4.2 Housing Update

I would assume that SE is taking baby steps on this at least hopefully(knock on wood). Assuming this is a baby step the next step would be remove the ability to relocate for those above the cap and say 3? months to slim down their properties with proper compensation until there could be a forced demolition of all but the 1/1 allotment. If this is just a stopgap measure It would be reasonable to say there's a much larger rework of the housing system in the works but not much to work on at this point to support that.

I know I personally would remove houses from people who had ones that were beyond the limit, they would get no gil back, they would get no furniture back (other than mog station items) and I would tell them to just deal with it as they told other players who they prevented from getting houses.

Thankfully, to those people, that isn't going to happen. I already have a medium in the Lavender Beds and have for a long time so this doesn't affect me directly, but I do hope they do something about people that own tons of houses so people who don't own one and wants to, can get one.

I got mine after someone lost theirs to auto demo after all.

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Originally Posted by Dragonrage53

I would assume that SE is taking baby steps on this at least hopefully(knock on wood). Assuming this is a baby step the next step would be remove the ability to relocate for those above the cap and say 3? months to slim down their properties with proper compensation until there could be a forced demolition of all but the 1/1 allotment. If this is just a stopgap measure It would be reasonable to say there's a much larger rework of the housing system in the works but not much to work on at this point to support that.

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They just can't get rid of the additional houses a player might own. Many have purchased housing items out of the cash shop for real money so SE would have to reimburse them for their costs as not every housing item can be kept if players are forced to one house. The only fair thing is to grandfather them and eventually reclaim them through attrition or when the owner surrenders them. To beat a dead horse, the multiple house owners are not the problem. The problem is the current model is not capable of scaling to meet demand. Until that is resolved players are going to be dissatisfied with housing and forcing a few extra houses on the market won't do anything to make it better. In fact fixing the supply problem would put the resellers and RMT folks out of business as there would be no point in buying a house they couldn't sell.

I see your point Clav but how long does one let a cancer grow intended or unintended before the infected parts are removed. Please note i'm not intentionally or angrily calling the unintended or well intentioned house hoarders, house enthusiasts, and other variations cancerous, a fair or large amount of them do use and love their houses but at some point you have to cut out the bad parts and someones going to loose it all or the whole system falls down goes boom. That's how these things work out in the end. Bottom line the system is critically flawed and there's much to fix. But, if you allow the old poisonous parts to remain it just spoils any good intention put forward. In the end its up to SE how this works out lets all hope they come up with something that's fair and amicable to everyone eh?

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Originally Posted by Adeacia

I got mine after someone lost theirs to auto demo after all.

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Some people keep saying it's such a tiny fix it's hardly noteworthy at all, and it would be in comparison to a housing overhaul, but nearly everyone I know who has a personal or fc house got it because of demolition. So...yea, even small fixes can have a noticeable impact.

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Originally Posted by Dragonrage53

I see your point Clav but how long does one let a cancer grow intended or unintended before the infected parts are removed. Please note i'm not intentionally or angrily calling the unintended or well intentioned house hoarders, house enthusiasts, and other variations cancerous, a fair or large amount of them do use and love their houses but at some point you have to cut out the bad parts and someones going to loose it all or the whole system falls down goes boom. That's how these things work out in the end. Bottom line the system is critically flawed and there's much to fix. But, if you allow the old poisonous parts to remain it just spoils any good intention put forward. In the end its up to SE how this works out lets all hope they come up with something that's fair and amicable to everyone eh?

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The thing is the multiple dwelling players are minimal and most own two or three houses not the mythical huge numbers most people seem to believe they do (yes there a few exceptions such as that ward on Mateaus). While none of us have the numbers I am willing to bet it is under 1% of the houses for N.A. To use your analogy these people are benign and you don't normally remove a benign growth. Take away their houses that were bought legally and you just alienate more players. You also still haven't done anything about flippers and RMT folks who are a real cancer to the game. Even with the timer and additional housing it will still be so constrained that some players will be willing to pay for the chance at getting a plot. They will do this even if they have to camp it for days to wait out a variable timer. Under the current system it is much better to have players voluntarily relinquish a house. In fact SE could encourage this by allowing alts to share houses automatically. A number of players have stated the only reason they have more than one house is to get around this silly restriction and would go down to one if they could share. However the real fix is to have an unlimited supply of houses. This means SE needs to add a lot more ward servers or drop the idea of wards and provide instanced housing. They wouldn't have to dump wards completely and could still keep the wards for those that are willing to live with its limitations. For everybody else have a parallel housing system based on instances. Instances would not only scale better but would allow for many of the item restrictions to be removed because of the scalability.

I wholly agree housing should have been instanced from the start, also allowing one house for one account where all characters on the account have automatic access would be great. Perhaps change what houses one sees in each neighborhood when someone goes to their own house based on their friends list, fc mates, LS mates... This allows for a far more intimate feeling neighborhood than what exists now with all the zombie houses. Either way this housing system is doomed unless SE does something about these intentional house hoarders and RMT's holding houses for ransom.

If they choose to stay with persistent housing in the end, People who knowingly and lightly pushed the boundary's (2-5ish? houses) for good reasons will get burned the most when they loose all but one of their houses. No way in saying how this can or will end but that's in SE's hands not mine and iv'e clearly laid out my ideas for them to read either way i'm done with this subject have a wonderful day /wave

I think a lot of folks who enjoy decorating and RP especially would happily give up their additional houses if they knew they could have an apartment with the same layout as a small, medium, or large house.... and not a cramped FC room. Or heck, even give apartments their own unique layouts to go along with the different sizes!


Especially since there are only so many ways you can decorate the outside of a house, and the item allotment out there is super limited.

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Originally Posted by Nalette

I think a lot of folks who enjoy decorating and RP especially would happily give up their additional houses if they could have an apartment with the same layout as a small, medium, or large house.... and not a cramped FC room.

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Yeah...I can live without a yard. They should really be looking at making apartments upgradeable. They're just a more expensive, unwieldy version of an FC room.

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Originally Posted by Elamys

Yeah...I can live without a yard. They should really be looking at making apartments upgradeable. They're just a more expensive, unwieldy version of an FC room.

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They are talking about small, medium and large size apartments. What they'll add in addition to that remains to be seen. I do believe it's on the agenda.

That would be wonderful for sure. Too bad they shot down the balcony idea though.

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Originally Posted by Claviusnex

They just can't get rid of the additional houses a player might own. Many have purchased housing items out of the cash shop for real money so SE would have to reimburse them for their costs as not every housing item can be kept if players are forced to one house. The only fair thing is to grandfather them and eventually reclaim them through attrition or when the owner surrenders them. To beat a dead horse, the multiple house owners are not the problem. The problem is the current model is not capable of scaling to meet demand. Until that is resolved players are going to be dissatisfied with housing and forcing a few extra houses on the market won't do anything to make it better. In fact fixing the supply problem would put the resellers and RMT folks out of business as there would be no point in buying a house they couldn't sell.

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I mean, realistically, Mog Station purchases should probably be reclaimed on house destruction no matter what.


And if you want to get technical, private houses are actually the problem. Some servers have more than enough wards for every FC to have one or will when 4.2 drops. On Mateus only like 27% of the houses are FC owned, Balmung goes up to almost 40%, Gilgamesh is around 31%. Putting in all servers at once it's like 35%.

The average number of wards you'd need is like 8(and still have spare plots even with all those 1 person fcs), and the freed up server space could be used to add wards to servers with higher numbers of FCs and/or improve apartments.



As for reclamation through attrition, i feel like that may take a pretty long time. The arguments about how connected they feel to their homes and all that make me think that they'll hold onto them as long as possible. Like I can imagine people logging on just to keep their homes.

The bottom line is there is gil (and in some cases IRL money) to be made over house flipping. If SE really thinks gating house purchases behind four person FCs is going to stop the issue I don't know what to say anymore. If you want to flip a house, wouldn't you just make a tiny FC with scheming friends, invite the buyer into your FC, take your payment, promote them to lead, then leave entirely and take your profit with you so you can do it again later?

All they've done is make it a longer process and cut out all the competition from individual buyers. Great job.

Quick question: My FC owns a small plot but we want to upgrade to a medium, when the servers go live, will we be able to do this or will the system prioritize homeless FCs?

Because if it's the latter we'll never get our hands on a medium plot.

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Originally Posted by Sashazor

Quick question: My FC owns a small plot but we want to upgrade to a medium, when the servers go live, will we be able to do this or will the system prioritize homeless FCs?

Because if it's the latter we'll never get our hands on a medium plot.

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FC's are going to get first crack at transfers, new purchases as well as privately owned houses able to do transfers as well.

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Originally Posted by Sashazor

Quick question: My FC owns a small plot but we want to upgrade to a medium, when the servers go live, will we be able to do this or will the system prioritize homeless FCs?

Because if it's the latter we'll never get our hands on a medium plot.

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the wards wont be released till one week after the patch..as far as what they have said..homless fcs can buy new plots and anyone who owns a house can transfer to a new plot

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Originally Posted by Siniztor

the wards wont be released till one week after the patch..as far as what they have said..homless fcs can buy new plots and anyone who owns a house can transfer to a new plot

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Where did they confirm this?

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Originally Posted by Sashazor

Where did they confirm this?

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https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DT6B09wWsAAy9Th.jpg:large

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Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra

FC's are going to get first crack at transfers, new purchases as well as privately owned houses able to do transfers as well.

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New purchases FC first, not so bad however, this system will be abused (which is already happening) by ppl buying multiple FCs. The end result will be that maybe a few more people get a small house given the small amount of med/lg ones in each ward. Bandaid fix gives way to duct tape fix but duct tape doesn't last forever...

Greetings,

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Originally Posted by Awha

Anyone happen to know if they will be removing houses from those currently already own more then one plot per server?

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Yoshida mentioned during the Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XLI that the rules being added in Patch 4.2 will be applicable to new purchases only. Players who already possess more than one FC estate and 1 personal estate per world will not lose their existing housing.

We appreciate all the feedback shared so far and will continue to pass your thoughts along to the dev. team!

Well, there it is lol. That sucks

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Originally Posted by Luxpheras

Greetings,



Yoshida mentioned during the Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XLI that the rules being added in Patch 4.2 will be applicable to new purchases only. Players who already possess more than one FC estate and 1 personal estate per world will not lose their existing housing.

We appreciate all the feedback shared so far and will continue to pass your thoughts along to the dev. team!

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Thank you for the confirmation Luxpheras, you cleared up a lot of confusion floating around on the forum. For the record, I think allowing hoarders to keep their collection of houses is a terrible idea, pretty much for all the reasons outlined here and in other threads. It's just my small opinion, but I figured I would express it since you are still taking feedback.

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Originally Posted by Rymm

Thank you for the confirmation Luxpheras, you cleared up a lot of confusion floating around on the forum. For the record, I think allowing hoarders to keep their collection of houses is a terrible idea, pretty much for all the reasons outlined here and in other threads. It's just my small opinion, but I figured I would express it since you are still taking feedback.

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If they ever set up instanced housing for personal and FC use it won't make a difference. I really hope they do something like this because the current housing situation is a crap design no matter how many rules you create.

Allowing hoarders to be grandfathered in is a huge mistake. They should be given reasonable deadlines to decide which of their houses they would like to keep and offered generous refunds for houses they'd be forced to relinquish. Perhaps even give them in-game vouchers they can use to pass their houses along to friends or FC mates... one-time transfer only, of course.

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Originally Posted by Thayos

Allowing hoarders to be grandfathered in is a huge mistake. They should be given reasonable deadlines to decide which of their houses they would like to keep and offered generous refunds for houses they'd be forced to relinquish. Perhaps even give them in-game vouchers they can use to pass their houses along to friends or FC mates... one-time transfer only, of course.

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Just whom would you have decide what number is classified as "hoarding"? Is 2-3 enough, is 8 too many? Unless you have a medical professional in SE's cluster, I don't know who else would be able to make that determination hehe. SE allowed this behavior to begin and flourish sans consequences since 2013 and now it is up to them to try and make it fair for the rest of their playerbase. Can they? Well not everyone will be happy however, they have to start somewhere which is what they are doing now.

Why is it a huge mistake? They are going to continue adding wards, and are planning on updating apartments to Small/Medium/Large. They understand the desire for houses and will continue closing the gap between players subscribed and houses/apartments. With 4.2 I think every FC that wants a house will have one. With a few more ward additions, the desire for personal houses will also be satiated. So what is the issue with them grandfather some players in? Over time many of them will be reclaimed through auto demos.

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Originally Posted by Besame

Just whom would you have decide what number is classified as "hoarding"? Is 2-3 enough, is 8 too many? Unless you have a medical professional in SE's cluster, I don't know who else would be able to make that determination hehe. SE allowed this behavior to begin and flourish sans consequences since 2013 and now it is up to them to try and make it fair for the rest of their playerbase. Can they? Well not everyone will be happy however, they have to start somewhere which is what they are doing now.

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It's actually rather simple, if you have more than one private and one fc house, you have too many because that's all a new character would be able to get to after 4.2. Personally, I'd even start the demolition timer on any FC that drops below 4 active accounts.

You can talk about fairness, but realistically, it's not fair that FCs haven't been able to get houses. Nor will it be fair that many will struggle to get one house while others maintain their extras for, potentially, years to come.

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Originally Posted by MeridaQ

Why is it a huge mistake? They are going to continue adding wards, and are planning on updating apartments to Small/Medium/Large. They understand the desire for houses and will continue closing the gap between players subscribed and houses/apartments. With 4.2 I think every FC that wants a house will have one. With a few more ward additions, the desire for personal houses will also be satiated. So what is the issue with them grandfather some players in? Over time many of them will be reclaimed through auto demos.

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Forcing those who have extra homes to relinquish them would free up more wards in the patch that it happens. This helps ensure that not every house will sell out during the FC only stage so there are some left when private ownership is opened.

This is an action that can be taken right now to alleviate the issue, it won't solve it but it would buy some more goodwill with those players who are still stuck outside the housing system trying to get in while they work up to more wards. Also, the more unique individuals you have in the housing the more chances there are someone will go inactivate and get auto demo'd.


Regarding the outcome of the patch... personally, I expect that the houses will likely sell out before private ownership opens up. Not being able to get a FC house seems to be a fairly consistent complaint and there are ways houseflippers could work even with the restrictions.

Also, if every FC without a house wants one, the number of wards being released wouldn't be enough on the random servers I'm searching. They wouldn't even be enough if half of them wanted one.

And then the moment they do sell out, if there are still people sitting on extra houses, the complaints about those people will just start up again. Where if you take them away, those people will be upset for a while but it will no longer be something to complain about. The only thing left would be waiting for more wards to open.

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Originally Posted by Sairys

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Excluding one popularized story where a guild/couple own 30 houses, I think you overestimate how many players own more than 2 houses. And the only reason the people who bought up 30 houses could buy up 30 houses was they were on a dead server. It takes about 295 million gil just to buy the properties, 3 accounts to own the houses and maybe 1-2 months just to grind 28 FCs to rank 6 (as I don't think jump potions were available at the time they initially bought the houses).

Think of the time it took to earn 295 million gil, level 28 FCs to rank 6, and all during this time someone random could have showed up and bought any of those properties. Instead no one ever showed up during their whole execution of the land grabs.

months had to have gone by where no one was interested in any of the properties.

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Originally Posted by Sairys

Forcing those who have extra homes to relinquish them would free up more wards in the patch that it happens. This helps ensure that not every house will sell out during the FC only stage so there are some left when private ownership is opened.

This is an action that can be taken right now to alleviate the issue, it won't solve it but it would buy some more goodwill with those players who are still stuck outside the housing system trying to get in while they work up to more wards. Also, the more unique individuals you have in the housing the more chances there are someone will go inactivate and get auto demo'd.


Regarding the outcome of the patch... personally, I expect that the houses will likely sell out before private ownership opens up. Not being able to get a FC house seems to be a fairly consistent complaint and there are ways houseflippers could work even with the restrictions.

Also, if every FC without a house wants one, the number of wards being released wouldn't be enough on the random servers I'm searching. They wouldn't even be enough if half of them wanted one.

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I will address the comments I put in bold. Removing houses from multi-house owners will not ensure anything but a PR nightmare and loss of subscriptions. There are many people who are fundamentally against the idea of removing homes from people who have them under completely legitimate means.

Second this "goodwill" isn't being very honest. People will be upset if they lost their homes and people who don't have multiple homes also will be upset. There are many people that have said this both on the forums and reddit. There will be some that are happy, but from what I have read on the forums, go ahead and look back a few pages there are some very vindictive people who are getting extremely upset at the idea of grandfathering people. Reddit had even more and harsher comments but I can't quote those on the official forum.

Lastly if you randomly search the servers are you being specific with your search? Did you choose FC's currently without an estate or plot? Did you add number of active members to that search? Because then you get much closer to the accurate count. For example on Ultros there are 2770 FCs out of that there are 1919 FCs without a house/plot. Then after checking active members there are 355 FCs that don't have 4 or more members so 1919-355 = 1564. They are adding 1440 more plots for 4.2 so only 124 FCs would not get a house if every FC on Ultros purchased a house. I would say that is more than half, and I also did random searches and this is similar across other servers. This does not account for the houses that will explode because of auto demos and I would also not assume that every FC on each server are planning on buying a house.

I ask again why is it necessary to remove houses from multi-owners? They will continue to add housing and apartments and as of 4.2 most of the FC's will have houses. It took me a year and a half to get my personal house, yes it takes a while to get but if you watch the wards you can get it much faster than I did. Let's also keep in mind not everyone wants a house or apartment. I said this before but I think if they had enough houses for 80% of the server population everyone that wants houses will have a house.

Question

Will the single-house for FC per person impact those who are not the FC leader?
Example.
I have multiple characters on a server.
Character A is in FC 1, they have a small plot in the Mists currently.
Character B is in FC 2, they don't have a house and are planning to buy one.

I am not the leader in either Free Company.
Will my membership within the company prevent FC 2 from buying a house?

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Originally Posted by Luxpheras

Greetings,



Yoshida mentioned during the Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XLI that the rules being added in Patch 4.2 will be applicable to new purchases only. Players who already possess more than one FC estate and 1 personal estate per world will not lose their existing housing.

We appreciate all the feedback shared so far and will continue to pass your thoughts along to the dev. team!

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This is a terrible idea. That said, they're very specifically saying "...added in Patch 4.2" so maybe once the initial changes take hold, more surgical options will be available.

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Originally Posted by illgot

.... I think you overestimate how many players own more than 2 houses. ....

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Exactly this. Too many people look at the exception and make it the norm. There aren't enough players with more than one house to make a dent in the demand for housing. By forcing the return of houses SE does nothing more than make more of their player base upset and causes additional problems related to cash shop item handling. It is better to grandfather current multi-house owners and let them come to the market through attrition. If they wan to incent people to freely give up extra houses adding the automatic ability for alts to share housing would go a long way. Even this won't fix the problem. There are only two options for SE to resolve the housing issue. Add enough wards so every FC and player can have a house or create a fully instanced housing system where housing is effectively unlimited. They could even keep both, keeping the current wards for those who are willing to live with its restrictions and a parallel instanced system where they lift the item number restrictions, allow for upgrades on the same plot, etc.

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Originally Posted by TheCurls

That said, they're very specifically saying "...added in Patch 4.2"

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I think you might be reading too much into that.

How else would you write that the new rules coming into effect with 4.2 will only affect new purchases?

If anything it's very clear that existing owners won't lose their housing, not that they might at some point down the line.

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Originally Posted by Luxpheras

Greetings,



Yoshida mentioned during the Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XLI that the rules being added in Patch 4.2 will be applicable to new purchases only. Players who already possess more than one FC estate and 1 personal estate per world will not lose their existing housing.

We appreciate all the feedback shared so far and will continue to pass your thoughts along to the dev. team!

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Thanks for the clarification! Quite the relief :)

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Originally Posted by missarielle

Question

Will the single-house for FC per person impact those who are not the FC leader?
Example.
I have multiple characters on a server.
Character A is in FC 1, they have a small plot in the Mists currently.
Character B is in FC 2, they don't have a house and are planning to buy one.

I am not the leader in either Free Company.
Will my membership within the company prevent FC 2 from buying a house?

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Your membership in FC 1 will prevent you from buying a house for FC 2, however anyone else with land permissions in FC 2 (provided they don't also have an alt character in a different FC) can still purchase a house for FC 2.

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Originally Posted by Claviusnex

Exactly this. Too many people look at the exception and make it the norm. There aren't enough players with more than one house to make a dent in the demand for housing. By forcing the return of houses SE does nothing more than make more of their player base upset and causes additional problems related to cash shop item handling. It is better to grandfather current multi-house owners and let them come to the market through attrition. If they wan to incent people to freely give up extra houses adding the automatic ability for alts to share housing would go a long way. Even this won't fix the problem. There are only two options for SE to resolve the housing issue. Add enough wards so every FC and player can have a house or create a fully instanced housing system where housing is effectively unlimited. They could even keep both, keeping the current wards for those who are willing to live with its restrictions and a parallel instanced system where they lift the item number restrictions, allow for upgrades on the same plot, etc.

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The people who will be upset will almost exclusively be the people who have the extra houses, along with a handful of unaffected people with misplaced empathy. I don't have a lot of sympathy for them, as they knowingly abused the system to horde an extremely limited resource. And, as was stated, there aren't many of these people. Even if 100% of the folks affected quit the game in disgust after having their homes taken away, it would hardly put a dent in the subscription base. It should go without saying that not even close to 100% of folks affected will do this; maybe a small handful, with the remainder grumbling on the forums a while before everyone eventually forgets about it all.

By the same token, there aren't many of these people. Taking their homes away will not suddenly flood the servers with available housing. To me, though, gaining new housing is not the reason to do it, but rather to FINALLY address an injustice that has been tolerated for far too long. I mean, seriously; the moment SE announced that FC housing was going to be our personal housing as well, folks knew it was going to be a limited resource. Hoarders did not go in blind.

It doesn't matter of only 100 people out of all the combined servers have multiple homes. The point is they are the only 100 people who will ever have that many come 4.2. Why should they have the privilege when at the least that is 100 plots that can go to homeless FCs or players?

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Originally Posted by Luxpheras

Greetings,



Yoshida mentioned during the Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XLI that the rules being added in Patch 4.2 will be applicable to new purchases only. Players who already possess more than one FC estate and 1 personal estate per world will not lose their existing housing.

We appreciate all the feedback shared so far and will continue to pass your thoughts along to the dev. team!

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Well if that's the case then it's too little too late, Especially when some idiots own whole wards or a house on each alt.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

The people who will be upset will almost exclusively be the people who have the extra houses, along with a handful of unaffected people with misplaced empathy. I don't have a lot of sympathy for them, as they knowingly abused the system to horde an extremely limited resource.

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There has been no abuse of the system. They bought houses in exactly the manner SE wanted them to buy houses. When SE designed the system and allowed personal houses they decided that it was on a character basis so intended for a player to have the ability to own more than one house. Since it is as designed it isn't abuse. You and others keep blaming the players when housing is entirely SE's fault. Instead of crying selfishly, "If I can't have it then nobody should" maybe y'all should worry that SE is still not doing enough to ensure adequate housing for the player base with 4.2.

The only people that abused housing are the ones that buy and flip for huge profits. The few that bought many to decorate like whole wards have other issues *rolls eyes*. The multiple plot owners should be given "X" amount of time to sell/demolish/give away, whatever, any more than 1 plot per main and allow alts to inhabit the main's property with all privileges. SE did allow multiples per account after all so to me, one house per alt was not abuse. Now that housing has become such an issue SE needs to step up and deal with it. I have 1 med house, 1 apt and am co-manager of 2x FCs (1 of which is my husbands, the other my friend's). I could of bought a house on my alt but I chose not to. There is something to be said for not being a glutton and sharing with others in my mind anyway. Allowing FCs to have first shot at the additional housing wards irks me because the system abuse is already in motion since the announcement came forth. It would be an advantage to the 2x FC's I am in but a pita to single purchasers that have been waiting equally as long for a shot at not being totally homeless.