"Free Company Houses" should not exist, they only encourage "personal/solo FC's"

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Originally Posted by SturmChurro

People say it provides an active ward, but I have yet to see that.

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Every FC I've been in, we've always used the FC house as a home base and usually congregate in and around it. It has a marketboard and bell right there so it's pretty convenient.
There's usually at least one other FC in the ward that has done the same, so there's been inter-FC interaction too.
Obviously it requires at least a medium sized FC to make a meaningful difference, at least 5-10 active members.

Ah, signs of activity: semi-AFK FC members congregating around a marketboard lol. Active ward indeed! Too much pretty much 98% of a ward remains lifeless and dead.

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Originally Posted by Padudu

Ah, signs of activity: semi-AFK FC members congregating around a marketboard lol. Active ward indeed! Too much pretty much 98% of a ward remains lifeless and dead.

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what kind of activity are you expecting? a parade?

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

what kind of activity are you expecting? a parade?

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Idk, maybe more activity than 5 AFK/crafting people and maybe more than 1 person outside than the apartment complex every once in a while? We have direct teleports to houses and such, so not like anyone has any incentive to actually walk through a ward lol. I don't expect it to be bussin' like Limsa, but I wouldn't really call a group of FC members congregating outside their yard a sign of an active ward lol. Just a sign of an active FC.

wow so many stress makers trying to flip everything been here playing sence arr have my house and will keep it as long as i can as for the rest of you do what you want but leave me and my house alone.

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Originally Posted by Padudu

Idk, maybe more activity than 5 AFK/crafting people and maybe more than 1 person outside than the apartment complex every once in a while? We have direct teleports to houses and such, so not like anyone has any incentive to actually walk through a ward lol. I don't expect it to be bussin' like Limsa, but I wouldn't really call a group of FC members congregating outside their yard a sign of an active ward lol. Just a sign of an active FC.

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Even if I had to walk through a ward what incentive is there for me to engage with an FC that's not my own? They're unlikely to invite me to do content because their party or parties are full up. If they're chatting it's more than likely going to be in FC chat, linkshell chat or on voice comms. Even if they tried to include me I'd likely miss have the in-jokes anyway.

getting rid of personal housing and having fc only housing doesn't stop the solo owned FC's from owning a house. only way i can see it working is if they required you to have 3 people to be present to buy the house and if the fc drops below that it is auto disbanded and house demolished

Can’t you guys just get over with it and wait for next release?

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Originally Posted by Divinemights

Can’t you guys just get over with it and wait for next release?

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No, they can't, let them have their tantrum for our entertainment.

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Originally Posted by Terin

Being PART of an active Free Company actually makes players MORE invested in the game. There's a lot of content that you can only really run in a static, and while a robust suite of options exist for FINDING groups, the fact is that players will almost always flock to running content with people they actually know.

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That's quite an assumption you made mates.

I've been playing this game for like ... 8 years now? And I was in various FCs, including one where I was a member of the core raid group. But by the mid Heavenward, I have been in a solo FC by myself all the way till now, and probably will be until the day I decide to quit the game. Suffice to say, I probably wouldn't play the game that much or even stay in this long had I been in an FC all those years.


There are tons of reason for it:

- First, you are completely oversale the need of an FC. This is not a pre-2015 environment any more where we only have teamspeak and ventrilo, which only used 90% for raid time. We have so many other meaningful way to form group and stay in contact with people of like interest, and often with way better mean than using what available in game. And even without external mean, the game has matured to a point where 99% you can do with FC members, you can do with people outside like Linkshell and world travelling. 99% is just me being cautious in case I may have missed something, but like ... is there anything at all in the game that you can only do with FC members?



- Second, I find by not joining an FC, but being a solo-player while keeping grouping to others method (like discord) give me the right healthy "distance" in relationships with other players. We do stuffs together, have fun, talking crap ...etc... but at the same time there is no string attached. If we lose interest, we say goodbye and that's about it. There is no need nor worry about drama/gosship/backstapping like there is in joining an FC.


So basically, solo-player like myself can enjoy 90% of what an FC player can, while at the same time don't have to worry about 90% of the crap an FC player potentially have to deal with. I used to have a personal house back when I was an FC player (back in 2.0) that I kept for over year, but eventually I sold that "crap" because after the initial honeymoon die down, it's just a piece of oversize trophy that offer almost no benefit. Becoming a solo player with my own FC-house is the best decision I have ever made in the 8 years of playing, and probably the main reason why I still playing after 8 years.

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Originally Posted by Terin

Would you RATHER be part of a Free Company community?
Or would you rather have a HOUSE?

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Too easy, house of course! :D People disappoint me on a daily basis but my houses make me smile.

I really hope SE unlocked the FC wards to personal bidders soon.

My friends have been trying to get their first house (small) or upsizing (from small to medium) and it's really rough seeing them getting disappointed over and over again due to how competitive the personal wards are.

Meanwhile, no one is bidding on the smalls and even a few mediums in FC wards, even by round 3 of the lottery. The frustration of players is only going to get worse if no changes are made to the ward allocation by round 5 or even the next round when the personal plots have completed dried up.

+1 to just removing personal housing entirely.

+1vto some kind of maintenance to keeping a FC house, though I have no opinion on what that means specifically. It could be money, but really it should be an active body count. (Aka 4+ active accounts (not players) for S, 8+ for M, 16+ for L)

In my FC of 4 active, 2 not so active we have 3 L, 1 M and 4 S. One of the L houses is decorated inside to be a messy 1 room apartment with partitions blocking off like 90% of the building. it started as a funny joke, and the owner honestly just bought the house because he had a plan to do something with it…but never got around to it.

He has considered giving it up, but doesn’t because he doesn’t want to take a loss.

I dare say he isn’t the only player that would happily give up their house for 100% wealth back.

theres only 3 people in my fc (and 1 alt) and i like it this way. it is quiet. we dont have to worry about thieves or drama. ive been playing since closed beta and tried different "community" FCs, and let me tell you, they've ruined my experience with the game.

i don't understand why people don't mind their own business and stop trying to dictate what people need to do to enjoy the game lol

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Originally Posted by Zomkei

i don't understand why people don't mind their own business and stop trying to dictate what people need to do to enjoy the game lol

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It just comes down to window dressing their own selfishness. No one wants to admit they simply want to kick other people out of the house just so they get theirs, so they all pretend to come up with ridiculous "solution" to hide their desire.

We have no one but SE for creating this problem in the first place lol

It's incredibly easy to form a small "personal" FC and rank it up to 30 over a week or two.

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Originally Posted by Raven2014

That's quite an assumption you made mates.

I've been playing this game for like ... 8 years now? And I was in various FCs, including one where I was a member of the core raid group. But by the mid Heavenward, I have been in a solo FC by myself all the way till now, and probably will be until the day I decide to quit the game. Suffice to say, I probably wouldn't play the game that much or even stay in this long had I been in an FC all those years.


There are tons of reason for it:

- First, you are completely oversale the need of an FC. This is not a pre-2015 environment any more where we only have teamspeak and ventrilo, which only used 90% for raid time. We have so many other meaningful way to form group and stay in contact with people of like interest, and often with way better mean than using what available in game. And even without external mean, the game has matured to a point where 99% you can do with FC members, you can do with people outside like Linkshell and world travelling. 99% is just me being cautious in case I may have missed something, but like ... is there anything at all in the game that you can only do with FC members?



- Second, I find by not joining an FC, but being a solo-player while keeping grouping to others method (like discord) give me the right healthy "distance" in relationships with other players. We do stuffs together, have fun, talking crap ...etc... but at the same time there is no string attached. If we lose interest, we say goodbye and that's about it. There is no need nor worry about drama/gosship/backstapping like there is in joining an FC.


So basically, solo-player like myself can enjoy 90% of what an FC player can, while at the same time don't have to worry about 90% of the crap an FC player potentially have to deal with. I used to have a personal house back when I was an FC player (back in 2.0) that I kept for over year, but eventually I sold that "crap" because after the initial honeymoon die down, it's just a piece of oversize trophy that offer almost no benefit. Becoming a solo player with my own FC-house is the best decision I have ever made in the 8 years of playing, and probably the main reason why I still playing after 8 years.

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I can respect that point of view.

That said, there is still no reason for you to have your own "free company" kept solely for yourself, EXCEPT that it gives you a house, and access to a workshop.

Converting all housing to Personal housing would make absolutely zero impact on your experience. You could easily still just NOT join a free company. At least you would have that OPTION, because as it stands, doing so would mean giving up your house. And like any community, you might find that first FC isn't a great fit for you, but you'd already be out of a house. Which probably makes you even LESS inclined to consider joining a FC.

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Originally Posted by Terin

There is still no reason for you to have your own "free company" kept solely for yourself, EXCEPT that it gives you a house, and access to a workshop.

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Not true.

This game is very alt-unfriendly. You cannot send mail to your other characters, and you cannot make then tenants of your personal housing. So if you have alts (like I do) the FC chest is the only way to transfer items and gil between your characters, other than trusting someone else to do it. Now, you may know someone you'd trust to transfer, say, the Varsity Skirt and Boulevardier's Ruffled Shirt your "elder" Auri character made to your new fem Roe (market value: almost three million gil) but it's still a lot simpler just to put it into the FC chest.

Of course, you still need someone in your FC other than yourself in order to invite your alts into the FC.
But that can be an "shell" alt of an in-game friend, and they don't have to have FC chest access.

Or, in my case, it's my spouse. Our FC only includes real-life friends, none of whom are worried about the others jeopardizing the friendship for a mere game item.

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Originally Posted by Terin

That said, there is still no reason for you to have your own "free company" kept solely for yourself, EXCEPT that it gives you a house, and access to a workshop.

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The last one alone is a sufficient reason. You also get a company chest you can use to transfer items to alts or fill with your own items, buffs of your own choosing, a crest and tag you can choose and swap at will, access to items bought with company credits, a house your alts can share and extra storage space for furniture in the FC rooms of your alts which are conveniently inside the house itself.

In case you feel like being in a more social FC, recruiting people into your own FC is risk free, because you have the ability to get rid of individual problem players without losing the social, financial and time investment you've put into the FC. You get to decide how the FC is run and you never have to rely on someone else to give you permission to access features.

These are why I think they should entirely separate housing from gameplay features. Like, there are incentives to having a house beyond just having a space to decorate, so of course people are going to want access to those features whether they care about housing itself or not. It's a bad system intertwined with other (imo also bad) systems that is trying (imo also badly) to cater to multiple different groups of people while being fair to none of them.

And like, I get housing probably isn't at the top of their list for major gameplay features. They clearly had some kind of vision they're either intent on sticking to or unable/uninterested in reworking in any significant way. The biggest bandaids we've gotten have been demolition, which spends about as much time off as on, and now the lottery. But as it is unless they do entirely rework it, it's just always gonna be an ill fitting hodgepodge of weirdly implemented ideas.

I think the only reason I even care so much is because I've wanted player housing as a thing for years - like my primary mmo for over a decade was wow, which has never had housing, and aion did have it but that games been mostly dead since year 2 and its actual housing was on an auction system with weekly upkeep fees. They at least gave every player a free apartment by default though. This was the first game I played where housing was both a fairly extensive system and also actually attainable in a way I didn't have to worry about losing (at the time) but the flaws have just become more glaring over time. I'm at the point where it feels like I've just invested too much energy into a system that I'm never gonna be able to fully enjoy even though I already HAVE a house (in my least favorite zone in a ward deader than Zenos).

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Originally Posted by Reinha

The last one alone is a sufficient reason. You also get a company chest you can use to transfer items to alts or fill with your own items, buffs of your own choosing, a crest and tag you can choose and swap at will, access to items bought with company credits, a house your alts can share and extra storage space for furniture in the FC rooms of your alts which are conveniently inside the house itself.

In case you feel like being in a more social FC, recruiting people into your own FC is risk free, because you have the ability to get rid of individual problem players without losing the social, financial and time investment you've put into the FC. You get to decide how the FC is run and you never have to rely on someone else to give you permission to access features.

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The Company Workshop thing is a legitimate concern, for sure. I would think it would be easy enough to make it accessible somewhere else in the game world (perhaps near your FC's nation's Grand Company? or perhaps in Revenant's Toll?), but I definitely think it's a problem that can be rectified in many different ways.

At the end of the day, while the game is certain totally playable with the current system, I think changing it would make the game a lot more "fair", and promote healthier communities for everyone. It's not the end of the world, but I see literally no downside, except that those like myself who ARE abusing the system to effectively "have two houses" would simply lose one of those. Which I think it objectively the fairest path forward.