Why can't we all have a House?

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Originally Posted by Arzalis

This is likely.

The somewhat frustrating thing about this is they do tend to repeat these mistakes in other systems too. The glamour system has the exact same issue.

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Unfortunately, the dev team can be frustratingly stubborn. They'll latch onto an idea and just won't let go even when it isn't working. You see this in job design, with Monk being the stand out example. Six years it took for them to land on what looks to be a meaningful rework. Glamour, as you've mentioned, is another.

Ive been watching this and I gotta say the housing is designed to keep u paying a sub. Ive played over 10k hours on this wonderful adventure and ive lost 2 houses from taking a break from the game. The last one I stayed up till 2am when they added extra housing snaged it, invested 120mil gil in it and lost it cuz I took a year break. I seen old posts where the Yoshi said you wouldnt lose houses years ago but someone from marketing must of bern like hey if they lose it then they will continue to sub. I must be one of the richest homeless persons living on the streets of Uldah. Ever Quest 2 had some of the best guild housing Ive ever used you could build a castle within a castle because it was instanced housing. This idea of community house and creating this lack of housing is someones baby. I dont care about the nieghbors just my guild. Btw I looked up my old home and the new people bought it for 300mil gil evidently. Just makes u feel bad , I dont play to play house Im here for the raids but I always like to have a guild hall for my teams. We need the option for Instanced housing and community housing so both sides can be happy. Ok white knights assemble.

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Originally Posted by Hammerhorn

Ive been watching this and I gotta say the housing is designed to keep u paying a sub. Ive played over 10k hours on this wonderful adventure and ive lost 2 houses from taking a break from the game. The last one I stayed up till 2am when they added extra housing snaged it, invested 120mil gil in it and lost it cuz I took a year break. I seen old posts where the Yoshi said you wouldnt lose houses years ago but someone from marketing must of bern like hey if they lose it then they will continue to sub. I must be one of the richest homeless persons living on the streets of Uldah. Ever Quest 2 had some of the best guild housing Ive ever used you could build a castle within a castle because it was instanced housing. This idea of community house and creating this lack of housing is someones baby. I dont care about the nieghbors just my guild. Btw I looked up my old home and the new people bought it for 300mil gil evidently. Just makes u feel bad , I dont play to play house Im here for the raids but I always like to have a guild hall for my teams. We need the option for Instanced housing and community housing so both sides can be happy. Ok white knights assemble.

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Sorry to break your little bubble.
Demolition timer is only there because of player community's request.
SE has no interest to use Housing to keep the subscription.
Player community was not interesting with house even by the time player housing function is unable.
A lot of servers still have empty small plots.
It is until gardening becomes a thing then players starting to want house

At the time, the player community want to recycle house plot from players like yourself because of shortage.
So the fact is, it is the player community do not want to see house plot on the hand of people who takes a break longer than a month; not SE.

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Originally Posted by Hammerhorn

Ive been watching this and I gotta say the housing is designed to keep u paying a sub.

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Except you don't have to stay subbed full time to keep a house.

Pay for a month.

Unsub for 6 weeks.

Pay for another month.

Unsub for 6 weeks.

And so on. You're back in time to reset the demo timer so you don't lose the house as long as you make certain enter your house one or two days before your current game time ends.

Not to mention if SE really wanted to tie players to a subscription using housing, they'd make certain there were enough houses for every player who wants one. It's rarely the house itself that players complain about losing. They complain more strongly about losing all the furnishings, especially seasonal event items. Furnishing a house costs a lot more than buying it.

Then of course there are the periods of months were SE suspends the demo timer. If housing was about the subscription money,, the demo timer would never get suspended for any reason short of the game servers crashing and being offline for over a month.

As Divinemights said, it's the players who want the demolition system so that they have a chance to get a house when house owners stop playing.

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Originally Posted by Jadedsins

Does everyone need glam?


and that cost seems fair to me.

No more neighborhoods fine with me. Reduced items sure?


A small price to pay for having a house and not needing to keep a sub up when the game becomes too tedious to pay for.

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You don't need glams either and glams are easier to fix than a whole housing area.
People are acting like they're entitled to housing when they're not, it's just a bonus thing added on. Yoshi P has already explained why they can't do what players want them to do because of certain limitations. I played arcage before ff14 and they had the same housing limit, you can only get housing now cause a lot of people left.
I don't complain about people owning entire wards as they were probably playing from 1.0 and most likely spent millions of gil to purchase, are we gonna begrudge them the free retainers too?

Well the current system is really bad for scalability - if the game population continues to grow explosively they got to commit more and more money to add servers for additional wards (which won't be able to satisfy everyone's desire for a house).
And the sunk cost would make SE resistant to a complete overhaul and redesign of the system.

To be honest i expect to see only band-aid solutions all the way till the game's sunset phase. (by then, it would no longer matter)

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Originally Posted by Mango2020

You don't need glams either and glams are easier to fix than a whole housing area.
People are acting like they're entitled to housing when they're not, it's just a bonus thing added on. Yoshi P has already explained why they can't do what players want them to do because of certain limitations. I played arcage before ff14 and they had the same housing limit, you can only get housing now cause a lot of people left.
I don't complain about people owning entire wards as they were probably playing from 1.0 and most likely spent millions of gil to purchase, are we gonna begrudge them the free retainers too?

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FFXIV game descriptive: "What is Final Fantasy?" Adventure is what you make of it.
Housing
Fashion
The Gold Saucer
Gathering
Crafting
Would you be happy if you never could make a crafter or gatherer because too many players had one? Would you enjoy being barred from the Gold Saucer due to high player content? Would you enjoy staying in the same outfit/armor because they only allowed x number of that armor and other players always bought them up before you could get them?
Think about what you said about not "entitled" to a house.

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Originally Posted by Besame

Think about what you said about not "entitled" to a house.

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With a many different politically charged connotations the word entitled has these days, perhaps it might be better and safer to say "..has the unrestricted ability to purchase a plot when they have the money.". You seem like a nice person and I'd hate to see you flamed even more than in the past. :)

Every player should have the ability to purchase a plot as soon as they have the money to do so, without restriction. To be clear, having to camp a placard with a bunch of other people is not unrestricted, nor is having to buy a shell FC to get a house. Unrestricted does not mean every single plot is available to all players at all times. Unrestricted means there's always at least one plot available at all times, with players being able to walk up to a placard at any time of day or night and purchase the plot. If this means instanced housing or dynamic creation of ward instances, so be it.

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Originally Posted by Illmaeran

With a many different politically charged connotations the word entitled has these days, perhaps it might be better and safer to say "..has the unrestricted ability to purchase a plot when they have the money.". You seem like a nice person and I'd hate to see you flamed even more than in the past. :)

Every player should have the ability to purchase a plot as soon as they have the money to do so, without restriction. To be clear, having to camp a placard with a bunch of other people is not unrestricted, nor is having to buy a shell FC to get a house. Unrestricted does not mean every single plot is available to all players at all times. Unrestricted means there's always at least one plot available at all times, with players being able to walk up to a placard at any time of day or night and purchase the plot. If this means instanced housing or dynamic creation of ward instances, so be it.

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"Entitled" wasn't my word, it was the OPs. As far as flamed, it takes more than posters here to ruffle my feathers :) As far as nice, I sure am however, I do not defend a gaming company that falls short while I pay for it each month. I have a house, an apt and a FC but I feel for those who post these boards day after day, week after week, month after month with the frustration of not being able to obtain a dream that was presentated as obtainable before purchase. If it's not as it is presented, repost correctly on the description page and apologize to all of us who expected one thing and got another over the years,

Why can't we all have a House?

100% agree

Their "reasons" are just disguised excuses. Period.

Two words: spaghetti code.

In the meantime, buy an apartment.

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Originally Posted by Sotaris

Well you could be using the search function and you could find out from all other 1000 threads on this subject.

But tl dr is basically old engine, systems, servers and developers own view on housing is partially reason to why we don't have instanced housing.

I keep seeing people bringing up newer games done it a different way but it's not comparable when we got the sytem 8 years ago and not even sure it's technically feasable with the current engine. I mean we can't even get higher outdoor item limit or indoor.

The way to make it instanced (if they even want that) is a complete overhaul to both sytem and most likely the game engine that limits them in various ways.

The game can't expand dynamically due to hardware limitation (need more servers) so it more a question of maintenance costs, invest in new servers (which is nearly impossible right now due to semi-conductor shortages).

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ESO, and especially Runescape or LoTRO are old ass games and yet have better housing features. So the « old engine » argument... mmh nah I don’t buy it.

I think it’s more a question of quality servers and capacity. The ones we have now both on NA and EU are crappy, there’s worse yes, but you can tell it’s not very smooth. I’d bet the core issue is there, not with the engine. When they can develop Island Sanctuaries for everyone, nothing seems to indicate they couldn’t do an ESO instanced housing system too.

But yea as you said, there’s also the issue of dev philosophy (or stubbornness)

Get an apartment, it is the same thing...

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Originally Posted by Themarvin

Get an apartment, it is the same thing...

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Literally isn't, and will never be until they either disentangle mechanics like the workshop from being solely tied to FC homes (every FC should be able to access this stuff) or give everyone and every FC a means to own a house to access them.

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Originally Posted by Themarvin

Get an apartment, it is the same thing...

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There are no apartments left on my data center. Any other solutions?

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Originally Posted by xxmiamorecadenza

There are no apartments left on my data center. Any other solutions?

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Joining FC with house plot for private chamber maybe?

Someone left a note in my housing message book the other day offering to buy my medium house and said they had 250m gil hehe.

I like to think eventually everyone who wants to buy a house will be able to, and in a meaningful way. It's just taking them a while to create the space and implement it in a way that the majority of players can agree with. There are positive signs anyway.

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Originally Posted by Erinellza

Did you accept? I wouldn't even sell my medium for billions. XD

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I once gave away an FC I had created, which included a small house, even though they offered me 10 million or something.

I made the FC and plac camped the plot for my WoW friends who had said they would totally play 14 with me, but they never did.

/sadface #sadpuppynoises

This was nearly two years ago, before WoW decided to eat itself followed by spontaneously combusting. How the turning of tables.

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Originally Posted by Erinellza

Did you accept? I wouldn't even sell my medium for billions. XD

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I didn't say if I did or didn't but NO, don't need gil and enjoy my place :)

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Originally Posted by xxmiamorecadenza

There are no apartments left on my data center. Any other solutions?

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There are tons of apartments left on Crystal.

Balmung is the only world that doesn't have any though if you offer someone enough gil to relinquish the apartment they aren't using, you could get your hands on one since apartments don't have a purchase timer.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

There are tons of apartments left on Crystal.

Balmung is the only world that doesn't have any though if you offer someone enough gil to relinquish the apartment they aren't using, you could get your hands on one since apartments don't have a purchase timer.

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Not particularly fond of the idea of transferring. That’ll cost a real dime for folk interested in housing - not unless they make a character elsewhere I suppose.

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Originally Posted by xxmiamorecadenza

Not particularly fond of the idea of transferring. That’ll cost a real dime for folk interested in housing - not unless they make a character elsewhere I suppose.

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For now, it's only affecting players on Balmung. Other players wouldn't need to transfer to get an apartment because their worlds haven't run out.

I do think it sucks for Balmung players, though. One of the selling points SE made to the player base on apartments was that they'd be able to increase the number of wings per building fairly easily if there was need. Balmung is in need (it's the second time it's happened) yet they won't increase the wings. It makes you wonder if they were just spouting random PR back then because they didn't think players were really that interested in housing and now they've backed themselves into a corner because players are getting frustrated that they won't follow through,

But my suggestion to ask around Balmung to see if someone would be willing to relinquish their apartment was sincere. A lot of apartments are purchased but never used and an owner might be willing to give theirs up so you can get one. Someone who bought the apartment just for cheap teleport probably still hasn't made back the gil spent (most don't think about the cost of the second teleport to their actual destination when calculating savings). Offer to pay them the 500k they spent on the apartment in the first place and they may be happy.

Balmung sounds like a horrible place to be, especially with current surge of player population

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Originally Posted by Divinemights

Balmung sounds like a horrible place to be, especially with current surge of player population

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Balmung is fine. It's got only one problem that can't be found on every other NA world and that's the lack of available apartments.

As for population, Balmung is no longer #1 according to Lucky Bancho. Mateus is. If you look strictly at characters with level 80 jobs, Gilgamesh tops all followed by Leviathan, Cactuar and Behemoth (Balmung is 5th).

You're probably going to have more trouble on Leviathan than Balmung players will come December 3rd. A lot of the Balmung characters are alts, not mains, and people are going to want to play their mains when Endwalker starts.

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Originally Posted by Divinemights

Balmung sounds like a horrible place to be, especially with current surge of player population

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Balmung's only bad if you want a house or apartment - the game's thriving RP community kind of ensures both are filled to capacity by players, their alts, and alts of people from other worlds and data centers, at all times. The actual community is pretty solid; I'd rank it as being more "casual" overall than most worlds but that hasn't stopped people from prog raiding and getting plenty of ultimate clears going around. But I have seen substantially less elitist behavior in public than I have on other servers I've had characters on.

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Originally Posted by Divinemights

Balmung sounds like a horrible place to be, especially with current surge of player population

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i love Balmung. It's a vibrant, full and diverse community. It sucks they are out of apartments and the fact that SE appears to always be slow to address the issue until later. I don't expect a fix until 6.1 but could be surprised.

Don't worry they will eventually find a clever way to close down the 1 person FCs, that should create a bit more of a flow.

I absolutely hate the housing system. I tried and tried and tried, and never succeeded.

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Originally Posted by Sotaris

Well you could be using the search function and you could find out from all other 1000 threads on this subject.

But tl dr is basically old engine, systems, servers and developers own view on housing is partially reason to why we don't have instanced housing.

I keep seeing people bringing up newer games done it a different way but it's not comparable when we got the sytem 8 years ago and not even sure it's technically feasable with the current engine. I mean we can't even get higher outdoor item limit or indoor.

The way to make it instanced (if they even want that) is a complete overhaul to both sytem and most likely the game engine that limits them in various ways.

The game can't expand dynamically due to hardware limitation (need more servers) so it more a question of maintenance costs, invest in new servers (which is nearly impossible right now due to semi-conductor shortages).

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That is absolutely BS on just because it is an old engine, games like Starwars Galaxies offered people to make player cities and place structures in the wild with fully based way of moving around items in any direction, that is like more than 20 years ago.

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Originally Posted by Palslow

I absolutely hate the housing system. I tried and tried and tried, and never succeeded.

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Have you at least purchased an apartment? As much as they get bashed because they're not the same size as a house and a lack a couple of a house's features (ability to use outdoor furnishings and intercross gardening), they aren't as bad as many make them out to be. They just aren't "the best" of housing.

Another thing to do is check with friends who have houses and see if they'll add you as a tenant. A personal house can have up to 3 tenants in addition to the owner, with the owner enabling permissions to the main housing features. Again, not quite as good as having a house of your own that you fully control but still something you can take advantage of until you're able to get your own house.

Hopefully you'll be able to obtain a house when Ishgard opens in 6.1 and the lottery ends up taking over as the primary purchase system.

I wonder if we could rent own houses to others at this state of the game :D
I mean the OF suggests already property taxes so why not rent it to others then. Wouldnt make a difference if you're paying "taxes" to other players or to Square :D

I have an apartment. It has only a fraction of the space and content that I want. This is why I am hoping to get a house. I will take my chances along with everyone else when the lottery comes.

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Originally Posted by Yodada

I wonder if we could rent own houses to others at this state of the game :D
I mean the OF suggests already property taxes so why not rent it to others then. Wouldnt make a difference if you're paying "taxes" to other players or to Square :D

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Officially, I doubt SE would ever add player controlled rentals to the game. Unofficially it's already happening, usually with house owners renting their unused garden patches to players who want to be gardening.

As for the property tax, that serves a purpose as a gil sink in addition to being a deterrent to owning property not being actively used. Paying rent to other players is not a gil sink and it would encourage purchasing property that wouldn't be otherwise used for the sake of personal profit. That's not SE's intent for the housing system. If it was, they would have set up formal systems for it and wouldn't be trying to kill house flipping through the addition of purchase timers back in 4.2 along with the lotteries and new restrictions on transfer of FC leadership coming in 6.1.

Sorry I'm adding the /s next time I promise :)

After having housing this bad for this long, it is a developer issue. This is what they want. It is wrong. It is dumb. It is a bad decision.

But it is their decision. I suggest we all just keep an eye for other mmos. Maybe RIFT will get its shit together. Best housing system ever I'm that game.

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Originally Posted by Necrotica

After having housing this bad for this long, it is a developer issue. This is what they want. It is wrong. It is dumb. It is a bad decision.

But it is their decision. I suggest we all just keep an eye for other mmos. Maybe RIFT will get its shit together. Best housing system ever I'm that game.

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All of that just because you don't want apartment (instanced) and you can't get a ward house?
Well, there is Lost Ark and it is free?
Right now, only Korean is making MMO (although it is usually instant noodle type and died in few years) , maybe you are lucky this time?

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Originally Posted by Divinemights

All of that just because you don't want apartment (instanced) and you can't get a ward house?
Well, there is Lost Ark and it is free?
Right now, only Korean is making MMO (although it is usually instant noodle type and died in few years) , maybe you are lucky this time?

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An apartment is tiny and not a good example of what instanced housing can be. Even the smallest Dimension in RIFT was roughly the size of a FFXIV mansion plot. Some of the larger Dimensions would rival Kugane in size including the instance ceiling being above the top of the hostelry - and you could freely place any items within that area, no glitch tricks needed.

People really don't understand what bad design choices SE has made for housing until they've experienced the much better housing systems in some of the other MMOs (even ones as old as FFXIV). The art aesthetic here is better (my opinion, others may disagree) but the system functions, especially the ability to acquire the location you want, are terrible. Maybe SE was hampered by the promised PS3 support but PS3 is long gone now. They should be working to improve the housing system, not leave it stagnant.

Honestly, it would be better if they ABANDONED the Wards system. Add in instanced housing. Make islands the answer to the problem. Make it possible for EVERYONE to have the housing space they want.
To the people suggesting apartments as a solution: Apartments are just not enough space, and are a hassle to invite other players to. They're not good enough for those of us that love to decorate and share our spaces. They're also fairly limited, as many wards on my server have none available... And you should not have to join a free company to get a small housing space that can be taken away from you in an instant.

The wards system is just not working. The game is too big, now. It barely worked in the old days of Lotro, the game they copied the system from, and only worked there because they could afford to add enough wards (having over 70 for each housing area). Nothing less than doubling or tripling the amount of wards is going to make so much as a dent in the issue. Make instanced housing a thing, SE, for individuals and FC's.

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Originally Posted by Divinemights

All of that just because you don't want apartment (instanced) and you can't get a ward house?
Well, there is Lost Ark and it is free?
Right now, only Korean is making MMO (although it is usually instant noodle type and died in few years) , maybe you are lucky this time?

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Come to a populated server. Look for an apartment. Poof, there goes your solution.

Many people are willing to settle, but even the apartment availability is horrifically underequipped.
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I love this game, but the housing aspect couldn't be more incompetently handled and that incompetence boils down to the design-level because some devs have some insipid nostalgia for a neighborhood. (My neighborhood's activity is restricted to a biweekly brothel. How nice.)