New Wards Alone Aren't Going to Solve the Housing Issue

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Originally Posted by Mikki

The major problem is the fact that you need an FC to do airship stuff. I know that my friend and I are basically in a two people FC (there are actually 4 of us but the other two come and go) and the reason is that we want to do what we want to do with the airships and joining another FC, it's unlikely that they would let us take over the company workshop and let us do whatever we wanted, especially if it's things for our own gains.

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That really needs to be something ran through Cid's company, especially doing something like building an FC airship.

As much as you and many people want to add more restrictions/limitations/reclaimations/other hoops to jump through, just like adding more wards won't fix the problem, neither will these.
As long as the number of unique players on a server is greater than the number of houses available, there will be a problem. We need to be asking for dynamic wards or a complete rework to the personal housing system, not making houses so restricted and gated with a potential to be lost for any number of reasons that owning one becomes stressful.

Remember how reclamation and demolishing was going to solve the issue? Did it? No. A handful of people grabbed a reclaimed house, sure, but look at the number of people still homeless and wanting a house. It didn't do anything but remove a tiny little dent in the overall population who wants a house, but added a great strain on housing owners to have to keep up their sub even in the event of a personal illness, disaster, work, military, or other RL issue that might keep them away for a period of time.

There are 60*12*4=2880 plots on the server. Looking at any of the various ffxiv census sites shows that most worlds in NA have over 10k active players, and most servers on EU have over 12k active players. At best, if every person owns exactly one house (completely excluding FCs), still less than 75% of the population will not have a house. Adding FCs in here will make this percentage higher. So even with our current system, and only one person having a house, ~6000+ people per server that want a house can be upset about not being able to own a house.

Even if the number of wards was increased to 20, or doubled to 24, there will not be enough houses for every individual non-alt player.

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Originally Posted by Almagnus1

That really needs to be something ran through Cid's company, especially doing something like building an FC airship.

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I honestly wonder where the airship even docks. Surely it can't be in the basement.

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Originally Posted by Titor

As much as you and many people want to add more restrictions/limitations/reclaimations/other hoops to jump through, just like adding more wards won't fix the problem, neither will these.

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Most of us are well aware of this, however we're attempting to work within realistic bounds. The ideal solution is a dynamic housing system that generate wards based on demand or instanced housing. Neither are scenarios SE will likely adapt. Therefore, adding a good enough number of wards and making it far more difficult to flip houses will at least provide some improvement. Say they double each housing region and impose a one house per account, per serve limitation. While that won't fix the system by any means, it will drastically increase the possibility housing goes to actual players looking to enjoy the fancy, not simply profit from it.

Short-term band-aid: Add more wards. Tighten the house per account rules.

Long-term: Ground zero overhaul to full instanced housing. You know, like how other smart MMO devs figured out a long time ago.

Not sure what is the deal over there in Japan. Do they not have access to other MMOs to research design? Are they seriously working in a bubble?

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Originally Posted by Titor

There are 60*12*4=2880 plots on the server. Looking at any of the various ffxiv census sites shows that most worlds in NA have over 10k active players, and most servers on EU have over 12k active players. At best, if every person owns exactly one house (completely excluding FCs), still less than 75% of the population will not have a house. Adding FCs in here will make this percentage higher. So even with our current system, and only one person having a house, ~6000+ people per server that want a house can be upset about not being able to own a house.

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You're not factoring in that, as many (like myself) are going to be fighting for our FC to get a fair shake of things in Shirogane (which isn't what happened), yet I really don't want to own a personal house at this time.

So how many of the players do not want a house?

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Originally Posted by Jas710

Not sure what is the deal over there in Japan. Do they not have access to other MMOs to research design? Are they seriously working in a bubble?

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I will say that you need to be somewhat careful when evaluating a competitors product functionality in order to avoid employee contamination. However the general design principles should be well known across the industry.

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Originally Posted by Jas710

Do they not have access to other MMOs to research design? Are they seriously working in a bubble?

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There is a recently made documentary on FFXIV, can be found on Youtube. The reason that FFXIV 1.0 transit successfully into 2.0 was due to the fact that Yoship-P and the dev team at the time made extensive research into successful Western MMORPH at the time, including WOW.

However, since housing is not part of the "core" contents, it is undeniably not thought out properly at all, especially in the long term. Hence it led to today's supply shortage and many other issues.

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Originally Posted by Jas710

Not sure what is the deal over there in Japan. Do they not have access to other MMOs to research design? Are they seriously working in a bubble?

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Funny you should ask that. After seeing people refer to LOtRO's housing so much the past few days I read up on its housing system and noticed it is almost a clone except it is cross server and once you buy a house it is shared between all your characters. Hell, the neighborhoods even have 30 houses (30-house subdivision). I don't know why they don't go this route. They could even play test it by using existing wards as test wards to make into cross-server wards.

This would actually solve a few issues IMO:
1) A house for all your characters would solve the reasoning behind most of the "don't limit us" arguments (though not all). It may not destroy the flipping market but...
2) Dynamic wards means there will always be housing because wards are added as old ones fill up, thus destroying the "flipping market".
3) I remember SE talking about cross-server FC's a while back and the problems with only players on one of the servers having house access was a point that was brought up. cross-server housing would solve this for the most part.
4) It would also allow for people to get their "dream plot" and could allow for a "plot reservation system" when the next ward opens and a reserver's number comes up.


Although I would ask they didn't punish those with multiple houses already and allow those players to keep their multiple houses by simply not allowing them to buy more houses.

The only issues I could think of are:
1) Money - SE would probably have to invest in servers similar to the instance servers to make this work. The front-end load would be a lot larger because they would need to have enough servers for the first-day rush although it may not be as bad as I am thinking it would be.
2) It may take time for the behind the scenes stuff such as physical setup of servers, programming, etc. to be done right.
3) The "How" of new ward generation. Hopefully it will be on a city-by-city basis (ex. if Mist fills then it makes a new Mist) instead of a full set basis (the wards in all cities are filled before a new set is generated).

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Originally Posted by Titor

As much as you and many people want to add more restrictions/limitations/reclaimations/other hoops to jump through, just like adding more wards won't fix the problem, neither will these.
As long as the number of unique players on a server is greater than the number of houses available, there will be a problem. We need to be asking for dynamic wards or a complete rework to the personal housing system, not making houses so restricted and gated with a potential to be lost for any number of reasons that owning one becomes stressful.

Remember how reclamation and demolishing was going to solve the issue? Did it? No. A handful of people grabbed a reclaimed house, sure, but look at the number of people still homeless and wanting a house. It didn't do anything but remove a tiny little dent in the overall population who wants a house, but added a great strain on housing owners to have to keep up their sub even in the event of a personal illness, disaster, work, military, or other RL issue that might keep them away for a period of time.

There are 60*12*4=2880 plots on the server. Looking at any of the various ffxiv census sites shows that most worlds in NA have over 10k active players, and most servers on EU have over 12k active players. At best, if every person owns exactly one house (completely excluding FCs), still less than 75% of the population will not have a house. Adding FCs in here will make this percentage higher. So even with our current system, and only one person having a house, ~6000+ people per server that want a house can be upset about not being able to own a house.

Even if the number of wards was increased to 20, or doubled to 24, there will not be enough houses for every individual non-alt player.

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I can't but agree. It's like people don't realize the main issue here is the demand/supply difference and instead act like 90% of houses is owned by alt accounts and shell FCs. Basically it's all a huge conspiracy just so they couldn't get their dream house. So obviously we need to punish the current house owners just because it's not them. Unless SE finds a way to manage adding a lot more housing lots (and like you said, simply doubling the wards just wouldn't be enough either), that demand/supply difference is simply not going to change. If the server limitations are really that bad, instanced is probably the only way to go. Dynamic wards would be sweet.

Yes, the system sucks. The biggest limitations on changes and improvement is the existence of the current system - you can't just wipe the slate clean to make up new system. Most of the supposed "solutions" here are just ridiculous.

What I can agree with is that apartments need to have some outside space, like a balcony or small instanced garden. And that they should add the ability to have instanced workshop for your FCs even without having a house.

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Originally Posted by Septonyte

Although I would ask they didn't punish those with multiple houses already and grandfather those players in to the new system as they already are just to be fair.

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Most of the people calling for drastic changes are the people who failed to get house. These same people are gonna cry and whine it's unfair the people who used to have multiple houses kept them and their poor selves can only have 1 house per account. You are very much underestimating people's greed and envy.

All in all though, switching to a completely new system like this is extremely unrealistic and most likely not close to what's going to happen. There's probably way more issues to it than you outlined, a lot dealing with the transition from the existing system.

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I find it saddening how many bitter people are generalizing and acting like all the houses are owned by some kind of land baron who took their potential house lot just out of spite/greed to sell. I don't know how it's on other servers, but I looked through mine, and barely saw any plots without houses on them. As for people owning multiples, it's not like they didn't work hard for it. People might swim in gil now and every newbie can afford a house (which is what raises the demand so much), but that hasn't always been true. And saying the bigger houses shouldn't go to individual players cos FCs deserve them more? That's just so ridiculous. For some people decorating their house and enjoying it has more meaning than other aspects of the game. Why should they be denied it just because they are individual and not an FC? It's not like there is any difference for FC functions in the house depending on it's size.

And imo the worst thing of all that's happening now is people being unable to even enjoy their houses because everyone that didn't get theirs is being bitter and sour about it and guilt tripping the ones that lucked out. Is that how friends should act? Maybe think through what you are doing next time you're being passive/aggressive to your friends about it. It's not helping anyone.

If you truly think house flipping is the main issue of housing, then there is an easy solution to fix it. All they have to do is implement stricter measures to catch house flippers. It's really not that hard when you consider how often people give up their houses. It's not a common thing, so whenever it DOES happen, all they'd have to do is investigate the previous owner and current owner and analyze to see if anything suspicious happened. For example, did new owner recently trade large amounts of gil to another player instead of just buying the plot? If so, that's a clear sign that house flipping occured, and SE would be able to take whatever action they deem necessary.

But that's if you think house flipping is that serious.

If you think this is too complicated, then fine - just make it so that once you get a house, you CAN'T get rid of it, unless you don't enter it for 30 days (or whatever the timer is). And after the timer, the plot becomes free but unavailable for purchase for 20-24 hours (with the time being random), with people being able to see that the plot will soon be up for sale. Simple and no effort required from the staff.

But again, that's if you think house flipping is the problem. Which it isn't. Even if without these so-called "house barons", there's still a bunch of people looking after plots, regardless of whether they plan to re-sell them or not.

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Originally Posted by Mikki

I'm on Zalera which is really small. A day or two after 4.1 dropped, there were still houses in lavender beds, mist and goblet. Despite this though, I saw some plots near my house in Shirogane just ....sitting there. I checked the owners. Lo and behold, today finally they built a house on the land. Only..........the person who owns it now is different. Which means of course... someone resold it. On ZALERA. A server which still had plots available in other housing wards for 2 days after 4.1 dropped. I'm disappointed and I wonder if I should report it, but I don't want to cause trouble for the people who spent tons of gil to get their house showing that they clearly really wanted it.

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Have you considered that it may have been a player holding the house for someone they know? I'm not dismissing the possibility that a sale might have happened, but as someone who's helped secure a house for a friend myself, I find that it's troubling when people immediately assume that it's house flipping.

I'm a bit torn on the reporting thing solely because I don't know what the protocol is for these sorts of reports. Do the suspected parties' accounts become frozen during the investigation? If so, I think better to procure more substantial evidence of a house sale taking place (chat logs, if you can fish the info out of them) before making the report as to not inconvenience a potentially innocent player. If there's no such account freeze, then I think go ahead and file a report if you sense something's amiss.

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Originally Posted by nranola

Have you considered that it may have been a player holding the house for someone they know? I'm not dismissing the possibility that a sale might have happened, but as someone who's helped secure a house for a friend myself, I find that it's troubling when people immediately assume that it's house flipping.

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Like with all systems, there are legitimate uses (like yours) and abuses (like house flipping) which means when the abuses become so egregious that SE must step in people like you end up getting screwed through no fault of their own, even though they are actually being altruistic (as they should) and not selfish.

Ya know house flipping wouldn't be a thing if people simply wouldn't pay people to relinquish a house... you stop people from selling by not buying... as long as people are willing to pay the stupid prices for houses flippers are charging they will continue to sell them at those prices

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Originally Posted by Okamimaru

Ya know house flipping wouldn't be a thing if people simply wouldn't pay people to relinquish a house... you stop people from selling by not buying... as long as people are willing to pay the stupid prices for houses flippers are charging they will continue to sell them at those prices

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While that's true, if you can reduce the house flipper's capacity from 16 down to 2 (or 3), then you're going to cripple the house flippers ability to keep inventory. Throw in a random timer of unknown duration that happens upon releasing a house, and the risk to the buyer becomes significant, which will force the prices down.

Do both, and the market will collapse.