Housing Reclaim Confirmed!

Gamescom 2015: Yoshi-P invterview

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MMORPG.de: A lot of players complain about the housing situation. They want to buy a house, but it is impossible to find free plots on some worlds. Are there any plans to improve the situation?

NY: Yes, we are working on it, and there are three phases. The first step is working on abandoned houses, so there’s no owner, or player there actually. The second step is to make it available to players that they can move house. There is no system in game yet that can help you to change the house, so we want to help and support this in the game. With these two steps we will be able to have some empty plots. Then we want to see if we have to open up an Ishgard plot or add more plot to the existing areas. That is the third step. We want to be careful here and judge the situation first. We are working on step 1 and 2 already. There will be some updates, probably in patches 3.1 to 3.15, around this time.

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About time

If they're adding this then they need to lower the prices of houses and/or create some system for people to sell their houses to another person/FC.

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Originally Posted by Xerius

If they're adding this then they need to lower the prices of houses and/or create some system for people to sell their houses to another person/FC.

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I think that's what he meant by "move house." Keep in mind this is a translation from JP to EN.

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Originally Posted by StouterTaru

I think that's what he meant by "move house." Keep in mind this is a translation from JP to EN.

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Hopefully, my understanding of this was that people would be able to move from their current plots to Ishgard plots if/when those were released or at least that's what I keep hearing people shriek about around here.

I find it hilarious that they seem to think just freeing up "abandoned" houses is going to be enough. "We want to be careful here and judge the situation first" - Really? The situation is you have thousands of times more players than you have housing available.

time to get the gil ready to buy some house

This is disheartening. They're going to free up the unused plots and see if that fixes the issue before they consider adding new plots? I doubt that's going to result in nearly enough new housing. It'll be gone pretty quick. Oh well.

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Originally Posted by LiliaLia

This is disheartening. They're going to free up the unused plots and see if that fixes the issue before they consider adding new plots? I doubt that's going to result in nearly enough new housing. It'll be gone pretty quick. Oh well.

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upgrade the quality of life before add more is a wise choice, imo. If you have enough money, the free up housing plot will give you a chance to get a house, if you don't have enough money, then add new houses now or later make no different

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Originally Posted by Shneibel

time to get the gil ready to buy some house

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Momentarily misread that as;

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Originally Posted by Shneibel

Time to get ready to buy some gil

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Forgiveness for my shoddy speedreading /Grovel

I kind of was hoping they would add the Ishgard plots as a sure thing. I love snow, winter is my favorite time of the year. Would love to have a house located in the snow capped mountains! Of course that would mean having to save up again to get a house there...

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Originally Posted by LiliaLia

This is disheartening. They're going to free up the unused plots and see if that fixes the issue before they consider adding new plots? I doubt that's going to result in nearly enough new housing. It'll be gone pretty quick. Oh well.

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I heard that a lot of the houses actually took a while to sell when they added the new wards last time. Like some had lots available 1-2 months after.

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Originally Posted by Rina_Leonhart

I heard that a lot of the houses actually took a while to sell when they added the new wards last time. Like some had lots available 1-2 months after.

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Well either way I'll be setting my alarm during every maintenance until it happens. Things on Balmung are likely to go fast. :(

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Originally Posted by Rina_Leonhart

I heard that a lot of the houses actually took a while to sell when they added the new wards last time. Like some had lots available 1-2 months after.

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That varied by server. When they added the last batch the first 6 wards hadn't all filled up on Exodus, and we had medium houses in the goblet still up for sale a couple months before expansion. Other servers claimed to be sold out of small houses in a few hours, all houses in a few days.

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Originally Posted by Rina_Leonhart

I heard that a lot of the houses actually took a while to sell when they added the new wards last time. Like some had lots available 1-2 months after.

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Maybe on low-pop servers, but definitely not on Balmung.

Indeed its a shame the have to think about Ishgardplots would atleast help with another 8x60 spots + Step 1 and 2 but yeah have to deal with it i guess...

Why can't they just give new wards to high population servers exclusively?

Siren isn't a high population server, but we're out of plots everywhere but the Goblet(no one here seems to like that place, and many of us just bought a place there as a last resort). I think one of my friends mentioned Coeurl being out of housing too, and they definitely aren't a high pop world, since I started out there. With the exceptions of Zalera and whatever other super tiny server there is, everyone needs new wards.

High population servers like Hyperion had all properties disappear in all subwards within an hour or so last time, when they added all of the subwards and ward 8.

When just ward 7 was added, it was literally a foot race with all plots except one mansion going almost immediately in Lavender Beds and Mist.

Goblet naturally took a bit longer. Because Goblet.

The problem is that they wrote themselves into a corner with the way they instituted housing. It's resource intensive, and they really don't want to institute more housing, even if people want to have houses. They'd actually prefer we'd all just forget about housing, and let them quietly take it back out of the game.

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Originally Posted by Rina_Leonhart

I heard that a lot of the houses actually took a while to sell when they added the new wards last time. Like some had lots available 1-2 months after.

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I'm on Excalibur.

They were gone in minutes, particularly small houses. I'm hauling balls to get the 5m for the plot when they free up, but it'll be empty til I have money again.

After having thought about this for a few weeks after having snagged up an FC on Bryn that had a fully loaded mansion, I've come across a few things that actually make sense here:

Old thoughts: lorewise, we can't expect to have Ishgardian housing until a) the power-vacuum we created by at the end of the MSQ is settled & b) there's a grand company in-place to match the rest of the Eorzean Alliance. Remember, housing in itself is handled by the GCs themselves rather than the cities themselves.

New thought: due to the hardware limitations as SE's go-to excuse for the current situation, we could see a massive change in a patch or two after they've moved the EU servers to the new EU-located data center. If they only transfer all the server data digitally instead of hauling all the hardware from Montreal to the new site, that means they could use the old EU servers as a means to expand several in-game systems.

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Originally Posted by JeniLinsky

The problem is that they wrote themselves into a corner with the way they instituted housing. It's resource intensive, and they really don't want to institute more housing, even if people want to have houses. They'd actually prefer we'd all just forget about housing, and let them quietly take it back out of the game.

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I honestly think they'd be better just starting completely over with housing. Maybe leave the wards for FC houses if they must (but even then, there will never be enough space at the rate they add wards), but the only way to implement a fair housing system that can be enjoyed by everyone is to give everyone a house in its own instance.

Adding a bunch of new plots over and over... and over... and over again is a terrible approach. It's like putting a band-aid on an every growing wound. It creates more dull and dead neighborhoods. Having a lively housing ward with a bunch of active users is one of the better immersion sensations in an MMO. They need to find a way to dump all the dead houses/claimed-plots for new people. Only then... should additional wards be added if need be.

I have a ward 1 house... used to be lively. Several of us from different FCs in the hood would gather together. People have left for XYZ reason and now my ward 1 neighborhood is dead. I'd like the empty homes removed for fresh people to be able to purchase plots in my neighborhood. I don't want to see new wards open... cause this doesn't fix neighborhoods feeling so bland now. Why only fix one problem, when a different approach fixes several problems.

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Originally Posted by JubjubTubs

Adding a bunch of new plots over and over... and over... and over again is a terrible approach. It's like putting a band-aid on an every growing wound. It creates more dull and dead neighborhoods.

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The best way to make sure you have a lively neighborhood is to let the players create it. WS will be implementing a neighborhood system where up to 5 players will be able to take their plots and physically connect them to each other's. This pretty much ensures you will have people to socialize with, and it opens so many wonderful doors in terms of build creativity.

I think the "ward" thing would work well if we all had our own individual houses but then could voluntarily pick people to "merge" instances with into a neighborhood.

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Originally Posted by JubjubTubs

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If I had to guess, the reason they want to free up the inactives first is for the very same reason you mentioned of creating lively neighborhoods and then after that's all settled down to see how active the neighborhoods become then. But this has it's own set of problems of course. In a perfect world, the new plots will only be bought by individuals and different FC's that want a house to use for whatever reason, gardening, chocobos, rp, or just because they like decorating for fun. Instead I have a feeling we're going to see a bunch of players with enough money buy up a bunch of plots so they can sell them off to those that are looking to get a house.

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Originally Posted by MsCroc

Why can't they just give new wards to high population servers exclusively?

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Because even low-pop servers are out of houses.

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Originally Posted by Shneibel

upgrade the quality of life before add more is a wise choice, imo. If you have enough money, the free up housing plot will give you a chance to get a house, if you don't have enough money, then add new houses now or later make no different

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Not wise to me, they need to free them up + add a way for ppl to fairly sell plots they no longer want + they need to double housing lots all at the same time.


I guarantee you even that will not be enough for the populated servers but at least it would be a far better direction then the barely noticeable baby steps they tend to take when it comes to any improvements.

They also need to revamp housing 100% and make it instanced, customizable, engaging and fun > simply tying perks to owning one isn't even scraping the surface of what housing could have been.

They totally missed the mark of 1/2 the enjoyment housing could have been, the actual construction and player creation aspect.. very very sad, thought they were more insightful then that tbh.


(for the love of all that is holy ...remove the character limit!!!)

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Originally Posted by Khalithar

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Oh well. You know what isn't fair? Every thing in reality and Life. Predators eating babies is pretty standard for e-ole Mother Nature. The T-ball era in MMO gaming has had its moment... time to bring back some old school stuff, where the rich get richer cause they smarter... and the dumb don't get what they want cause they too stupid. If someone has earned themselves enough money to invest in real estate... good for them. Why should they be penalized for doing what others can't/haven't? What isn't fair is the people that do more and excel not having a chance to obtain even more through what they already built/accomplished. <--- what truly isn't fair. "I want what he/she has but I'm not going to work as hard as they did..." has to die already. It's bad for gaming, it's bad for society, it's bad for humanity as a whole.