Forcing players to pay to keep housing is unfair.

It's not all about "what if I was in the hospital possibly dying and couldn't log on", which was a really bad scenario in the first place. Though honestly if I was in the hospital, got out and my house that I worked my butt off to buy and decorate was gone, even though it wouldn't be the end the world kind of thing, I would still be pretty pissed off. There are a whole mess of things that can go wrong in a person's life from time to time, and keep someone off the game for a measly month and a half. We shouldn't be punished for real life happening ESPECIALLY in the case that our sub is being paid!

There should be some other way to preserve a personal house than the owner logging in, whether it's a permission given to a tenant that can enter the home and cancel the timer, or simply keeping our sub paid. The fact that any FC member can save a dead FC house from demolition but a friend is unable to save mine is absurd.

The housing system is flawled as it is, I think it's absurd that the FC housing shares the plots with personal housing considering there's much to benefit from housing and not having one makes you miss out on a LOT of features.
While I understand why the timers are there in the first place, it is upsetting that you can't take a break from the game without worrying about your house being demolished, it's not easy to get one specially on bigger servers. It's even more upsetting when you see a single person holding on multiple plots just for the sake of money.
Imo telling OP to get over it because this is "reality" is a poor excuse for condoning a flawled system. I'm hoping SE will address this problem in 4.0 or else the new housing area will be even a bigger mess than what we have now.

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Originally Posted by Rymm

And if losing a few 1s and 0s in a digital game is the worst thing you have to deal with after an extended hospital stay, you are lucky as hell.

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And this is why the argument is stupid, because nobody has ever said that this is the worst thing that could happen to them. The whole point is that players shouldn't lose their house because of stuff out of their control when they otherwise would have wanted to keep it.

To me our current system is balanced around FC, so one house can be used by multiple accounts and in theory everyone should have access to their benefits, but is just not working for us, EU/NA is more individualistic. Neighborhoods can stay as something exclusive but IMO we need a real instanced housing.

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Originally Posted by Naunet

And this is why the argument is stupid, because nobody has ever said that this is the worst thing that could happen to them. The whole point is that players shouldn't lose their house because of stuff out of their control when they otherwise would have wanted to keep it.

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Well, OP was the one who said "I could be in hospital dying", that implies preventing himself from dying is of a lesser importance than his pixel home, lol.

This could all have been avoided if he had just dealt with the issue instead of complaining about the demo timer, and asking SE to fix the housing system instead.

Is it unfair to have to stay in the game paying to keep one's house? Depends.. as I've said before, if you have to deploy for duty in the service of your country and its alliances. Then yeah.. that could be a bit unfair.

You know what is way worse? Imagine if you've had a house since they released housing. You've had it for several years. You paid good gil for it. You paid for furnishings. Later you may have put a workshop in it and have some airships with your Free Company. Now imagine if the server population dropped for whatever reason. And they decided to merge your server.

Guess what happens to your house and everything attached to it? Goes bye bye.

Sure.. they'll 'compensate' you in gil. But once the merger is complete. You're dispossessed. You have to find a new plot to build on. What if there isn't a plot to build on?

You see, most of you are focused around the idea that 'I've got mine, who cares about those who leave the game and come back?' But what happens when you face this situation in the future? You're going to cry foul in the forums. You're going to expect everyone to feel sympathy for you as well. Oh and don't give the spiel about how that isn't how it works. Ask the Korean FFXIV population when they had their 6 servers merged to 3. You don't need to look further than the front page here for a necro'd thread about it.

Instanced housing is the solution. It ties a house to a character rather than a server. It makes it so that server transfers aren't punishing and mergers aren't heartbreaking. That helps everyone. It helps you, the deployed soldier/marine, and the simple guy who wants to take a break from the game once in a while.

Or you can continue with the apathy. And get it in return later.

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Originally Posted by Kaethra

Oh and don't give the spiel about how that isn't how it works. Ask the Korean FFXIV population when they had their 6 servers merged to 3.

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It's not how it works though... those servers are run by a completely different company. It was their decision to merge their servers, nothing to do with Square Enix and nothing to do with our servers.

Since the start of 2.0 Square Enix has never even hinted at any merging of *our* servers.

In fact it's pretty much the opposite, instead of taking away, we know they're giving us an entirely new housing area some point after 4.0, which will probably be 12 wards and 12 subdivisions (to match the rest of the housing areas).

And with things like cross server party finder and the fact duty finder is also using entire datacentres, it wouldn't really matter if the worlds themselves were ghost towns.

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Originally Posted by Ailis

snip

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While a lot of us are telling the OP to get over it, we're also advocating that SE needs to fix this broken system. And indeed, I stood by that comment in the other thread (that I got mixed up with and thought was a different more recent thread about the issue) that I necro'd (which I necro'd by accident because of the aforementioned mixing up of threads). Yes, it sucks, but we have to deal with this for now and hence the getting over it. But at the same time SE need to fix their broken housing system. I'm sorry but it is utter garbage. I'll be firm but not crude.

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Originally Posted by worldofneil

It's not how it works though... those servers are run by a completely different company. It was their decision to merge their servers, nothing to do with Square Enix and nothing to do with our servers.

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It still would not change the fact that the housing system right now could mean that something like that will happen if they merge the servers. Does this mean it will happen? No! But it should be enough of a reason to at least introduce personal instanced housing to avoid such a problem or at least make it less hurting. Because with instanced housing they could simply move every personal house when merging to an instanced plot which would mean that there is a bigger chance for a FC to not lose their plot in the merge.

Even if they do not plan for it they should have this in their mind because there are always things that could happen that are not planned..and its not like SE always kept their word..especially about housing..

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Originally Posted by worldofneil

Since the start of 2.0 Square Enix has never even hinted at any merging of *our* servers.

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This is a 'stick head in the sand' sort of response.

If you wish to put your trust there, be my guest.

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Originally Posted by Kaethra

This is a 'stick head in the sand' sort of response.

If you wish to put your trust there, be my guest.

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Not really, to me SE is following Blizzard with their cross server tecnology and till today they never "merged" any server in a classic way.

Probably Korea population was so low that they needed a marge to keep the game playable.