 2 houses (1 personal and 1 FC). 650,000/1,000,000 = 0.65 > 65% could own both. Obviously, a lot of characters are going to be in the same FC, so that percentage will only increase—especially if a server has a lot of large FCs. Because then characters would only be able to own one house (since there cannot be multiple FC houses). And then, there are characters that have no interest in being in an FC, but want a house. And the opposite is true: people that are in an FC and are perfectly happy with an apartment or an FC room, and who have no interest in owning a house. Even if there were alt characters with a shell FC who bought 2 plots (1 personal and 1 FC), I highly doubt that we would be discussing a problem similar to what we have now, where less than 20% of the playerbase can own a house because so many people own multiples, and because there is just an obscene lack of supply to demand.

And while I don't agree with the people telling people who missed a house to stop being salty or whatever, I think everyone can agree this same attitude would be thrown back at the people upset they lost houses they worked for. 'I don't feel bad for them, they shouldn't have been so greedy', 'Get over it', 'So much salt', etc.

And I raise to you again that other people worked just as hard to earn money for a house, and lost it due to either sheer greed (whether it be players buying houses for alts that they seldom play, or players buying to resell at ridiculous prices), or rotten luck (poor server performance). Actually, they didn’t even lose it; they never even had a chance at it.

I am not trying to argue or be mean or abrasive or anything. But I just find it hard to understand why some individuals are okay with the fact that, on some servers, 1 person owns half a subdivision, or 2 people own an entire ward, when there are already barely enough houses to give a fourth of the playerbase a house.

Sorry if my post is convoluted in some areas; I’ve been up all day and had a super busy day at school, so I’m a little exhausted. But hopefully I have made my stance and my reasonings clear, and presented them in as polite a manner as my tired brain can manage.

[Almagnus1]

I'm not denying that we have a supply issue, as IMO we really do need at least another two wards per neighborhood. I'm not going to dispute more wards as it's part of the solution.

However, people absorbing more than 2 houses per account (personal and FC) are an aggravating factor to the housing shortage, and for that reason, I am suggesting that we limit the number of personal houses an account can own down to one.

As someone else mentioned, SE is mathematically fine to make the land barons mad because at least one other person will benefit from it, so even at two houses/baron, the population benefits.

Also, there needs to be a random timer between 1-24 hours after a property is released, and one that does not tell **ANYONE** how much time is left. This change alone would completely destroy the house flipping market.

The other issue that needs to be addressed is the one person shell FC that has a house, but that's a subject for a different thread entirely - as any attempt to resolve that issue WILL cause side effects.

[lokowoko]

honestly enough i think this is the solution they need to go with, though i'd say to go one step further and add a rule that if you make an fc, all of your other characters on the server gets placed into it or are prevented from making/joining and removed from other fcs and the fc needs 10 or more unique characters (basically 10 different service accounts) before you can build an fc building, also adding a watered down version of airships/workshop for non fc houses probably would be nice. it would certainly help more people get a chance at housing in my opinion.