Critical Feedback: Housing is not for Casuals

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Originally Posted by kaynide

Why not an auction system where anyone can bid up for a 72 hour period?

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Honestly, unless they can solve the supply problem on legacy/busy worlds, that may actually be a better solution (since it helps drain extra gold from the economy, which is part of the objective from the developers). I think it would also frustrate people more since it'd be seen as even more a "system for the rich" at that point, but perhaps it's still preferable to "first come, first serve" when it's going to go that fast.

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Originally Posted by Mahri

As a casual, I'm fine with housing requiring more heavy prioritizing.

As a casual, I request that specific housing options be added to reflect the casual lifestyle.

When I log out, I want my character to appear snoring indelicately on my FC leader's couch, one hand in a bag of potato chips.

They should also appear there to everyone else who is logged in.

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God I'd love that.

Housing is, actually, not for amateurs. By that I mean SE, who continues to make bizarre choices (to put it kindly). The new subdivisions with their rotated maps only makes it even more chaotic. Each time a new, ahem, "feature" is added to the housing system I cannot avoid going "What the HELL are they doing?!"

I really hope that hosing gets a complete revamp in 3.0 cause right now it's so ridiculous that even MMOs from back in 2000 can still point a finger at it and laugh.

can we get some tents and camp out since housing goes so fast lol

I guess I should confess a little: I had an FC house. Actually, my 6 friends were on Sargatanas and we managed to get a house together in a pretty bad location in Mist (s-sized). Good times, but living in Japan the lag was just too much... like Titan HM was 1 second delayed for all 6 of us.

So, we sold the old house, packed up and moved to a Japanese server (picked Tonberry because there is a respectable English speaking population). There is almost no delay in playtime, and we had all the money ready to go for getting a house in 2.4

Things were looking good. As soon as the patch went up (around 5pm JP time), the earliest one of us could check in on a new house was that evening which, sadly, was too late. One member checked at 5:45 and Mist was sold out to private owners. There is the problem: It's not about being an amateur or pro at the game, but simply being able to log in at the right time (ie Chance)

I see these discussions popping up all the time and I have to wonder why they don't do a census of the housing situations on all the worlds and then increase based on that. Several servers have open plots -- lots of them. Some servers were sold out within a couple of hours of the patch going live. Why don't they add more housing where demand is higher and add less where it's lower? They could even take it a step further and add more Mist wards than Goblet wards since people obviously prefer one to the other. Now, this would surely not fix the problem, but it would be a bit more helpful. It must be frustrating knowing that you can't buy a house on Balmung, for example, but several wards on Behemoth (in the Goblet anyway) are just empty.

After all these months and being owner of a house all i can say, FFXIV has one of the worse designed, planned and executed housing systems in the MMORPG market. Period.


The time invesment/effort on getting a house isnt comparable with the limited options, limited designed (having server space problems over this is so late 90`) and limited philosophy behind it all. For much less several games give you much better housing, with far more options and more unique-ness to it.

FFXIV housing.

-All houses are the same square estructure. Want a round house? Want to move that stair other side? Want to have the house in another position? A diamond shaped fence maybe? Want an irregular angled house? All no.
-Housing items are limited. Some of them cant be dyed, others requiere insane high end materials to even be gotten, making a casual activity like housing suddenly a grind. No mirror option for items, cant place them as you would like, no "3D" placement.
-Housing is plain useless. Gardens, yeah! ok, gardens, and thats it, beyond that housing is useless and seems to not have any special feature in the far future (SE didnt even think about having shared permissions with incoming marriage till they were asked about it, something totally logic for a housing system, revealing how little investment of R&D is going to housing)
-Guild and Personal housing mixed up. This is another killer, having whole group of players and single players fighting for plots is just... lacks of foresight.

Games with much less resources got all those points right to a degree, or at least tried. Housing in FFXIV is whatever but what housing is about, an unique, placid, casual, short term, fun and lasting activity. Housing is not unique (what makes housing unique is customization, not accessibility) housing is not placid when you can`t share it with almost no one, is not casual since it requieres lots of work towards it, isn`t short term for most people, is not fun when again, everyone is outside cause there isn`t many players there cause... SERVERS! and isn`t a lasting activity. With so few and limited customization options, housing burns out after 2 or 3 remodelings, after that, the only thing you visit your house is garden (which also burns out really quick even with the promise of materials) and universal item NPCs.

Im not saying that FFXIV should have something like Wildstar or Rift`s housing (rifts being the best by lightyears) but damn, could have at least tried, instead, hurried everything up, hyped it, and didn`t delivered. Seriously, 2014 housing system without item mirror feature. Really.

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Originally Posted by Nutz

I see these discussions popping up all the time and I have to wonder why they don't do a census of the housing situations on all the worlds and then increase based on that. Several servers have open plots -- lots of them. Some servers were sold out within a couple of hours of the patch going live. Why don't they add more housing where demand is higher and add less where it's lower?

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My strong suspicion is that the server architecture they have so far wasn't built to allow that. But I do agree that, ideally, this is the sort of restructuring they need to solve this imbalance. It's either that or they need to give big incentives to get people migrated over to the quieter servers.

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Originally Posted by Alexander_Dragonfang

Gardens, yeah! ok, gardens, and thats it, beyond that housing is useless and seems to not have any special feature in the far future (SE didnt even think about having shared permissions with incoming marriage till they were asked about it, something totally logic for a housing system, revealing how little investment of R&D is going to housing)

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I still remember clear as day when they were asked about storage options in houses...waaaaaaaaay back in time. What that came off as, to me, was perplexion and cluelessness, saying something along the lines of having not thought of it and citing hardware limitations (basically saying "no desu" to the idea itself). And there I sat, completely baffled and speechless, not even being able to comprehend how nobody would as much as think of such a feature when it came to having a house in an RPG. So, yeah, I can't help but think that really is the case, and it's just utterly sad. Regardless of how they're trying to fix things now... It's a botched-up and badly implemented thing to play with and would require complete overhaul imo.
The even sadder thing is I personally have been looking forward to having a house - since 1.0. And still can't have it because of all the issues already mentioned. Something tells me I'm not alone.

What I found amusing about this patch's housing addons is that they made exact copies of the original wards and thought tilting the maps 90° would make them look different.