So My Neighbors Quit the Game & Left Behind Their Abandoned FC House

So my FC is at Plot 4, 1st Ward, Mist (Diabolos) and our neighbors at plot 6 are down to one member, and they're not active in the game anymore. There are a few other plots on our Ward that have also been abandoned. I can imagine this is probably going on at other wards too.

It doesn't directly affect us, but just the same it's disappointing that our ward is a bit of a ghost town. The only legitimate complaint about this is that these abandoned FC houses are preventing new and active FC from getting a plot.

I know they said they're adding more Wards, but rather than spending money and resources on these new wards maybe they could solve this issue first?

A Free Company's leadership is handed off to someone after being inactive for so long, but how about an auto FC disband that frees up these plots after the inactive FC leadership can no longer be handed off? It'll free up FC names, some space on the database as well as some plots.

Or maybe just some sort of tax system?

What do you guys think?

If I remember right, there's already a system in place that will drop a plot of land held by an FC after X amount of time goes by with that plot abandoned.

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Originally Posted by Brine_Gildchaff

If I remember right, there's already a system in place that will drop a plot of land held by an FC after X amount of time goes by with that plot abandoned.

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They scrapped that idea after everyone complained. This is what we asked for.

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Originally Posted by Brine_Gildchaff

If I remember right, there's already a system in place that will drop a plot of land held by an FC after X amount of time goes by with that plot abandoned.

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not yet. they are working on a system that if you don't enter your fc house in so long you lose it. but it's not out yet and is getting change because of another thread.

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Originally Posted by TheCurls

They scrapped that idea after everyone complained. This is what we asked for.

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actually it wasn't scrapped it is getting tweaked but it's still comming.

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Originally Posted by Musashidon

actually it wasn't scrapped it is getting tweaked but it's still comming.

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I don't suppose you could point to where this was mentioned?

Housing was doomed to suffer from this at the start. One can only conclude that Square Enix never intended for the wards to become active hubs and hangouts in the first place.

You have your house. It's your own personal instance, for you and your friends' own personal achievements and social gatherings. All other players, and the houses they purchase, are the same in that regard: exclusive and irrelevant to their surroundings. The neighborhood concept that comes with wards just doesn't work beyond the novelty it brings visually, because the possibility of those players coming back after abandoning the game removes the effectiveness of inactivity rules and sweeps. When the time comes that some form of those rules are put into place, it's only going to push the affected players further away from considering a resub.

The house should be overgrown with weeds & overrun with vermin. & an abandoned airship in the front yard, on cinder blocks.

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Originally Posted by arctic

I don't suppose you could point to where this was mentioned?

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Originally Posted by Camate

Greetings,

Thank you for all the feedback on this.

Based on all of the comments, we’ll be spending a bit more time looking into the automatic removal of land and house feature again, and we expect to implement it sometime after patch 2.4. Once the details have been finalized we will be sure to make an announcement.

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here it is.

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Originally Posted by kidvideo

The house should be overgrown with weeds & overrun with vermin. & an abandoned airship in the front yard, on cinder blocks.

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I could get behind this. Of course this means I'll be on the "bad side" of the ward.

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Originally Posted by Musashidon

here it is.

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Thanks, sounds like it's something that's going to be on the back burner for a while. Especially if we're supposed to see new wards before then. So what system do you think would be best to implement this? People just flat out not going into the house for a certain period of time? The FC getting disbanded after a certain amount of inactivity and no longer able to hand off lead? Or Taxes? Something else?

the system will be pretty simple. you don't enter your fc house(basically proving to the game you're still there) you lose it.

this also means anyone can enter. meaning even if 100 people are inactive only 1 person needs to step foot into the house to reset the timer.

Why get rid of them? Other games keep your house indefinitely....I still have houses in Rift....which may encourage me to go back to that game sometime, knowing that all the work I did building it and it will still be there.

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Originally Posted by Rosy

Why get rid of them? Other games keep your house indefinitely....I still have houses in Rift....which may encourage me to go back to that game sometime, knowing that all the work I did building it and it will still be there.

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well that's what this thread is for.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ming-Patch-2.3

this a thread with people who feel they shouldn't put the system in place. can always put your 2cents in :)

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Originally Posted by arctic

The only legitimate complaint about this is that these abandoned FC houses are preventing new and active FC from getting a plot.

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I also reside in Mist on Diabolos server, and I'm counting 19 un-purchased plots of land still across the 6 wards. Small, Medium and Large all available. Maybe this will be an issue in the near future with FCs being prevented from buying property, but at the time of this post I'd say we have a player shortage

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Originally Posted by HaelseMikiro

I also reside in Mist on Diabolos server, and I'm counting 19 un-purchased plots of land still across the 6 wards. Small, Medium and Large all available. Maybe this will be an issue in the near future with FCs being prevented from buying property, but at the time of this post I'd say we have a player shortage

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And that's just mist, our goblet is a ghost town and lavender beds still has around half the plots free, the shortage only affects legacy servers.

I honestly think they should deal with this issue on a per-server basis, they won't add more wards to legacy / extreme pop servers because it would affect the resources of all servers, but they could add wards only to legacy / extreme servers and leave high, mid and low pop servers as they are right now.

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Originally Posted by Alukah

And that's just mist, our goblet is a ghost town and lavender beds still has around half the plots free, the shortage only affects legacy servers.

I honestly think they should deal with this issue on a per-server basis, they won't add more wards to legacy / extreme pop servers because it would affect the resources of all servers, but they could add wards only to legacy / extreme servers and leave high, mid and low pop servers as they are right now.

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I think all the Goblet wards are like that on every server. Which is a shame, because it's a pretty area.

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Originally Posted by Musashidon

here it is.

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What they mean by that is they're going to change the color of the text that pops up when you loose your land so it's easier to see. They aren't changing the length of time before getting booted or anything like that.

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Originally Posted by kidvideo

The house should be overgrown with weeds & overrun with vermin. & an abandoned airship in the front yard, on cinder blocks.

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I would like this, i'd love to see those little rats outside limsa on an abandoned property. Something to kill in town. Maybe a Botanist can get a harvesting node on some of the plants too for an uncommon item.

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Originally Posted by HaelseMikiro

I also reside in Mist on Diabolos server, and I'm counting 19 un-purchased plots of land still across the 6 wards. Small, Medium and Large all available. Maybe this will be an issue in the near future with FCs being prevented from buying property, but at the time of this post I'd say we have a player shortage

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Before 2.3 when the new wards were added, there was not a single Medium plot available anywhere on Sargatanas. Since 2.3, Mist ward 6 has filled up aside from a couple of Larges and Smalls. Lavender Beds ward 6 has all of 7 plots left (all Small and Large). Even Goblet, though unpopular, is starting to see some activity as the other wards fill up. We have visitors to our FC house daily, and I often stop and talk to people in the ward itself.

A lot of the "neighborhood" feeling simply comes from having a high server population.

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Originally Posted by arctic

So my FC is at Plot 4, 1st Ward, Mist (Diabolos) and our neighbors at plot 6 are down to one member, and they're not active in the game anymore. There are a few other plots on our Ward that have also been abandoned. I can imagine this is probably going on at other wards too.

/snip

What do you guys think?

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I commented on this before. This really was easily predictable. New FCs are formed and fold every day. Our FC has a medium plot in Ward 1 on Moogle and we use it all the time. I decided to go for a little wander and inspected all three of the large houses and from what I gathered two of the three large plots were abandoned. The FCs were down to a small amount of players and it didn't seem that anyone logged in. I look at every house and there were a lot of properties that seemed to belong to abandoned guilds. There needs to be a system to strip abandoned FCs of their plots after so long. Perhaps a 'storage container' for old properties so when they come back they get a new plot in a new ward and don't loose their house and contents. Adding new wards with a few house active just isn't tenable.

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Originally Posted by Musashidon

the system will be pretty simple. you don't enter your fc house(basically proving to the game you're still there) you lose it.

this also means anyone can enter. meaning even if 100 people are inactive only 1 person needs to step foot into the house to reset the timer.

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and then soon we will see a thread say a FC with 100 active memeber lose their house because no one enter it, that ll be hilarious

anyone who's on a high population server should know exactly why it would be a good thing for houses to auto delete due to inactivity. our free company is very small and it took us a while to get the FC rank for a house, and by the time we did, every single ward in every single housing area on excal was full, minus like, a medium and a large (which we can't afford and wouldn't want to purchase anyways since there's like 5 of us). house purging would give FCs like ours an actual chance to get a house on servers with lots of people on them, instead of having to twiddle our thumbs waiting for them to add a new ward again.

I suggested a while back FC's should be able to sell back the land for less than the lowest price it will drop too - the prospect of regaining some money should help the problem.

No dev response though, so I guess it's easier to just add new wards and blame server loads for stuff rather than recycle what's already there.

(And not that I'm butthurt, but not longer after my post, devs respond to post about going barefoot? Really? I know they can't respond to everything but... yeah ok I got butthurt -.- lol)

While it sucks when housing wards end up being as inactive as some are, I don't feel deleting houses is an acceptable solution. Especially if it applies to personal housing.
If I bought a house and knew that it was going to be deleted during a break, I'd never bother coming back.

I'd really like to see them open up the possibility of completely instanced 'grottos' and the like to put houses in.
The neighborhood concept was interesting early on, but the way it was handled is... not so great...
Granted I'm more concerned with how personal housing is going to go than FC housing, but since its apt to be (essentially) the same all-around, the same concerns still apply.
That said, I believe the real reason for deleting houses is more to cheap out on datacenter operations, but still; if/when they implement it, I'd like to see them have to admit that is the reason instead of citing abandoned wards giving off a 'bad atmosphere'.

What they need to do is this.

If the person is gone, the house goes back up for sale, though the person who has the permit at the time gets the gil.

This way its not a total loss someone gets the house and furnishing and the person gets his gil for what he invested into the property.

They should also give the option to sell house on your own.

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Originally Posted by HeroSamson

What they need to do is this.

If the person is gone, the house goes back up for sale, though the person who has the permit at the time gets the gil.

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That would no longer make it a gil sink.

There's an argument against auto delete for Personal Housing, but FC is different. Many of those saying No to auto eviction are 3 and 4 person FCs and SOLO FCs using FC housing as Personal Housing.

It took SOE a while to figure this out for SWG as well....after NGE hit entire cities became ghost towns and stayed that way for some time..

I think their solution (memory is fuzzy at best) was after the house was abandoned for set amount of day (90 maybe more?) than it became flagged for demolition and the players could demo the house and get a reward er something for it. The house wasn't fully destroyed just went back to that players datapad but it freed the space up.

The worse part is, I fear this will become a much larger issue in 2.38

I'm all for removing inactive houses so new FCs can have a shot at them, as long as the inactive FC doesn't get boned. Instead of gil cause that can cause quite an imbalance, just send a property deed of the same size to the last FC master/company chest.

-Spaces for New FCs, check.
-Lively Wards, check.
-Incentive for old players to come back, check.
-Less complaints for SE, check.

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Originally Posted by HeroSamson

What they need to do is this.

If the person is gone, the house goes back up for sale, though the person who has the permit at the time gets the gil.

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All right, so this might be over thinking things as far as possible devious deeds go, but just the same trolls will be trolls. If this system were in place and you had a FC leader become disgruntled what would prevent them from booting everyone out of the FC and then waiting to collect the gil from the house at some point?

I think I like the idea of getting a deed to purchase another house down the line to replace the one lost as one of the better solutions, personal housing inside said FC housing might be getting the short end of the stick though.

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Originally Posted by arctic

All right, so this might be over thinking things as far as possible devious deeds go, but just the same trolls will be trolls. If this system were in place and you had a FC leader become disgruntled what would prevent them from booting everyone out of the FC and then waiting to collect the gil from the house at some point?

I think I like the idea of getting a deed to purchase another house down the line to replace the one lost as one of the better solutions, personal housing inside said FC housing might be getting the short end of the stick though.

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Not really if the house is empty with no members and someone decides to come back at least they have something to fall back on. If you lose your private room all furnishing in that and all furnishing in the house you spent a lot of gil on you would be mad. I would probably think person wouldn't come back to the game that's bad bis.

In FFXI if I came back and my character didn't have all of its gear and everything I worked hard to get I would probably quit all together and do something else.

You have to realize small house almost 3mil, then almost 500k for a permit, 300k for private room, depending on what furnishing you have that's like a few million gil there.

then other's private rooms with furnishing saying if they took a break or not.

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Originally Posted by Camate

Hello, everyone.

We do in fact have plans to add more land in the future, but I cannot promise a specific time frame at the moment.

Also, currently as of patch 2.2, houses will remain intact regardless of whether a free company is active or inactive. However, in the future, in addition to adding land, after patch 2.3 we’ll also be looking into adding a feature so when free company members haven't accessed their house for 35 days (Earth time), their house and land will be automatically forfeit in order to free up the land. We'll also be looking into a system that will display the remaining time until this happens.

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theres the answer to that