I am not talking about new homes in Shirogane. I'm talking about empty mansions that have, in some cases, been sitting like that for years.
100% Nah here. No size should be FC or personal only.
Some people buy a plot and then have no gil to decorate it at all, I saw a large in LB sit with nothing in it for a long time because the player had no gil. If they just lock the house then nobody will complain at them?
The only way I could see them making an FC only type of land plot would be if they added an XL plot larger than anything available now. These would cost a fortune and base design of the house would likely lean towards looking more like a guild hall than an actual house. However you'd still have to deal with people buying these with shell FC's which would kind of eliminate the point of FC exclusivity unless they either put a member activity requirement to buying it or add additional costs or conditions to purchase along with an incredibly high initial price tag in gil that would make it difficult for 1 person to pull it off.
Don't see why players should be dictated on what they can or can't buy.
Most FC's may say they "need" a large FC house but its usually the FC leader and maybe a handful of people who actually get to decorate it. And that one airship captain that maintains the airships while asking everyone to donate coke, or that one gardener who will make sure to mention to fertilize and donate soil...
Don't see why this selected group should get priority solely due to the reason that they share the same FC tag.
I have no problem with single players having a mansion as a personal home. The only issues that rises from a single player owning a mansion is decorating it. Unless your Omni crafter or Really good at making gil using alternative methods, it can take forever to fully furnish a large home by yourself.
They gave them to us, they can't take it back now. So arguing about whether they ever should have changed their minds about FCs having priority is pointless at this juncture.
There's also significant problems with prioritizing FCs without adding a lot of extra checks and balances to make sure it's a legitimate FC and not just some guy by himself with a bunch of his friends alts that they made specifically to fill his FC.
Further with the low prices and advertising of availability of housing as feature they kind of backed themselves into a corner of it being too accessible.
It's also, in general, unfair to say that an FC using a house as glorified teleport to the marketboard is more "important" or more "useful" than one single person who really enjoys their house, decorates it, throws parties etc. The fact they have added more features for decorating than for FC activities further solidifies housing as an aesthetic feature. If people who really didn't care about them just didn't buy them "because I can", or people who bought them but don't play or use them for a year plus didn't hold on to them "because it's mine" it would solve at least 50% of the availability issues. But they do.
In the end, SE are the ones who gave up on their own vision of it being a communal neighborhood for FCs. They had the information and resources available to realize what was going to happen with Shirogane and did nothing. They should have raised the prices. They should have come up with something other than winning the login queue for ownership claims. They discussed the idea of letting FCs go first and decided not to. They created this demand and so they have an obligation to fulfill it.
House sizes should not be FC-only. Developers should however consider the option to have all plots be the same size and cost, and capable of containing ANY size of house, if owners can come up with the costs.