Unable to log in to prevent house demolition due to real world issues

Unfortunately, real world circumstances have kept me away from the game for the past few months, and as a result, my house was demolished and the grace period to retrieve my belongings has past. I don't mind that I lost the house, but is there truly no way to retrieve the items that were within my house or the four-fifths of its cost?

I want to stress that for the last few months due to real world personal issues that I was physically unable to log in to the game to meet either deadline. My character is Mori Smolliope on Leviathan. I've been away for so long that I don't remember the exact ward and plot of my house, only that it was in Empyreum. Any help or information that can be provided would be most greatly appreciated, thank you for your time.

Good morning! Thank you for posting in the Final Fantasy XIV Technical Support Forums.

We apologize for any inconvenience that has occurred when playing Final Fantasy XIV. Unfortunately, the issue you are describing does not appear to be a technical issue. I will go ahead and move this thread to “General Discussion" instead. Unfortunately the only means to recoup losses from a demolition is through the methods you have already described.

Thank you once again for visiting the Final Fantasy XIV Technical Support Forums!

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Originally Posted by Cirno

Unfortunately, real world circumstances have kept me away from the game for the past few months, and as a result, my house was demolished and the grace period to retrieve my belongings has past. I don't mind that I lost the house, but is there truly no way to retrieve the items that were within my house or the four-fifths of its cost?

I want to stress that for the last few months due to real world personal issues that I was physically unable to log in to the game to meet either deadline. My character is Mori Smolliope on Leviathan. I've been away for so long that I don't remember the exact ward and plot of my house, only that it was in Empyreum. Any help or information that can be provided would be most greatly appreciated, thank you for your time.

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I'll take the risk of being blunt, you wont get anything back, they really dont care.

https://media3.giphy.com/media/TNDMR...uE5d/giphy.gif

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It's still insane to me that the game only holds your stuff for a very short amount of time. What on earth is going on server side that they can only hold the money and items from a demolished house for 35 days? Reclaiming your stuff shouldn't have a timer at all.

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

It's still insane to me that the game only holds your stuff for a very short amount of time. What on earth is going on server side that they can only hold the money and items from a demolished house for 35 days? Reclaiming your stuff shouldn't have a timer at all.

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It's simple: it's to make you sub for a month, no other reason. Same with the housing itself: it's a means to an end, and that end is to keep people subbed so that they don't lose their quadrillions on their housings.

I once told this, long long LONG time ago, back in patch 3.1 when it was first introduced, that this system was stupid and it's only purpose is to keep you playing even without our will. Their answer was "then stop complaining and quit, so I can take your house"

Glad I just stuck with apartments from now. At least they don't get demolished after years of being unused...for now.

Because for the longest time there were entire residential areas of houses empty whose owners had long since left the game and never returned, and with housing at a premium and a critical shortage of plots, players actually begged SE to implement the demolition timer of these abandoned houses to free up space, and SE eventually complied. It's annoying, but that's life sadly.

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

Because for the longest time there were entire residential areas of houses empty whose owners had long since left the game and never returned, and with housing at a premium and a critical shortage of plots, players actually begged SE to implement the demolition timer of these abandoned houses to free up space, and SE eventually complied. It's annoying, but that's life sadly.

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The core of the issue isn't demo timers. It's the housing system as a whole.

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

It's still insane to me that the game only holds your stuff for a very short amount of time. What on earth is going on server side that they can only hold the money and items from a demolished house for 35 days? Reclaiming your stuff shouldn't have a timer at all.

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I assume it has something to do with the structure of how the data is stored. Server storage has to be allocated and managed, and that costs money. So to try to cut costs, most platforms will try to reduce that overhead as much as possible by allocating close to what they think they'll need, and not more. If every player who has ever had their house demolished had that stuff stored without limit, that has the potential to add up to a lot more data than the FF14 team had organized their system to support.

In theory they could change this, but from what we know the housing system in FF14 is a bit of a hack job; it reportedly takes the team a lot of time and effort to create new housing wards, when if the system were designed "better" it would likely be as simple as provisioning a server and flipping a switch. I'm not an expert on all things servers, but I suspect that the devs made some decisions about their architecture early on that have made changes very difficult to make without upending the entire system.

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Originally Posted by Voltyblast

It's simple: it's to make you sub for a month, no other reason. Same with the housing itself: it's a means to an end, and that end is to keep people subbed so that they don't lose their quadrillions on their housings.

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What? No.

Demolition is a necessary evil. It sucks, but without it we'd be looking at entire wards full of abandoned houses and no plots would EVER go up for sale outside of the occasional server move.