Now That The Game Is Getting A Housing Upgrade, When Are The Extra Wards?

I would suggest that SE does something with people using the FC exploit to have multiple characters per account and more to as well as removal of grandfathering... it alone would free up 100s of housing across all servers to begin with.

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Originally Posted by Brynne

Even on Dynamis, it's difficult to get a medium or large house now. There are plenty of smalls, though... which illustrates another problem, but that's not what we're discussing here.

I agree with others that instanced housing would solve most if not all problems, but that's not likely to happen while SE is doubling down on their chosen housing model. SE could take some measures to free up a few houses - by allowing access to company workshops outside of housing for example. But this is still a bandaid fix. As long as demand is far higher than supply, nothing will be solved. I wish they'd give some kind of instanced option.

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Eh, I left two Medium houses behind on Maduin when I moved to Excalibur (abandoned the personal, gave away the FC), so I know I did my part to free up space over there. But it highlights the problem that as someone who wanted to actually play the game and not just own houses, there was "nothing" for me on Dynamis, and I gained more by moving out and never going back then if I had stayed any longer.

Anyway, I've no problems with making workshops available for all, but it would require absolutely destroying the amount of gil it produces to avoid mass inflation. Of course, they could destroy the gil-minting RIGHT NOW and that would still have the effect of freeing up a lot of plots as most, if not all, of the submarine farms shutter up. But Square-Enix is a master of maintaining problems instead of fixing them.

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Originally Posted by Themarvin

it alone would free up 100s of housing across all servers to begin with.

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They'd need to free up likely 15-20 full wards (main and subdivision) PER neighborhood type to even dent demand meaningfully. The last several times they added 3-4 wards on main data centers, it was gone majority within a few hours, everything within 1-2 days back during non-lottery era of first come first serve, or 2-3 housing cycles when lottery got added. You'd need 10 wards minimum to even last a week/month before they got bought out, which would mean wiping out like a third of the existing houses.

Every time someone brings up the housing in XIV, I think about how in SWTOR every player can get a (cheap) house in EVERY location that has housing and decorate it with 10 times the items, and there's no issues with server capacity or anything...
Shame we can't have that in this game too.

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Originally Posted by ServerCollaps

95% of fcs in this game are dead anyway. You can always play with friends, thanks to server and data center hopping. You have cross world links shells aswell as fellowships to compensate being in a fc

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Again, people should not really have to transfer away from said groups, especially when they do like said groups, and ultimately a limited housing supply is always going to be just that regardless of whether people do or do not travel, hence why it is a band aid and not really a solution.

It's like you missed half of what I actually said -- inane compromises like needing to server or DC hop for social interaction (or playing with others) and thus hampering their ability to interact with parts of the game, e.g., retainers unspoiled/folklore nodes.. Cross-world LS will only do so much. Especially when you're insisting on a solution where the onus is on the player and not on the developer to support their own game.

Like, if you actually had players making these compromises and just picking up whatever house were available, you would very quickly see some DCs and main servers would have an inadequate supply.

For a game that relatively speaking (Had up until recently) only had a booming subscriber count, they don't really do enough.

The onus shouldn't be on the player to continually make compromises for SEs inadequate support for core features in their own game.

If you want to go ahead and insist people should make a compromise if they really want it, then that's your prerogative, but don't go around selling it as an actual solution when it's nothing more than actual temporary problem coping.

Reminder that we havent had new housing wards added since 12/26/2022, which is over 3 years ago
Reminder also, that we havent had a new housing exterior added since 06/27/2024, which is almost 2 years ago now
Reminder again as well that the last housing residential district added was 01/19/2021, which is 5 years ago

Housing overall is drastically behind schedule and not the reason that we're not getting anything else, as it's been neglected thoroughly for years now! Ok that is all. Love that we're getting the increased items, but we're behind on everything else that they used to do on a regularly balanced schedule that came to a complete stop and never resumed since, and I simply will never let them forget about it, that's all.

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Originally Posted by Voidsent-Uchiha

They'd need to free up likely 15-20 full wards (main and subdivision) PER neighborhood type to even dent demand meaningfully. The last several times they added 3-4 wards on main data centers, it was gone majority within a few hours, everything within 1-2 days back during non-lottery era of first come first serve, or 2-3 housing cycles when lottery got added. You'd need 10 wards minimum to even last a week/month before they got bought out, which would mean wiping out like a third of the existing houses.

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I honestly think this would be solved by closing the 'multi-per-account' loophole and removing grandfathered plots.

Knowing how the average person plays the game, there's a higher chance than not that only very few players both have the gil needed for a Medium or a Large plot, and are willing to tie it up in auctions indefinitely for only the chance of a house. Thus, it's likely that the many bids such plots get are not from house-less players looking for an 'in' to the system, but those with established venues or sub/airship farms trying to expand their 'portfolio', bidding on multiple characters to increase their chances and push out other moguls. This also explains why on the forums I only see the same 3 people in vocal opposition to any changes to the status quo, while everyone else seems vehemently in favor of changing it (and also why they so commonly use the argument 'why are there so many bids on larges but not on smalls?')...

So, remove the multiple-per-account loophole, make it so a service account can only own one house and one FC house across their characters. I guarantee at least half of Large plots would go up for sale overnight, and entire wards would turn into ghost towns. Would also prevent newly added/freed plots from being instantly taken up, since the demand would be more organic. If plot farmers want more, put your money where your mouth is--that's another 12.99 per month per house, please (they already do this with retainers lool). Housing problem solved.

Removing grandfathering would also help, but to a lesser extent. Can you imagine how many high value plots there are that are owned by players who haven't touched the game since ARR?

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Originally Posted by Voidsent-Uchiha

1) then stop giving them money. because that's how the system works.
2) the vast majority of the money they have, isn't even your money as a customer from ff14. even if ff14 is their biggest cash cow, you have interests from shareholders that outweigh those customers. before you even existed, they were millions in debt to people who have other interests. they don't need you, when they can drop another remake. they don't need you, when they can drop another collab. Yoshi P just doesn't want to go that route because that tells other management that they can afford to not listen to players even more. But they are extremely far from being on their last legs financially. the ff14 community is insignificant, but they've been dealing with a lead that talks to them and wants to care about them instead of just ignoring them entirely for 5-10 years like what other leads from other companies have done where they'll just straight wallet check you to see how important you actually are. you have been falsely put under the assumption that you direct the ship financially, when in reality, you're just a replaceable slave working the oars on the ship. you're not part of the crew. you didn't buy the ship, you come and go. you can just make a suggestion in the sense of, "if you don't want to replace me and go hiring again to make this ship move more, this is what I want". you only have as much power as you have in giant, overwhelming numbers. which is non-existent given the topic. but that's not an easy conversation behind the scenes for Yoshi-P to tell his crew and financial backers, "yeah, they want me to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix problems they created every other year, but also, if we ignore the problem, they won't leave the game, but we should fix it anyway."

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Being a paying customer makes me a stakeholder, which means I am as entitled to an opinion on how the company should be managed as much as a shareholder. You think your example of 'slave workers' apply to the real world but you do not seem to understand how shareholders get their dividends from their investments.

The reason why "vote with your wallet" doesn't work in XIV is because of people who think there are nothing wrong with the system and keep paying Square Enix anyway. People have been putting down points on why there needs to be changes and they will just say "that's not an issue" despite it glaring at them in the face. These are issues due to gaps in technology and it is up to the technology team to fix it.

And don't get me wrong, there player counts for Dawntrail has been on the decline, it's just Square Enix would rather ignore the games problems rather than trying to fix them. Note that I am not saying players are leaving due to housing alone, I'm just saying housing is one of the ones that are easily solvable and is gatekeeping paying customers what they are entitled to.

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Originally Posted by NegativeS

there's a higher chance than not that only very few players both have the gil needed for a Medium or a Large plot, and are willing to tie it up in auctions indefinitely for only the chance of a house

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- anyone who does field operations had access to 600k-1+mil/hr gil income
- anyone who regularly does savage content that can do mercenary runs. ultimate clears were like 7-10+mil per person assisting last I heard. lot of raiders including streamers sitting on hundreds of million they don't spend from various mounts they sold like chaotic and delubrum and paid runs saved up
- every nsfw courtesan/freelance and shoutrunner for venues. shoutrunners often make several mil in one night for 4 hours, courtesans used to be 100-150k/30min but nowadays I hear of rates in the 250-500k/30min, some people charging a mil or more per hour with animations. that's excluding findom's, that's excluding lifetime packages
- housing designers get commissioned at anywhere between 10-30mil per house on average
- gposers have done commissions/collabs ranging from a few hundred thousand at a low level up to several million for a single picture, especially if it's post-edited. they have freelance work in open world and social media, work at venues as photographers with hourly rates, and some users on twitter are charging 20-50mil for collabs with their characters. JP has Gochuumon Studio that had like 20-30+ artists on staff line-up for the venue all doing ff14 fan art/artwork for gil
- achievement hunters that spam deep dungeons, field operations, levequests, etc. would all have the gil requirement
- anyone who has $15-25 irl that doesn't mind a 10 day suspension if they get found out
- venue attendants that have 10-30mil giveaways at 3-10 locations every single night on every data center, also includes the ppl who sold themselves at various auctions and had gross overpay rates due to the environment
- anyone who does crafting/gathering even casually as it barely takes a week/month to get enough for a large
- any saint/beatus of the firmament
- barding individually was several hundred thousand per hour, bard groups were 2-5mil/hr income
- hunt train ppl with an army of materia to sell on patches
- treasure chest ppl when new content first drops

Like there's thousands of people that could easily earn 100+mil after just 1-6 months if they felt like it, let alone speaking about years. nowhere near just venues and submarines for the bidding wars. even small personals on balmung were racking up 100-200 tickets. but you are correct in venues and subs being the ppl who use alts the most as everyone else I've talked to, even if they have the gil, they refuse to put in bids on their alts because they want the house attached to their main character only. same way they won't make an alt on dynamis to use for roleplay or their gpose studio and wud rather fight 50-100+ tickets at home instead. self-nerfing condition technically.

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Originally Posted by Kaosuko

Being a paying customer makes me a stakeholder.

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I mean you say this, but it's literally not legally the case. No point in even responding to the rest if we're not being objective legally. You can literally be banned at any moment and not even be allowed access to the game, to the forums, to responding on social media, with 0 legal recourse. Your opinion even being allowed to be spoken is a privilege. If you played other games where staff regularly locked threads from the start and deleted threads on certain topics for years, regularly blocked creators, filed copyright claims on youtube video commentaries, you wouldn't even be in the realm of conflating what you're allowed to do vs. what you're entitled to.

It probably wouldn’t be that difficult to simply add a new “tab” or additional wards when needed. They could even manage this dynamically for each world and each housing district.

For example, if Ishgard becomes full (let’s say around 95% of the houses are taken), even if Ul'dah, Limsa, Gridania, or Shirogane still have available plots, they could simply add another Ishgard ward so players can still obtain a house in the district they actually want.

On lower-population servers, they could also remove or disable empty wards until the others fill up.

I really don’t see why the system needs to remain static when server populations differ so much. Some housing districts are clearly more popular than others, and every server has a different level of demand.

At the end of the day, this is a video game. It’s virtual space, not physical land. Instances can theoretically be added or removed depending on demand.

And for those telling me to just transfer servers: I started playing on Jenova the day the server opened. I played until late 5.2 when I took a break, then returned in 6.4. Of course I lost my house during that time. But my FC, my friends, and everyone I know are still on Jenova.

I haven’t managed to obtain a medium or large house again, and the small plot I eventually won isn’t even in the district I wanted. But the solution shouldn’t be asking players to abandon the server they’ve always played on.

On Jenova, on some weeks, there isn't any houses in some district, not even a small one to bid on.

I also don’t really believe there’s a serious hardware limitation behind this. Housing wards are just instances. If the infrastructure can handle an entire expansion’s worth of new content, it should be able to handle a few additional housing instances as well.

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Originally Posted by Voidsent-Uchiha

I mean you say this, but it's literally not legally the case. No point in even responding to the rest if we're not being objective legally. You can literally be banned at any moment and not even be allowed access to the game, to the forums, to responding on social media, with 0 legal recourse. Your opinion even being allowed to be spoken is a privilege. If you played other games where staff regularly locked threads from the start and deleted threads on certain topics for years, regularly blocked creators, filed copyright claims on youtube video commentaries, you wouldn't even be in the realm of conflating what you're allowed to do vs. what you're entitled to.

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Do not speak about legality if you know nothing of the subject matter.
This isn't even on point of the topic yet you keep defending Square Enix by saying "you shouldn't be able to complain".

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Originally Posted by Kaosuko

you keep defending Square Enix by saying "you shouldn't be able to complain".

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Aaaannnnd here comes the gaslighting with quotes that never existed. Utterly surprised.

Rest in peace are housing it got hit with a bazooka! Yoshi tells please look forward to it whenever I hit the hookah! Kaboom! Kabloom! Kaboom... I was in my room trying to teach my little sister then I heard a boom it sounded like a missile! What that is? Who that was? That's our ward slots oh they're gone...

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Originally Posted by AlliciaCapulet

I really don’t see why the system needs to remain static when server populations differ so much. Some housing districts are clearly more popular than others, and every server has a different level of demand.

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Because Square-Enix has a problem with people congregating onto one data center while leaving the rest of them to rot, so they're not going to do something that further encourages people to keep flooding into Aether which is what more wards there would do.

Trying to make people transfer out isn't ideal, and I certainly don't blame anyone for refusing to do so, but Square-Enix isn't about to make the problem we made for ourselves worst because it was 100% the community's fault that Aether got labeled the "raiding" data center while refusing to play anywhere else.

As for certain wards being more desirable than others, that's admittedly on Square-Enix for making places like the Goblet and Empyreum pretty damn dull compared to the rest, but I also don't know what could be done to make them more appealing so people are more willing to choose them instead of everyone rushing into Shirogane and the Mists.
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Originally Posted by Kaosuko

Do not speak about legality if you know nothing of the subject matter.
This isn't even on point of the topic yet you keep defending Square Enix by saying "you shouldn't be able to complain".

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You should probably know that the person you're arguing with is a house hoarder themselves, so of course they see "no problem" with the current system and automatically assume everyone else is "entitled" even as they sit on entire wards to themselves. You won't ever get an unbiased or sensible discussion out of them, because its in their best interest that things remain as they are.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

Because Square-Enix has a problem with people congregating onto one data center while leaving the rest of them to rot, so they're not going to do something that further encourages people to keep flooding into Aether which is what more wards there would do.

Trying to make people transfer out isn't ideal, and I certainly don't blame anyone for refusing to do so, but Square-Enix isn't about to make the problem we made for ourselves worst because it was 100% the community's fault that Aether got labeled the "raiding" data center while refusing to play anywhere else.

As for certain wards being more desirable than others, that's admittedly on Square-Enix for making places like the Goblet and Empyreum pretty damn dull compared to the rest, but I also don't know what could be done to make them more appealing so people are more willing to choose them instead of everyone rushing into Shirogane and the Mists.
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You should probably know that the person you're arguing with is a house hoarder themselves, so of course they see "no problem" with the current system and automatically assume everyone else is "entitled" even as they sit on entire wards to themselves. You won't ever get an unbiased or sensible discussion out of them, because its in their best interest that things remain as they are.

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They could keep the server closed to new people or keep it restricted but at least open wards for people that are actually there...

I know it's a community problem, sometime I really wishes that people goes back to Primals or Dynamis, especially when a new raids comes out. It become hard for us to just travel to see our friend or do stuff...

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Originally Posted by Voidsent-Uchiha

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Regardless of how easy to make the money, the argument is also how willing these people are to spend the money. Because there are a lot of things someone could conceivably spend gil on--gear, leveling, mounts and other expensive items, and some of the things you listed...

But even outside of that, the argument still stands, at least on highly populated servers like those on Aether. All houses end up in the clutches of hoarders eventually, because they have virtually infinite gil compared to an individual's ~100m, and an army of alt characters compared to the individual only wanting the house on their main (which makes sense). So that's 50 set-and-forget bids against one 'if I don't get it this time I'm done with this system' bid. And there are multiple of the first group competing with each other.

And then you end up with wards that look like this...

https://i.imgur.com/c5f3v0x.png

...and the game is worse off because of it.

Better to tighten the restrictions on the system and be done with it. A few ERP venues is not worth this miscarriage of game design... and excluding extraordinary circumstances, the only reason one would have to disagree is if they were part of the problem.

(And judging by your shell FC of choice, I think I can guess where you stand...)

Before they adds more wards, they really needs to do something with this massive problem of housing plot hoarders where single FC or single player using massive amount of accounts have bought +15 of housing plots on mutiple wards and in some cases even bought entire or almost entire ward and of course there is chance that these housing plot hoarders does have something to do with RMT when quite often i have seen these RMT bots advertising to selling housing plots in recent years.

It would be lot better if they make entirely new housing system where it's a instance based and every player can buy small, medium or large housing plot without need to wait x amount of time to find purchasable housing plot and have pure luck to win the housing plot lottery while the housing lottery system is active.

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Originally Posted by NegativeS

Regardless of how easy to make the money, the argument is also how willing these people are to spend the money. Because there are a lot of things someone could conceivably spend gil on--gear, leveling, mounts and other expensive items, and some of the things you listed...
As is the same case for the venues/submarine people. You choose what you invest your gil in. If you spend your 100mil on glamours, and they spend their 100mil to make more gil later on, you live with the consequences of your decisions.

because they have virtually infinite gil compared to an individual's ~100m, and an army of alt characters compared to the individual only wanting the house on their main
And where does that infinite gil come from before the first submarine is even built? That ward costed 300-400mil just on property, and 300-400mil in submarine gearing costs. Where does that 600-800+mil come from? The first 10 FC's? Where did the money from that come from? Same starting point as everyone else. And as I said, them going against an army of alt characters without alts themselves is their choice. You have legit FC's that I've seen on Balmung on Twitter bidding a bil+ on large's as well. And you as an individual, are going into a lottery category meant for groups of people and get mad that those groups of people outbid you, as a single person, in a category, not catered to you. You being outbid, is not the problem. That is systemically intended. What you actually have a problem with, is the ratio of houses meant for individuals vs. groups because you don't want to compete with groups but find yourself forced to.

(And judging by your shell FC of choice, I think I can guess where you stand...)
You think, but if you went to the plot, like every other that's open, there's not even a workshop built despite that house being bought back in 2022/2023. Good attempt though.

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forced to write here.

I just lost a bid among 110 other people.

We need housing updates, stat.

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Originally Posted by AlliciaCapulet

They could keep the server closed to new people or keep it restricted but at least open wards for people that are actually there...

I know it's a community problem, sometime I really wishes that people goes back to Primals or Dynamis, especially when a new raids comes out. It become hard for us to just travel to see our friend or do stuff...

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I think the issue Square-Enix has with this is that they would be making new wards for Aether constantly in order to accommodate every possible person there (doubly so if houses keep getting grabbed up by hoarders first), or how it would require them to PERMANENTLY lock down Aether for transfers going forward because they don't want people thinking "if we all just rush in when the gate is open, SE will be FORCED to make houses for us".

Whether or not that's a fair trade off for some, that Aether goes into eternal lockdown (transfers and traveling) for adequate housing for all of those already there, I can't really say because every time Aether gets too congested for transfers or traveling, there's always people popping their head up complaining they can't get in or can't bring their friends over anymore, and then SE like fools creaks open the gate and another flood comes in acting like Aether is the only data center that works.

Even then, what would "adequate housing" look like? Lots of people refuse anything smaller than a Medium, or they abhor owning a house in the Goblet or Empyreum. Would they need to add thousands of wards in Shirogane and the Mists before everyone on Aether would be at last satisfied? Will they all need to be FC wards because most people want a house that makes gil on the side? SE's idiotic decision in making housing scarce and tying money to it (both real and fake) never ceases to keep making problems.

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Originally Posted by Kaosuko

If someone wishes to buy a house for their FC, they are entirely in their rights to do so. The issue is locking out paying customers from something everyone should have equal opportunities to own.



I transferred worlds because my friends are on that world. To transfer away will be counter-intuitive. Instead of adding in new empty worlds, they should have expanded the existing ones but that's not the topic for today.

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Equal opportunity what do we mean?

Because having an equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome.

As it stands, everybody has an equal opportunity to get a plot.Because everyone has an equal chance to win a plot.Regardless of what server theyre on.

I think you're looking for equal outcome, it's not opportunity that you seek, but the guarantee for everyone to be able to have.

Not saying you're wrong for wanting it. But I think the word opportunity is being liberally used when a guarantee is what they are really asking for

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Originally Posted by Solowing

Equal opportunity what do we mean?

Because having an equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome.

As it stands, everybody has an equal opportunity to get a plot.Because everyone has an equal chance to win a plot.Regardless of what server theyre on.

I think you're looking for equal outcome, it's not opportunity that you seek, but the guarantee for everyone to be able to have.

Not saying you're wrong for wanting it. But I think the word opportunity is being liberally used when a guarantee is what they are really asking for

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Opportunity as in if a player wants a house, they should be able to get one. The current lottery process is not equal opportunity because only the ones that are lacking housing are vying to compete against each other. The ones already with housing that had them before the lottery change did not have to compete, so not everyone had the same opportunities to get a house.

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Originally Posted by Kaosuko

Opportunity as in if a player wants a house, they should be able to get one. The current lottery process is not equal opportunity because only the ones that are lacking housing are vying to compete against each other. The ones already with housing that had them before the lottery change did not have to compete, so not everyone had the same opportunities to get a house.

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Equal opportunity ensures a level playing field—such as identical rules or access—but does not guarantee equal outcomes, which are determined by individual choices, effort, talent, and luck.