There was no abuse. They didn't glitch to do this. They just managed to afford several houses. Abuse implies some sort of exploiting.
Printable View
It is when you're negatively impacting others. And stop trying to defend the indefensible.
Given the restrictions, it's pretty clear that they did something SE did not intend them to do, otherwise they wouldn't have felt the need to pen what's on https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes.../housing_land/ .
You can keep deluding yourself that the restrictions weren't the original SE intention but SE naively thought people wouldn't get greedy and buy up wards then were forced to implement that policy once it became a problem due to lack of supply.
Until we have the SE stats (and not some third party site that may have doctored stats), we don't know what percentage of the houses are grandfathered in, what percentage of the FCs are FCs with less than four members (which is how many that's needed to sign it) or how many FCs have less than four active service accounts. I have a strong feeling that if stats of that nature were published we'd probably be shocked at the amount of FC houses that fall into the two buckets I listed, as all of those FC houses should be released back into the pool so a legitimate FC (or another player) can get a house they've been longing for. And while I doubt the grandfathered in houses are as big a chunk as the FC side of things, that's also something that should have never been allowed to exist in the first place, and SE should correct that mistake as I imagine SE naively thought most players would only roll one character, so there'd only ever need to be one personal house per server per account... and history has shown that not to be the case.
Ok... so why did SE write the restrictions listed at https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes.../housing_land/ ?
Purchasing a number of houses, as much as it's super greedy and shouldn't be allowed in the first instance, was not the player's fault, but the developers.
Clarify your language about abuse. The player did not abuse what they were able to do, with the sheer amount of gil they had. That. Is. Not. Abuse.
The developer of the game not fixing it afterwards, That could be classed as a type of abuse.
Such arrangements are known as Grandfathering. It would have been better for Square to advise players to pick one property to keep, reimburse with their made up gil purchase for the rest, and put the others back into circulation.
It is an abuse to keep the status quo and not change it, I agree on THAT point alone.