Dear SE - housing issues and solutions (keep them comming, someone might notice)
Dear SE, ladies and gentlemen, esteemed lower primates.
My FC ended without a house, they were all gone in 5minutes on Balmung while we waited in 2000+ long line to even get in. Dear SE what is the FC house based functionality for if FC's can't get the houses? Did no one realize this is an issue? And did you by any chance employed group of baboons as your game designers to make up for the budget cuts?
Let's make it simple and list some of the worst issues.
- FC housing should always have remain separate from private housing. Especially when you lock actual FC functionality (as the workshop) behind ownership of the house. Before you implement something you might first consider what are your resources.
- Can your servers really support only 36 wards for thousands of players and hundreds of FCs? Then you should limit private housing to something manageable as simple rooms. Many mmorpgs use this formula and it works.
- Oh you already messed up and it had been an issue for over a year? Then when adding new wards consider the issue first. Would it really be impossible to add FC-houses only wards? There had been also suggestion of grace period when only FC's will be able to buy the houses in first day/week but I don't like this solution as it doesn't really help new established FC's who also should have chance of reaching full FC functionality.
- When trying to fix the issue don't make changes that make it worse instead. While Heavensward brought logical inflation as every expansion in any mmorpg everyone expected the housing prices to go up instead they had been lowered further promoting private housing over Free Companies. And even more so make things even easier for army of vultures who could afford to harvest even more plots, at friendly profit of course.
- And most importantly, when trying to fix your past mistake don't pick solution that instead add to the worst problems within the game. The ward expansion became golden opportunity for gil farmers. Horrendous amounts of money for which houses are being re-sold proves that people are desperate. And where will some of them get those ridiculous amounts of gil? Well it's simple and costs only 9.99$ you know where to go from your mail and friendly whispers.
Of course they also have to earn that gil somehow. Let me tell you story of a golden goose, or in this case strange FC, named after the plot it owns and with each member happy owner of all of the nearby plots. Either someone is incredibly lucky or we got our first Eorzean real estate agency. And while I didn't witnessed it myself enjoying company of error 5006 I heard tales of these groups of real estate agents running in very coordinated herds smelling of motor oil and buying out the plots with almost machine like precision.
Dear SE, this is the product we are buying and we expect it to work. We should have to take days off work or wake up in middle of a night and have to compete with army of hoarders and bots to make it work. And if you cannon make it work then no banana for you.
And now so I'm not just snarky here are some possible solutions
Most of them had been already mentioned here and I'm sure local community could come up with even more, all needed is just a bit of a common sense. Note that probably few of these suggestion had to be combined to make up a working solution.
- If you really want to provide private housing for everyone then add a lot more new wards, improve servers if needed. Simplest solution but possibly not technically viable.
- Add limited number of wards but lock medium and large houses for FC housing only.
- Add FC housing wards only, ideally implement unlimited FC housing, then you can leave current wards for private housing.
- Hard limit one house per account.
- Implement rent system. Rent could be expensive for single person but easily manageable for whole FC.
- Solve the issue of plots taken up by inactive players. Have plot be freed after X time after sub runs out for example. (This one is even good business for you)
- Solve the house reselling issue mechanically. Banning few people wouldn't do much, especially in case of gil farmers who often run dozens of accounts and take lots ones as minor business expense. For example implement a house destruction period and randomize it.
- After house reselling won't be possible implement housing refund system so people who aren't using their houses are motivated to free the spots for those who'd love to use them without the reselling.
- Release the baboons back into the wild. The corporate environment isn't good for them.
- Motivate people to spread population more evenly across servers. Offer free migrations to low population servers, bonuses, free stuff. I understand it's likely not technically viable to add wards dynamically and have 30 wards for high population servers and 10 for low pop ones but then solution is actively try to spread the population evenly which would both aid the housing issue and other server issues connected to too high or too low population.
And that's it. If you want to see (or naively hope) SE to solve these issues remember to make your voice heard and feel free to add more ideas and suggestions.
- Your Grumbling Behemoth
