Why is player housing so coveted in the community?

It's pretty simple. It's forward facing and limited and extremely customizable
Having a really cool house is like the biggest badge you can flash around, even more than ultimate weapons

They could add in the best instanced housing of any game ever, and I'm still very suspicious that the islands will be just that, and people will still complain about the wards because having an actual plot in the limited space of a housing ward makes it just a little more special and unique

For me its convenience mostly. I have the marketboard next to my house, so its like my own private Limsa without the cringy people and lag :D

While it does have minor advantages, housing is mainly a fun activity to do. It's a piece of content a big percentage of the player base is excluded of, because Apartments have no garden, and due to their single floor layout, they also offer only restricted options for players who wish to go all-out on decorating.

Imagine if glamouring gear was restricted the same way. It offers no real advantage, but people LOVE glamouring their gear, because it's a fun thing to do. The same goes for housing.

I'd say one of the biggest advantages (for me at least) is the gardening. You can make sone serous Gil with gardening and grow things to sell on the marketboard that you cant get/buy anywhere else.

While all the reasons brought forth so far (gardening, workshop, storage, expression) are all very much correct, I think a part of it is also simply the fact that it is limited. Something limited and/or difficult to acquire automatically becomes a prestige object of sorts, no matter how useful it actually is to the owner.

There also is an element of future-proofing, and associated fear of missing out. Sure, you might not need a house at the moment, but what if you need one in the future? Well, they are limited, so you better get one now already, even if you don't need it at the moment; just in case that changes one day, cause when that day arrives you don't want to have to wait for the next housing batch to be added or go through the house flippers.
If anyone could get a house at any time, it might ironically lower the demand.

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Originally Posted by Midareyukki

Worshop, Gardening, better FC buffs, furnishings.

...making me waste hours upon hours of my life struggling against the horrid mess that is the grid system @w@

But boy almighty, if you have a house I will ENDEAVOUR to make it look impeccable.

...okay, add to the list "giving housing nerds a dumb addiction". Also, does anyone want me to decorate their house? I'm growing desperate. I need my fix.

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I have a private mansion needing a redo if you want to derp about in that. We are same server too so that's nice.

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Originally Posted by Vav2021

I'm not asking this to be passive agressive, or dismissive, etc, I am legitimately curious. Does player housing offer things people wouldn't have access to through the game? Or is there more to it? I have assumed that since it's such a coveted system, it has some sort of advantage that the game outside of housing offers.

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Adjusting for the gated features XIV's housing is no more or less desired than any other game. It only gets talked about because Square thought making it a limited resource was a good idea at one time. Instead of being able to celebrate players' creativity the Housing section here is flooded with gripe posts all trying to clue Square in that they need to solve this.

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Originally Posted by FrogDog

I think for some it's just a matter of having it and really nothing else. I logged into the game for the free weekend, and I haven't been playing for a few months. I was eager to see what cool stuff people had done with Ishgard housing since it's been out for 2 months now. Going through several wards on a few different servers yielded pretty much the same thing. Lots and lots of empty houses and a few that were furnished but really poorly. I think I saw one medium house that was pretty good.

I would have thought though, with all the hype and demand for Ishgard housing, and the years people had to prepare, that the end result would have been a lot better. Wards are a massive waste of resources and houses should have always just been instanced.

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tl;dr: House decorating is harder and far more expensive than it looks and that's not something you're going to realize until you have a house to decorate.

From apartments to mansions the amount of things you can add, call it a decoration budget, is super stingy. It's so bad that many designs just wall off the other floors. The interiors have a base style dictated by the city the ward is attached to complete with columns, moldings, and wainscoting that you cannot change. The only way to correct that is to cover it up which eats into your decoration budget.

The decoration UI has no control to adjust height. There are glitches that can be used to do this but it's tricky and time consuming if done manually. The glitch only works in the up direction. If you're in an apartment and only want the top half of a decoration you're pretty much SOL.

There's an OK selection of things you can buy from vendors but some of the more useful things are crafted, bought with crafting scrips, require airship/submersible mats, etc. In other words prepare to spend another 2-4m. The initial cost of winning the plot is a known expense but what's not clear is that you have to buy a building permit on top of that so people are already reeling from an unexpected expense. Small permits are 450k.

Housing is a niche thing, but if you want one it can be frustrating when you can't get one and people get mad because they're not getting what they want.

It's understandable on some level tho if you've been trying to a really long time, personally I'd like to have instanced housing too.

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Originally Posted by GeminiReed

tl;dr: House decorating is harder and far more expensive than it looks and that's not something you're going to realize until you have a house to decorate.

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I've had several houses and apartments and did numerous remodels of them. I actually have a house still in the game at the moment but somebody took all my stuff. Decorating is cumbersome and requires bugs but it's not difficult to put something basic, cheap, and aesthetic together pretty quickly.

I don't understand the mindset of people who could come onto these forums for years talking about how much they want Ishgard housing, and then when they get it they just leave their house an empty husk with maybe a vendor inside. I know I was probably more involved in the housing feature than most players, but still, at least do something with what you have.

Again, the fact that a large amount of players don't even utilize their homes, on top of the fact that wards are typically devoid of any people, just makes the neighborhood system come off as extremely wasteful in my view.

because they will never own one in real life

so they try to get one in game but turns out art imitates life