"Free Company Houses" should not exist, they only encourage "personal/solo FC's"

These are why I think they should entirely separate housing from gameplay features. Like, there are incentives to having a house beyond just having a space to decorate, so of course people are going to want access to those features whether they care about housing itself or not. It's a bad system intertwined with other (imo also bad) systems that is trying (imo also badly) to cater to multiple different groups of people while being fair to none of them.

And like, I get housing probably isn't at the top of their list for major gameplay features. They clearly had some kind of vision they're either intent on sticking to or unable/uninterested in reworking in any significant way. The biggest bandaids we've gotten have been demolition, which spends about as much time off as on, and now the lottery. But as it is unless they do entirely rework it, it's just always gonna be an ill fitting hodgepodge of weirdly implemented ideas.

I think the only reason I even care so much is because I've wanted player housing as a thing for years - like my primary mmo for over a decade was wow, which has never had housing, and aion did have it but that games been mostly dead since year 2 and its actual housing was on an auction system with weekly upkeep fees. They at least gave every player a free apartment by default though. This was the first game I played where housing was both a fairly extensive system and also actually attainable in a way I didn't have to worry about losing (at the time) but the flaws have just become more glaring over time. I'm at the point where it feels like I've just invested too much energy into a system that I'm never gonna be able to fully enjoy even though I already HAVE a house (in my least favorite zone in a ward deader than Zenos).

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Originally Posted by Reinha

The last one alone is a sufficient reason. You also get a company chest you can use to transfer items to alts or fill with your own items, buffs of your own choosing, a crest and tag you can choose and swap at will, access to items bought with company credits, a house your alts can share and extra storage space for furniture in the FC rooms of your alts which are conveniently inside the house itself.

In case you feel like being in a more social FC, recruiting people into your own FC is risk free, because you have the ability to get rid of individual problem players without losing the social, financial and time investment you've put into the FC. You get to decide how the FC is run and you never have to rely on someone else to give you permission to access features.

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The Company Workshop thing is a legitimate concern, for sure. I would think it would be easy enough to make it accessible somewhere else in the game world (perhaps near your FC's nation's Grand Company? or perhaps in Revenant's Toll?), but I definitely think it's a problem that can be rectified in many different ways.

At the end of the day, while the game is certain totally playable with the current system, I think changing it would make the game a lot more "fair", and promote healthier communities for everyone. It's not the end of the world, but I see literally no downside, except that those like myself who ARE abusing the system to effectively "have two houses" would simply lose one of those. Which I think it objectively the fairest path forward.