Housing, it's bad and you should feel bad.

@Teroniss

I don't consider garrisons/class hall housing. They were just crappier versions of hubs so they could try to include a "facebook" game for addiction purposes.

I think that if i pay monthly for a game I should have access to everything offered, now do I think it should be handed to me? absolutely not. For example, my raid group is still progressing in O4s, do I expect gear of o4s level? hell no. but that is content for progressing and for show of skill. Same goes for pvp. I don't pvp but I have access to it IF I wanted to try to progress in ranked. Now do i expect to have access to a heavily advertised feature that for a lot of people (myself included) was the highlight of this patch? you're damn right I do.

Now I'm going to throw some rough ballpark math your way. So according to https://ffxivcensus.com/ for Excalibur (not even the most popular server) alone it says there is 14,600 players. There is about 3000 houses available. That is roughly 20% of the population. Do you think that is anywhere near enough? Hell no.... it should at least be around 60-70% (imo if you want one it should be available). So it is set up to fail from the get go. And this doesn't even account for house hoarders and FC's. so you could probably lower that percentage to 5-10%.

If anyone says that is acceptable then they have a few screws missing.

But thank you for contributing, should have started with something similar to that.

I agree that they should lock housing to one per account. The issue where single accounts can chomp through a chunk of the entire server's allocation is absolutely bizarre, and I say this as someone lucky enough to have got the house they wanted for their FC. There is clearly a problem when on servers of approximately equivalent size (not locked, not preferred), some servers sold out of everything in every ward within minutes while others (yes, they exist) still had large Mist/Goblet/LB houses and medium/small Shirogane houses many hours later, and still have empty apartment blocks. If the number of players isn't wildly out in these cases, player behaviour is a major factor. It's not fair that a few can spoil things for a majority.

For the problem with flipping, which barely exists at all on many servers, there are a lot of possible solutions even without having to police it, such as implementing the lock above and also making it so that when a house is relinquished it's not purchasable again for several days, making it very risky to be a buyer. If there were no buyers, there would be no sellers, but I've seen the posts and it's obviously at crisis point now. A priority period for FCs and a block on one-man FCs owning an additional house would also make sense; I'm in a small FC so I'd hate to see only large ones allowed to buy land, but there should be a baseline activity requirement to justify the need other than 'I want lots of houses'.

I hope they'll implement some improvements before the next batch of wards arrives one day.

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Originally Posted by Teroniss

The biggest issue with this is that it leads to the casualizing of the game such as the case with WoW and its Raid Finder feature and Dispatch missions, or Quest given legendary weapons you dont really need to work for.

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I don't see how it would casualize the game honestly ?!!
There's no "difficulty" in housing - it's pretty much as difficult as glamour, except for the gardening/airship part.

It actually looks like some home owners telling people to get over it are like those little spoiled kids lulzing from having expensive toys others kids can't afford.... and afraid at the idea that they wont be special anymore if other kids would get the same toys as them.

I'd like to know how accurate that FFXIV census page is; it's interesting that the 'tiny' EU/NA worlds are still large compared to the JP ones, if it's correct. Which might be a very important factor in all of this. It was war on JP servers too, but if you have the same number of homes and twice the number of players, it's going to be an all-out bloodbath in the rest of the world.

Yeah some food for thought. A portion of every player's subscription fee is going towards development of housing and housing items which they cannot access BY DEVELOPER CHOICE AND DESIGN. That should make everyone paying a sub fee angry. We're paying for something they intentionally limited and walled off. As a game dev you just don't do that, it's incredibly disrespectful to do that to all of your paying customers. Everyone should have the POTENTIAL to get something. The only gating that should exist for 'exclusivity' in MMOs is time and effort spent to get it. Imagine if WoW had a mount that only dropped for the first 2k people to kill the boss? Same thing. People would riot. And that's just a mount, the housing system in FFXIV is much more developed.

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Originally Posted by Moogly

I don't see how it would casualize the game honestly ?!!
There's no "difficulty" in housing - it's pretty much as difficult as glamour, except for the gardening/airship part.

It actually looks like some home owners telling people to get over it are like those little spoiled kids lulzing from having expensive toys others kids can't afford.... and afraid at the idea that they wont be special anymore if other kids would get the same toys as them.

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Slippery slope logic. You cater to one demand under the pretense that players are entitled to something, and it starts a rolling ball where more demands are made.

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Originally Posted by ManaBanana

Imagine if WoW had a mount that only dropped for the first 2k people to kill the boss? Same thing. People would riot. And that's just a mount, the housing system in FFXIV is much more developed.

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WoW DOES have a mount like that. It was a mount from Silithis that only had 1 per server

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Originally Posted by Teroniss

Slippery slope logic. You cater to one demand under the pretense that players are entitled to something,

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Wanting access to housing(something you pay for) is being "entitled to something"? Following your logic, it would be perfectly acceptable if only a small percentage of a server population could be logged in at any specific time? demanding to log into a game that you pay for is being entitled to something, right? If you are actually going to start making the Logical debate, then make sure your logic is sound before you start.