What would you do to improve/'fix' housing?

You can create any number of wards and houses... Until SE realizes that one account holder can get 2 or more houses exasperating the problem, the amount of houses may never even meet the demand. Accounts should be locked to 1 house and 1 house only. If you have characters on different servers or multiple characters on one server, that's too bad. You pick one house to fool around with on whatever server you happen to get one on.

-Large houses should have some kind of restrictions that limit them to larger FCs. Using amount of members is sketchy due to alt character bloat but I'm sure SE could figure a way out if they tried. I say this as a member of an FC with 4 to 6 active players at any given time who is happy with their small house so don't think I'm saying this without any kind of regard to smaller FCs, but really just think about it. Why you need that large ass place for a few ppl to hang out. Just no.

-Large and medium plots can only be purchased by FC creators with other restrictions at SE's discretion.

-Anyone not in an FC or a low rank/pop FC should be limited to small houses.

This is assuming this current system continues.

let's see...

- I liked the Add a ward when a new ward fills up (might cause server stress, yes, but would keep the bloat and insanity from going on like this morning)
- I've seen plenty where it's 1 per acct. I can see 1 per world, where all your characters on that world share it. that's a good idea.
- The Multi-story Apartment with a "balcony garden" is also a viable issue.
- Having "FC" wards and "personal Wards" might help as well.




Other options would be
- Instancing them completely; that means no neighbors, but a lot more people can get them
- Actually doing housing more than once every 18 or so months. people save money, gather gil and wait for the housing. I know of at least 12 people (including myself) that saved up to buy a house, only to not have the patcher update...which means we spent half an hour to get the game to work. This is a big problem. yes, it is something people work towards, but when you work and in two "housing expansions" you miss out because of various things (game not patching, overload of people wanting to buy a house) there is an issue.


Limiting the house size based on how many active FC members (or limiting housing due to it being a personal house) can be a boon and a bane. my FC has times where people come on regularly, but then when they do all there is for the patch, they're gone until the next patch. doing that would be a discriminating due to various subjective things. Take the recent hurricanes. what if suddenly your FC was "Denied" a house because people weren't active...only because of a natural disaster. bad.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sylfaein

B) Split between individual and FC homes: one in wards, and one private. FCs and individuals competing for the same limited housing just isn't fair. :(

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Honestly this would make sense, because then the FC buildings wards would operate more like a business district.

That said, that moves in the opposite direction the game is supposed to behave.

My suggestion is more blunt:
- Remove the instanced wards and go minecraft/landmark strategy where players have to claim land, rather than buy it (maybe a maximum size can be specified to avoid making super tall/wide buildings.) The more land claimed, the more services the FC has to provide or be penalized. (eg you can't build a house taking up space larger than a typical zone and have it completely empty, there has to be at least a path through the property), the more space taken, the more Retainer-NPC's on active subscriptions have to be hired to hold it.

- Algorithmicly generate more land on the periphery as the space gets taken up, and have the server dynamically swap out map segments the player doesn't visit to keep it playable. That way large servers like Balmung simply grow their housing areas while nearly-empty servers don't grow at all.

Just give us instanced housing and have the instance be 'unloaded' on the server when not in use. It's simple, not a straing on the servers, and basically what everyone else already does. We don't /need/ neighborhoods that are always dead.