There are actually players who live off of decorating houses in FFXIV because they have a disability or are unemployed. Taking their show house away is not going to help them.
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Jesus can y'all not make up your minds?
This is pretty much what goes on in Ultima Online. When I stopped playing the only really hard server to get a house was Atlantic and even still it was not impossible to find something depending on what you wanted to settle for. UO probably was the basis on which the ward system was founded on in xiv , giving players the ability to own a physical location within the game. The population ratio tho is completely mismatched tho not nearly enough individual housing for the amount of players.
While I can sympathize with this, I still feel that a game which is dependent on the servers provided by the developer and for which you have to pay a monthly fee is a poor choice of canvas for something you want to keep around. The rules for auto-demolition have been in place since very early on and they are publicly known and the same for everyone. As you said yourself, the problem is that there isn't enough houses for everyone. Do you really think keeping houses reserved for inactive people for a longer duration is going to help?
IMO the auto demo timer should be left alone and always active. There's always something bad happening somewhere in the world, and SE should either leave it off (which is going to lock up a bunch of housing to people not paying subs) or leave it on and never turn it off again. I prefer the latter because while it's tragic that something bad happened halfway around the world, it's not really fair to the NA (or EU for that matter) customers to have the auto demo timer suspended for something that happened half a world away, and likewise, it's not fair to the JP customers to have the timer suspended over hurricanes in NA wreaking havoc on the US South. However, if we were talking about timer suspensions on a per datacenter thing, that's a bit more understandable and something I might be able to get behind.
Tbh, if you can't pay your sub, then you need to look at RL and figure out your financial issues before getting back to FFXIV. RL should always come first, and if you don't have the money to spend on FFXIV, you need to go solve that problem first and come back to FFXIV once you are able to pay for it again.
As far as Covid stuff goes, if you haven't figured out how to make a living by this point, you have bigger problems that need your attention than a house in FFXIV. Again, RL >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> FFXIV.
A better option would be to fix housing.
Why would you want bandaids on a gushing artery?
Just remove grandfathering, second to that... put the timers back on... its bad for the ingame economy as well that it is locked up like this.
Demo timer is back when the servers come up from maintenance. It's still not going to have the effect that many hope for.
I wouldn't say it's that bad for the in-game economy. House purchases prices (even mansions) are a drop in the bucket compared to how much gil is now sitting out there. The housing item market only thrives when there are new wards being added, otherwise it's fairly slow being dependent mostly on apartment purchases. Those who redecorate frequently are also usually omnicrafters capable of crafting everything they want so they only need to buy the few items that come from instances and lockboxes from the MB (assuming they don't already have them saved).
What would really help the item market would be moving to an instanced house system then removing the one house per account limit so every character could own a house if the player wanted. It would also help keep the item market a lot more consistent.
IMO if we're going the instanced route, it needs to make sense on a per character basis, so the restrictions don't make sense and shouldn't be there for instanced housing, and you should be able to have your instanced house alongside the wards. If it's a compelling enough alternative so that players aren't going to want to deal with the wards, it'll help the economy by generating more demand behind the housing items... while also reducing the demand on the housing wards.