Personal housing time limit?

Hey, I was just wondering if I don't log in after a certain time will I lose my house?

I've been trying to find an official statement on this, but no luck.

No. There was a plan but it got postponed indefinitely after some feedback.

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Originally Posted by SecretCrowds

No. There was a plan but it got postponed indefinitely after some feedback.

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Oh, thanks a lot. That's really good to hear.

Yeah and now we are stuck with a situation where there isn't enough space left when people who have quit or are on a long break get to keep their houses.

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Originally Posted by IzumiLuna

Oh, thanks a lot. That's really good to hear.

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I'd be cautious about relying on this, though. As Sove mentioned, lack of available housing is a tremendous problem on some servers, and players are making a lot of justified noise about it. If SE does not subtantially increase the amount of available housing, they'll need to come up with some other way to satisfy players - and that could mean that they go ahead and implement the timer system to free up housing owned by players who aren't playing anymore. Such a timer could also easily affect players who take a long break from the game.

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Originally Posted by IzumiLuna

Oh, thanks a lot. That's really good to hear.

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No it's not. If you quit you shouldn't get to keep your house. That just takes a space up that another PAYING player could use.

Housing situation in game really sucks , but i glad that SE didnt add time limits for housing . Sometimes i have to work 2~3 months w/o PC and access to game , and it will be too bad if once i back from work and my house gone ;(

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Originally Posted by Vladislav

Housing situation in game really sucks , but i glad that SE didnt add time limits for housing . Sometimes i have to work 2~3 months w/o PC and access to game , and it will be too bad if once i back from work and my house gone ;(

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Time limits should exist but be 6 months. If you don't pay for 6 months then you lose your house. It would be the best system.

I kind of wish they did something similar to what ArcheAge did with their farms. You pay a (weekly?) tax after you purchase it, and if you miss x-amount of payments, then that plot is up for grabs.

I really hate comparing other games with FFXIV, but this was the best example I could come up with.

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Originally Posted by Arixtotle

Time limits should exist but be 6 months. If you don't pay for 6 months then you lose your house. It would be the best system.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

Such a timer could also easily affect players who take a long break from the game.

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Especially since theres no variety in content, the game pretty much forces you to take 2-3 month long breaks :/

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Originally Posted by Obysuca

Especially since theres no variety in content, the game pretty much forces you to take 2-3 month long breaks :/

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Except there is a huge variety in content it's just not combat content.

But anyway, my thought with a 6 month time is that the majority of people who leave for six months are not coming back. Just make it so if they do come back eventually they get compensated with about the same amount of gil as they spent on the house and get all their housing stuff back of course.

Don't FC owners lose their ownership status over 1 month, and then it gets passed down to another member? As for personal housing, and timers, since you can sub for a maximum of 180 days at a time, 6 months of inactivity sounds rather reasonable. As it stands you pay for a house and keep it forever. There's no rent, taxes, or upkeep. We have it a little too good, you know? Though, "personal housing" was implement rather poorly too :D

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Originally Posted by Arixtotle

Except there is a huge variety in content it's just not combat content.

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Agreed. Anyone that makes the ludicrous claim that there's "no variety in content" either:
A. Has decided to discount a ridiculously large part of the game as not being content (crafting, gathering, pvp, sidequests, etc etc etc), or
B. Has so much free time on their hands that they DO count it, have done it, and still aren't satsified.

The former is like going to a buffet, and claiming there isn't enough to eat because all you like to eat is french fries, and the latter, well, it's outright unreasonable to expect SE to account for such a small population of players (no work, no job, just play FFXIV all day and all night).

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Originally Posted by Arixtotle

No it's not. If you quit you shouldn't get to keep your house. That just takes a space up that another PAYING player could use.

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Not really i mean if SE just add more space things be a bit better and we all know SE needs to add space at some point yea? anyway i agree that if a house has no ppl using it for at least 60 days then sure maybe boot it. But at least give that player who quit haf there gil back or something

Yeah, I think taking a house back after six months is reasonable. Heck, at this point a year.

As long as adequate warning is given, anyway, so that someone who bought a house last year with the intention of coming back after they graduated school or something has the opportunity fork over another six months of sub time and keep it.

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Originally Posted by HakaseNyan

Don't FC owners lose their ownership status over 1 month, and then it gets passed down to another member?

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I believe the exact period is 35 days, but yes.

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An easy solution would just be to tie it to the owning account's sub. If you're going to be away for an extended time, just keep the sub active and you keep your housing server space reserved. If it's not worth $13/mo to them, they can unsub and (after a month or so just to prevent losing it to billing issues), the space can be freed up for other, active players.

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Originally Posted by Vladislav

Housing situation in game really sucks , but i glad that SE didnt add time limits for housing . Sometimes i have to work 2~3 months w/o PC and access to game , and it will be too bad if once i back from work and my house gone ;(

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Pretty much why I asked.

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Originally Posted by Arixtotle

Time limits should exist but be 6 months. If you don't pay for 6 months then you lose your house. It would be the best system.

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Everyone acts like a super long time is the justifiable cure-all, when in reality it is not going to solve the problem in the long run when mostly active players have houses. You may see ~1-2 go up for sale every 6 months or so, but in the end that is just another ~1-2 people that can get a house. Removing housing is not a good solution if you really think about it. 6 months is a long time, that is hopefully half the way to an expansion. If they cannot upgrade their servers to facilitate their growing playerbase and the amount of housing remains the same, it will in fact get HARDER to get a house than simply asking for more housing wards, hopefully making them prioritize increasing housing servers.

Perhaps they should make personal housing function like additional retainers in-game. If your subscription isn't renewed, you lose it. I'm not sure how they would implement this since houses are purchased in-game, but the issue I can see with taking it away from people who don't log in is having people log in once a month, do nothing, and then log out just to keep their house. This also doesn't take multiple characters into consideration. Should the person log in with every character that owns a house, or just log in period?

Returning all of the Gil spent on a sold house also will likely not work. That opens the possibility of players simply logging in and immediately repurchasing their lot/purchasing another lot and sitting on it. It would be fair to return it, yes, but what of people who try to cheat the system?


Edit:

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Originally Posted by Vladislav

Housing situation in game really sucks , but i glad that SE didnt add time limits for housing . Sometimes i have to work 2~3 months w/o PC and access to game , and it will be too bad if once i back from work and my house gone ;(

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This is why I think it should be subscription-based rather than log-in based. It would stink to pay for a game that you cannot play at the time, but at least it would offer some solution to a lack of housing while also offering a way for players with houses to keep theirs. I'm curious to see how Ishgardian housing wards sell if/when we get them.

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Originally Posted by Amiaze

This is why I think it should be subscription-based rather than log-in based.

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If you really want people to pay a subscription during a time that they will not be able to play the game, just so they can keep their hard-earned house, you are literally asking them to pay real-world rent for a virtual house.

These houses are not cheap, especially mansions. I do not want to have to pay a sub if I am going to be away from the computer for a month or two out of my control, but I also do not want to lose my 80m gil mansion and the months and months of staring at the mb and crafting to get there.

As I have stated earlier in this thread, and in many posts in the past, removing housing from inactive players will not be the solution in the long term, only more housing plots or an alternative private housing system can.

A time limit should be there. If you have to take extended leaves regularly, what use do you have for a personal house anyway?
No gil compensation to anyone that loses their house for any reason either as that could just lead to people investing in a house on an alt, then wait for someone to buy it, or if noone wants to buy it at a higher price get the investment back without any loss.

Something needs to be done to grant more people the possibility of buying a house though. And prevent people from buying plots speculatively.
There are plenty of plots that's been bought only to gouge other players that want a house.

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Originally Posted by Nekodar

If you have to take extended leaves regularly, what use do you have for a personal house anyway?

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If you really think that something that costs literally 80 million gil should be taken away due to a 1-2 month break (sometimes not even of their choice or desire), you should just support deleting the character and the rest of the account with it, because why would they need those as well?

It is a bit coldhearted to want to remove such a large investment on such short notice /and/ without compensation.

Listen, I am sorry there are not enough houses to go around. That is not my fault. I do not want my large investment to be gone without compensation if something came up IRL that I was not able to control but had every intent of returning when the issue passed. If my house was gone, I am not even sure I would want to come back. It is my pride and joy of my game right now. I worked so hard for it, to see it just gone would be devastating.


The answer is more housing instances or instanced housing/another system.

There's only one solution and it's that SE get their stuff together and add new plots or revamp the housing system if necesary.

It's amazing how people here are just looking for ways to punish players in a system that cleary SE didn't think enough when implementing. If you implement housing in a game, it should be in a way that everyone will (at some point, even if it requieres years of grinding) be able to get it.

When SE finally gets time to add more wards and maybe some housing in Ishgard, I really think the new houses should be more expensive than they were originally. Otherwise, like in two weeks we are going to be exactly where we were. Atleast on leviathan server, it took almost until a few weeks before the expac before all the new wards were full. With all the new influx of money into the system with the expansion, people are a lot richer and a new ward would fill almost immediately at this point at the original prices.

I'm not saying this to block anyone but, a house should feel like a investment. If you buy one you might feel like you are going to be poor for a while. It shouldn't feel like some impulse buy like buying some cookies at the store... :p

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Originally Posted by Titor

If you really want people to pay a subscription during a time that they will not be able to play the game, just so they can keep their hard-earned house, you are literally asking them to pay real-world rent for a virtual house.

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This is true. I guess I wasn't really clear in my edit. I should have said that it would be more beneficial for it to be subscription-based rather than log-in based, although it would really stink for players who can't get on for a month or two. Not that it's the best solution by far, just that it's better than a log-in solution due to there being less of a chance of people manipulating the system.

Adding more housing is the most obvious and viable solution, but how much would they have to add to satisfy their customer base? Heavensward brought a slew of brand new players that are still going through ARR content. More often than not, the DF gives me at least one new player in hard dungeons. There wasn't enough housing before Heavensward; adding them into the equation only compounds the issue.

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Originally Posted by Amiaze

This is why I think it should be subscription-based rather than log-in based. It would stink to pay for a game that you cannot play at the time, but at least it would offer some solution to a lack of housing while also offering a way for players with houses to keep theirs. I'm curious to see how Ishgardian housing wards sell if/when we get them.

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Tbh the reason we can't have this, is because of this--v

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Originally Posted by Obysuca

Especially since theres no variety in content, the game pretty much forces you to take 2-3 month long breaks :/

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Having to pay just to keep the house is kinda weird and like paying real life rent tbh

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Originally Posted by Cherie

When SE finally gets time to add more wards and maybe some housing in Ishgard, I really think the new houses should be more expensive than they were originally.

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Sorry but no, no at all.
When they released small house for 4M people on forums went nuts and we had dozen of threads crying about how the housing is unaccessible.

And honestly gating housing behind money wall only because SE cannot provide enough server space for instanced housing for subscription based game is just plain dumb. All they have to do is to release one big patch 3 months later than usual, take some of the money we gave them and actually buy some server space with them instead of puting them to developement of their other singleplayer games.

After much hard work I was able to finally afford to pay for someone to demolish their house and buy the property myself.

It was great, but after a while I noticed I never saw another soul.

Turns out all neighbors have quit the game for at least a year. Take their land away from them. It's terrible.

There needs to be some kind of limit. Right now there are way too many plots and houses that are currently unoccupied because their owners quit a long time ago with no intention of ever coming back. Letting them sit in limbo permanently just because they might come back isn't very fair to the people who are actively playing and wanting a home. I can appreciate the plight of those players who want to play and yet are forced away for extended periods, but the system can't stay the way it is.

I would like to add that there should be a time frame at which you *have* to actually build a house on your land. I saw some plots being occupied since the beginning of housing which still don't have a house on them.

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Originally Posted by Arixtotle

Time limits should exist but be 6 months. If you don't play for 6 months then you lose your house. It would be the best system.

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Fixed that for you. Not that I don't disagree, if you can't be assed to log in every so often you shouldn't keep your plot of land. I do think 6 months is a bit generous, though. 35 days is best to me. That's a whole month plus part of a week in another, longer if it's a short month. If you can't log in even once in all that time then you really have no commitment to this game.

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Originally Posted by Gilraen

Fixed that for you. Not that I don't disagree, if you can't be assed to log in every so often you shouldn't keep your plot of land. I do think 6 months is a bit generous, though. 35 days is best to me. That's a whole month plus part of a week in another, longer if it's a short month. If you can't log in even once in all that time then you really have no commitment to this game.

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I think saving up for a house for 3 months of time suggests quite a bit of commitment.

There already *is* instanced housing in the game.

It's called a Free Company room.

People think SE is being silly and not trying to add space just seemed to conveniently forget that they are actually adding a legit EU datacenter. Housing just isn't a priority for server space when they have a WHOLE region to make a data center for. Instead of getting all defensive about keeping your house while you sub once every 3 months, just relax and realize that we're talking about the plots that were bought and completely unused since housing was implemented.

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Originally Posted by Aeyis

I think saving up for a house for 3 months of time suggests quite a bit of commitment.

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Houses are a commitment, but like real life you shouldn't be allowed to keep one if you can't afford the mortgage payments. Logging in once a month doesn't sound like all that tough a 'payment', either.

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Originally Posted by Gilraen

Houses are a commitment, but like real life you shouldn't be allowed to keep one if you can't afford the mortgage payments. Logging in once a month doesn't sound like all that tough a 'payment', either.

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You've clearly never been deployed or had to travel overseas for work, I take it. There are several military members in my FC who are inactive for months at a time, despite loving the game and playing as often as they can when they're on leave.

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Originally Posted by Gilraen

Houses are a commitment, but like real life you shouldn't be allowed to keep one if you can't afford the mortgage payments. Logging in once a month doesn't sound like all that tough a 'payment', either.

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So once a month would be ok? What if someone finally saved enough money to go on a long holiday trip for 3 weeks and after that have some problems to log into the game? Should that person loose their house just because SE can´t somehow implement a system where everyone can have one? Or maybe someone got really ill and could not play the game at all. Should they be punished too that something real life happened? Or maybe someone lost a dear person and just needs some time for themselves or there is work that keep the person away. Is it okay to punish them too? Sorry if I sound a little aggressive but it just surprises me that instead of wanting SE to come up with a better system some people want the players to be punished.

We already payed our mortgage for the in game house. That big sum was not something that anyone can easily have earned especially if your are on a bad server. So yes sorry to say we paid our complete mortgage. Even in real life you don´t always have to pay it for the rest of your life. If someone is lucky enough to earn a lot of money they can own that house really fast and pay all of their mortgages back. After that the house is ours. The real life example would be more like: Oh sorry you bought your holiday house in “...” and even payed all the mortgages for it back..but you are only there once a year. Normally that is in your right but we have families here that would like to have theirs too and they would be there twice a year..so if you don´t want to loose the house that is yours you have to visit it at least twice a year too.. Yes this is in a way a horrible example but nobody in the real world would truly loose their house if they paid everything for it just because someone else wants it too and use it much more..

Maybe if housing is such a commitment than we should have such commitments for other parts of the game too? :) Maybe you can only try the new raids in the first month of the release and afterwards you can´t join it. Maybe you will have to wait till another group has gone through it and than you can join it (if not some other group was faster). Wait you don´t like it? Than your just not committed enough for it. I mean its the same in real life too right? ;)

You know this is a game. A game where we already pay money to play it. Real life can be hard enough and it would be horrible if everything that we have to do in real life is going to be part of the game..

And I agree with Titor. Even if we loose our house after maybe a half year of not logging in than this would make barely any change at all..even now only a small percentage of people own a house and even not every FC has one..and than we still have the problem of people with too much gil buying those houses with their alt character or just opening a second FC..The only thing that SE will achieve with a timer is making the people that loose them angry, give some bigger FC even more a chance to earn more money and maybe making a handful of other people happy (or even not). Really the only solution to this would be wards for FC only and instanced housing for private people. Than nobody needs to fear to loose their house and everyone can enjoy one.

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Originally Posted by Gilraen

Houses are a commitment, but like real life you shouldn't be allowed to keep one if you can't afford the mortgage payments. Logging in once a month doesn't sound like all that tough a 'payment', either.

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Pretty sure you don't have to pay a mortgage back if you, you know didn't take one out and bought said house outright.

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Originally Posted by Vinestra

Pretty sure you don't have to pay a mortgage back if you, you know didn't take one out and bought said house outright.

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But you still have to pay property taxes.

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Originally Posted by Dree-Elle

There already *is* instanced housing in the game.

It's called a Free Company room.

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A room is not a house, and you need an FC with a house for that. Not everyone has that (and you still miss the garden).

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Originally Posted by Gilraen

Houses are a commitment, but like real life you shouldn't be allowed to keep one if you can't afford the mortgage payments. Logging in once a month doesn't sound like all that tough a 'payment', either.

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Let's not compare real life with a fantasy game... Theres a hunderds of legit reasons for someone to not be able to log for a month. A monthly limit is stupid.

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And I agree with Titor. Even if we loose our house after maybe a half year of not logging in than this would make barely any change at all..even now only a small percentage of people own a house and even not every FC has one..and than we still have the problem of people with too much gil buying those houses with their alt character or just opening a second FC..The only thing that SE will achieve with a timer is making the people that loose them angry, give some bigger FC even more a chance to earn more money and maybe making a handful of other people happy (or even not). Really the only solution to this would be wards for FC only and instanced housing for private people. Than nobody needs to fear to loose their house and everyone can enjoy one.

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I agree.