A small concern I have about housing

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Originally Posted by DixieBellOCE

'people have lives'

Correct, they do. Telling somebody they don't have a life because they choose to stay subscribed to a video game is a bit childish no?

About the average NA reaction i'd expect on these forums.

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I think He was referring to the case where real life might cause you to unsub/take a break for certain period of time, every person has a life regardless of how they spend their time.

It would be nice if auto-demolition is removed so players do not have to be subbed constantly to retain their houses.

Unfortunately, as long as the availability of housing plots are limited and demand exceeds supply, it is a necessary evil to allow new players to have a shot at housing.

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Originally Posted by Renalt

Yeah...I agree. It's not a good system all around but I think it's intentional.

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Yeah don't unsub for long.

I don't know why your furnishings disappear along with your gil after a set period, as far as I know there has been no official word on this. I definitely don't think this should be the case, but it's been in place for so long with relatively little complaint from the community that I think it's probably here to stay.

I know of no other game that deletes a player's virtual assets like this (including cash shop items).
The fact that you can be paying a subscription and still lose your items makes it even worse. If they did this with any other items besides furniture, there would be a riot, and quite rightly so.

I assume the reason more people don't complain is that housing is extremely limited which means only a small proportion of the player-base is affected.
Another reason some people defend it is, I think, spite. If you're lucky enough to get a house under the present system, those people are going to resent you for it and they will support anything that kills your joy. The housing forum has plenty of threads advocating punitive measures to make owning a house more onerous or suggesting ways to remove houses from their present owners (nice community btw :P).

The only way for it to make sense is for housing to be so absolutely horribly done that even the stored items are still somehow on the same server space as the houses themselves.

Course, there's coding that bad all over this game, so I wouldn't be shocked.

So, what if all housing districts are loaded, at all times. What if every stored item, on every plot, is actually active, in memory, as if they are displayed and being looked at, right now.

That would actually explain the limitations.

It would explain why they can't just add yards to appartments, because that would be a horrible thing to do if things were this bad.

From what I understand, each housing ward is its own logical server within the server cluster, with a chunk of active memory where the displayed items (houses, housing exterior, furnishings, etc) live, and then the instanced zones within the housing area are still live and active even if people are not physically in them, but in a separate logical server.

Back when the afk botting was rampant the first time with 5.0 launch, there was an issue where the housing instance server had reached the maximum character cap, and people were essentially locked out of their homes due to the "congestion." That's how we knew that the outside of the neighborhood was a separate virtual server to the inside of the ward, because the outside didn't have the same congestion warning, but everyone was locked out of their houses for the whole housing ward area at once.

Happened again last winter.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/450469

If we assume that the limitations and design make sense, that setup would not require any limit to stored items. SO I'm going to just layer on top that the stored items must exist somewhere too.

The demolition and loss of stuff is why I won't even bother trying to get a house. I tend to take long breaks and I know very well I would get started on something and forget to log in the character that has the house. Better to not even try.

Having 2 houses and 4 fc rooms of my own, the demo timer is grating. But i understand and empathize with why it exists.

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Originally Posted by Bukachu

And Yoshi-P said that he doesnt want people to feel pressured to play at all times and not take breaks, right. that's also fair.

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Maybe he doesn't want you to feel pressured to play at all times... but he certainly wants you to pay at all times.

There's big money in that. There's about 70 servers, 5 cities, 24 wards, 2 subdivisions, 30 plots in each - that's 504,000 plots. Players that own them are on a treadmill where they have to stay subbed (for the most part). At around $15/mo, that's $91M per year. Just for the playerbase to keep their housing.

I'm a player that lost my house in the first purge back in 2015 or so. I wasn't playing (or paying!) the game. The house was returned back to the playerbase. By the time I returned, the items were gone. The gil was gone. Poofed. I was hard pressed to find a reason to stay in this game at that point.

I'm with you though. There is no other aspect of the game that is "lost" because you don't login. Imagine if you took a break from the game and came back to:

- All jobs deleveled a few levels
- Gil down 50%
- Mounts lost
- Achievements lost
- Minions lost
- Quest progress lost
- etc etc

Honestly, since housing is the only aspect of the game that is lost by not being around, it really brings into question SE's justification for it. After all of these years... why single out housing? Maybe address the problem?