This needs to be fixed. Posting solutions too.

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Originally Posted by Marcellus_Cassius

Every single person gets a house is a bit unrealistic.

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I would say it should be expected not unrealistic.

I feel for those who have been waiting for years now and I believe they deserve to have a home by now, housing IMO should not be a competition/epeen contest aspect of this game, it should be one of the few things that exists just for....idk, the "F" word...fun and player creativity, a place to let ones imagination go and relax, not like it is now lol

In some other games homes are infinite and zones huge to decorate and actually create in, not to mention one can purchase 10+ of them to create in...cheaply!

If a complete revamp would be necessary then I say do it, because it is long overdue.
Just my personal opinion on the matter...housing is one FFXIV weakest selling points by far.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

please understand that they are adding a form of instanced housing based around the idea of apartments

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Instanced apartments would have been the answer to personal housing in the first place, not private FC rooms and allowing players to buy housing in the FC wards as personal houses. Now instanced apartments are another crutch, its another band-aid over a broken system that solves none of the issues at hand. It won't solve why they can't add unlimited wards, nor does it solve people with multiple alts from mass buying plots with the sole intention of flipping them to FC's who have been waiting more then patiently for a house of their own.

Granted I don't play enough of FFXIV to where housing is a big important thing to me. Though after talking to my friends, most of which have been loyal SE and Final Fantasy can do no wrong since the launch days of XI. When putting up with waiting and watching the devs put mistake on top of mistake and the only thing growing is their frustrations to the point where they're so discouraged and talking not just quitting FFXIV but boycotting SE's future works. I can only imagine others feel the same way too.

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Originally Posted by Desfin

Well put, but Square has always been about their Japanese player base first and for most with almost everyone of their games, if the Japanese players are happy with Housing plots we won't have a fix/solution/BASIC INFORMATION for months if not years.

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This is the sad truth that I feel that most people are unaware of or refuse to acknowledge.

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Originally Posted by Oohlalaheals

Regarding the housing issue- why not just limit the housing to 1 house per FC and 1 personal house per player? This completely solves the issue of one person or one FC buying up all the plots to sell for ridiculous prices later, and honestly why would anybody *need* more than one house? When and if the housing issue is every resolved they could lift the restrictions for people who *want* multiple homes for whatever reason.

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An FC can't have more than one FC house.
A character can't have more than one personal house.
People still get around that by making more characters and using several accounts even.
Just bring down the ban hammer hard on players that buy just to scalp it at a higher price to someone else.

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Originally Posted by Marcellus_Cassius

I think the problem is their server storage capacity, instances or not wouldn't it cost them the same? Both methods would mean more furnishing items to store per player.

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I think it was dumb to implement housing the way they did if they couldn't find a way to make it available to everyone that wants it from the start.

Leave it as is. Implement instanced housing where you can get whatever size you want, it just won't be in a community. That way, people who want it can at minimum get whatever size they want and not have to trample each other and deal with flippers. Would kill the flippers almost instantly. There will probably still be people that want houses in specific spots but people that are approaching it more casually won't be screwed having to wait for more wards to be added with no house at all and possibly not even getting one at all.

Limiting the gardening system (which is what wards did before since there were limited plots and in extension gardening) seems pointless now with the flowerpots you can put in rooms.

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Originally Posted by Zyama

Are we supposed to just leave behind 21+ million gil?

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No, you get creative and raid the marketboard for things you can sell on your new server. There's no limit on taking items with you cross-server, and if you're smart enough to make an alt on the server you're moving to and scope out the market there, you can even make more money in the deal.

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Originally Posted by Zyama

The solution is SE gets it's head out of it's arse and moves housing to a separate server and then adds wards as they fill up.

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I'm no programmer, but wouldn't having you literally go to a different server every time you entered your housing area break a lot of things? For instance, the ability to send tells? The real solution is a lot more complicated than that, but it would start with people shifting around so that the population isn't all clustered in one overpopulated server and end with SE fixing it's clearly very poor data handling.

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Originally Posted by dashrem

stuff

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I been reading the JP forums and the thing is, on the JP servers they dont have as much greedy jerks (if at all noticable) that 'buy up all the houses'
Of course its first come first serve so there are some that are bummed up but there arent threads that are wholy complaining like i see on the english side.
The housing system isnt designed so every player can get one, that was clear when the housing first came out.

Seemsmore a country problem than a game problem tho >> our side is too greedy as F.
Most of the time the thing that thwarts JP from doing stuff like that is the whole community looks down on you.
Here, I feel that pple can pull crap and FC's will still accept you and your friends will still be ok with you.
Thats the problem, there are no repercussions from our own community on our side.
SE can punish you but your FC and friends will cheer you all the way and you dont feel that bad.

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Originally Posted by Fouraces

Second problem. Lacking meaningful high priced items to spend Gil on once you reach a certain threshold. After you reach a over 100,mil Gil there is nothing to buy that can even dent that pocket. The solution use to be to buy a house. That was the biggest dent you could do. It could be items, or other things. If someone can make 25mil a day. There needs to be things down the line to balance that.

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This is such a first world problem lol. I'm sorry, but 99% of the playerbase will never have even close to that much, so this isn't really a problem. Just be happy you're set for anything you could possibly want in the game.

Every person getting a house is not the point. They have not even provided a 10th of the population/sub count. It's a lot like the winning the lotto. You chances a slim because the odds are like 720 out of 2mil on snagging a property. It is mathematical that this is not going to work and is a waist of time money and server space to continue. Even more so because instanced housing would cost less in terms of a technological stand point. Linear games use less performance than a and open world game because of load screens, and not having to render in more objects that are out of you field of view. Using an instanced lot you would only be rendering your lot and the skybox that potrays the illusions that you are in the ward. For a player house being inside of an open world ward you would be rendering in every object everyone placed, the ward, their house, their positions and other multiple factors that would other wise be completely ignored if the house was closed of in an instance.

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Originally Posted by Roegadyn_Bear

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Originally Posted by Desfin

if the Japanese players are happy with Housing plots we won't have a fix/solution/BASIC INFORMATION for months if not years.

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This is the sad truth that I feel that most people are unaware of or refuse to acknowledge.

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No, it's borderline xenophobic nonsense (as is your reply), and is an over dramatic response to an annoying situation.

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Originally Posted by Fouraces

You chances a slim because the odds are like 720 out of 2mil on snagging a property.

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Your math is so wrong, it discredits your argument. The number of plots per server is currently 2,232 (12 wards with 2 subdivisions each in 3 zones each with 31 plots; 12x2x3x31=2232) and not 720. I'm not aware of any server with an active population much larger than about 20, 000. IIRC there are 64 servers which translates to 142,848 possible housing plots available to the active subscription base. The last estimate of active players I can remember was far short of the total number of accounts and characters, i believe the number was about 600,000 active accounts, but it could be as many as a million or more, especially around patches. That means that there is approximatelty a 15%-25% chance that any given account could have a home. Of course things are more spread out than that and some servers morepopulous than others, but even on a crowded server you are still loking at greater than a 1 in 10 ratio of plots to active players.

Absolutely it's not enough yet, I agree, but please dom throw silly numbers up when debating easily quantified information.

Btw, the instanced apartments should add approximately 36,000 'housing' slots per server, and when the Ishgardian zone opens 744 more plots will be added, and another 12,000 or so apartment instances. That's asuming 512 instanced apartments per ward/subdivision. If it's only 256 each, the number of aparyment instances would be halved. Sti;l this will mean each server will ultimately have about 3,000 housing plots (assuming they add no more wards/subdivisions) and either 24,000 or 48,000 potential apartment instances.

World of Warcraft took more than 10 years to implement a system of Phasing(http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Phasing) when other games already had at the time.
The problem was how this system is implemented to the game and it is too late to change without harming the community.

Prolly an architectural issue on the SE hardware end. The way they're doing it implies everything is permanently loaded to RAM or at least cached to fast storage (e.g. a high iops SSD). This means they can only expand so much. Instancing the housing would imply outsourcing the housing to an auxiliary server but I cannot see a clean way for them to reprogram the existing wards.

I've seen few people try to use the idea of limiting housing to free companies whether completely or whether housing within wards. Firstly personal housing was promised to players of this game prior to realm reborn and before FC housing even was a concept...FC housing was the fall back plan they came up with after realized they would struggle to support personal housing on their old infrastructure.

Also keep in mind anyone can set up a free company and a free company can have as little as just one person as a member. It might be called free company house but it would still be a lot of individuals running those free companies without members just to get the house if personal housing was not an option or was not on offer.

On the Ishgard apartments I think it will just be a single room like when purchase a room in an FC or the single room you got in FFXI...so I think it is dubious to equate/call that 'housing' or 'plot' as though it is anything like owning an actual house or like owning a housing plot currently in FFXIV which includes multiple rooms inside and outside ownership of a fair amount of land on your property. Some people might be happy with apartments, some people might not but lets not pretend owning a house currently and owning an apartment are going to be equal.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

No, it's borderline xenophobic nonsense (as is your reply), and is an over dramatic response to an annoying situation.

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Oh ho, really now?

Tell me why Au Ra got changed? Or why the Japanese player base got a region locked event all for themselves. Square-Enix would not be the first, nor last, Japanese game developer that does special events for their Japanese playerbase while excluding those of other regions.

Suppose it is far easier to label such statements pointing out what appears to be Japanese favoritism as xenophobia though, isn't it?

The biggest mistake was to introduce personal housing in areas that should only be for FC housing. But the damage is done and I doubt much will change in that regard. LotR style housing with growing wards to accomodate the housing needs would be great but require a server investment on SE's side. Especially overpopulated servers like Balmung would easily go to 100+ wards in Mist alone.

Now, how to solve the problem? Make the Ishgardian housing simply better than the exsisting one. It needs to have better atmosphere and the appartments need to be bigger than the traditional housing. Make that is has standart, big and luxury appartments, with Luxury having several rooms, a big balcony and possibly a little instanced garden along with a chocobo parking lot. To get the neighborhood feeling, you could simply make it that a certain amount of appartments are on Ishgardian streets and that a new street is opened whenever the appartment limit on one has been reached. It would be a nice touch of things like items that you set on your windowstill could be visible from outside. Basically mini-wards that are not too data intense.

Appartments should also fully count as personal housing, meaning you can not have an abode in the Goblet and Ishgard, just to make exsisting plots less attractive in the overall picture.

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Originally Posted by Waterdeep

Now, how to solve the problem? Make the Ishgardian housing simply better than the exsisting one. It needs to have better atmosphere and the apartments need to be bigger than the traditional housing. Make it so that it has standard, big and luxury apartments, with Luxury having several rooms, a big balcony and possibly a little instanced garden along with a chocobo parking lot. To get the neighborhood feeling, you could simply make it that a certain amount of apartments are on Ishgardian streets and that a new street is opened whenever the apartment limit on one has been reached. It would be a nice touch of things like items that you set on your windowsill could be visible from outside. Basically mini-wards that are not too data intense.

Apartments should also fully count as personal housing, meaning you can not have an abode in the Goblet, Lavender Beds, and the Mists, just to make existing plots less attractive in the overall picture.

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I do agree with this idea.

Unfortunately, it makes too much sense and therefore it'll never come to pass.

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Originally Posted by Roegadyn_Bear

Oh ho, really now?

Tell me why Au Ra got changed? Or why the Japanese player base got a region locked event all for themselves. Square-Enix would not be the first, nor last, Japanese game developer that does special events for their Japanese playerbase while excluding those of other regions.

Suppose it is far easier to label such statements pointing out what appears to be Japanese favoritism as xenophobia though, isn't it?

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Xenophobia is easy to spot, just as other forms of prejudice are. You are the one making distinctions and drawing conclusions based on assumption and distinction. This topic has been discussed before and many examples of SE responding directly to the NA and/or EU player community have been put forward. As is typical they were dismissed about as glibly as you dismiss the assessment of xenophobia by those wishing to portray SE as an entity that ignores it's non-japanese customers. Engaging in further debate is pointless, there are myriad examples of companies running special rpromotions in their home markets whether American, Japanese, German, British or whatever. Market specific promotions are not an indication of bias, unles you happen to fel entitled to everything anyone else has of course. But let's not bring entitlement into this yet, someone else may wantto have that fun.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

Xenophobia is easy to spot, just as other forms of prejudice are. You are the one making distinctions and drawing conclusions based on assumption and distinction.

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I guess you figured me out, Nancy Drew.

Of course I'm drawing conclusions based on my observations. Are they true? Who knows really, but I've seen enough cases of Japanese and Korean game developers favoring their own demographic to go with my gut on this.

I will give you that I could have worded my previous statement better, however.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

This topic has been discussed before and many examples of SE responding directly to the NA and/or EU player community have been put forward. As is typical they were dismissed about as glibly as you dismiss the assessment of xenophobia by those wishing to portray SE as an entity that ignores it's non-japanese customers.

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For the record, I don't believe that they completely ignore their non-Japanese playerbase.

I do believe, however, that we hold considerably less influence on their design decisions and that our input means less to them than that of their Japanese playerbase.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

Engaging in further debate is pointless

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True.

You're not changing my thoughts about this and I'm certainly not going to change yours.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

Market specific promotions are not an indication of bias

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Of course not, unless that particular market keeps getting said promotions.

Let's not go into a xenophobia discussion and keep things on track. My suggestion for housing for everyone:

Sky Housing:
Just like the Vundu, Player can get a floating rock to build things uppon. Be it a little hut, garden or anything like that. You can aquire more 'land' and build bridges inbetween, even building an instanced house on it. While those rocks float in a seperate, instanced skybox you can 'link' your islands with a friends so that their islands appear in the distance and you can fly over there. This can be done 4 times for each cardinal direction. That way people can build their neighborhoods themselves or stay private. Being basically just a big skybox and a few rocks, data management should be pretty easy as well. You could even incorporate getting new land into beastmens quests, making people work for it along with it costing a lot of money to have a constant drain of gil from the economy. Rich people can get big sky fortresses pretty quick while poorer people have something to work for.

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Originally Posted by Desfin

if the Japanese players are happy with Housing plots we won't have a fix/solution/BASIC INFORMATION for months if not years.

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I disagree with this. Some of my FC neighbor member pretty grumpy with how the house sold pretty fast by those reseller.