Since you demand others to provide proof of what they type I'd like to see you do the same. You claim 95% of the player base is left out of housing, please cite sources.
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I swear, this has become the Godwin's Law equivalent for MMOs. Criticise anything about another MMO in the genre and you'll inevitably have someone scream, "Go play WoW!!!" when they have no argument worth making.
The hilarious irony here is WoW doesn't even have a housing system because it largely doesn't appeal towards aesthetics. Meanwhile, MMOs like Black Desert, which has a substantially smaller budget, has a vastly better housing system. And guess what? Their entire playerbase can access it! What a novel concept.
Perhaps, instead, of dismissing valid criticism, we demand better from FFXIV?
If you don't like the how houses work in FFXIV, then play a game that matches your need and requirements, also alot of actually unused property right now, and I am not speaking of all the plots free in Ishgaard, if personal housign is a severe need you could play the sims or something on the side of playing FFXIV to satisfy your needs, as for the game itself, no you don't need a house and if all of what you want to do is about having one, then you hit such a little unimportant fraction of the game.
The only obstacle is how to get a house, as for the amount of houses I don't really want anymore wards I rather want the current areas expanded much further in size making each ward 3x as big or something, with more features around as well instead.
Houses would be more worthwhile, if there was actual things to do with them and around them, such as various activities, most wards any server is most of the time dead empty for people.
Once again, you are invoking the MMO equivalent of Godwin's Law instead of acknowledging a flawed system and demanding better from a game who advertises a feature the vast majority of players can't interact with. In fact, take the housing limitations and apply them to any other piece of content. Imagine if Savage was the only way to achieve max ilvl for each respective even patch cycle. After all, you don't need ilvl 600 right now to do any content besides Savage itself or Ultimate. People want it. Just like they want a house. If I wanted to play the Sims, I would. I prefer FFXIV but am not going to white knight an objectively terrible system.
For reference sake, I already own a house. None of these issue apply to me. It doesn't change how poorly designed housing is in FFXIV.
Earlier you said FFXIV's neighborhood system was "pretty good" yet now you're acknowledging the wards are essentially ghost towns. The problem with adding "actual things to do" is they're entirely restricted to only a small portion of the playerbase as those without a house can't interact with them. Put simply, you've just shown yet another reason the neighborhood, in its current state, is flawed. It cannot be expanded upon feature wise without alienating even more players, thus the wards remain dead, defeating entire point of having a neighborhood to begin with.
Weird how you claim that 30-50% of housing in WoW is never used when WoW has no housing. Can't use what doesn't exist.
It's also mainly instanced. Very few MMOs have gone with a non-instanced system and none of those have been very good in practice, ending up with many of the same problems we have here.
I don't know why you're so attached to this system when so many of the complaints you make are a result of it not being fully instanced.
Some of you "housers" might enjoy SwtOR. They give you 4x individual fortresses to decorate separately instanced. Only pain was their terribad placement squares you were hindered by. I played for 5 yrs and was reasonably pleased. Oh, WoW does not have housing.