"Flipping" (Hoarding) Housing

Apparently, it's a common thing amongst servers for one person to buy multiple estates, entirely for the purpose of resale, 3-5 times the original price. Since housing is a limited commodity, these prices become realistic.Buying housing with large amounts of money to make ludicrous amounts of money, dominating the housing sector of the economy. Is this acceptable behavior? Do you feel that players should be able to own houses on alts?

I don't agree with it but there's nothing we can really do about it. Each character is entitled to a house.

I completely understand though. Our FC paid someone 30 mil to relinquish a plot (he also gave us a lot of airship mats which we really appreciate) then 28 mil to buy the plot. Another mil went on a building permit and a few more mil on furniture.

This was just a regular purchase and he only owned one plot, but that's just an example of how pricey they can be. The plot is a medium.

I think from the beginning, it should've been only ONE house per ACCOUNT. That way, if people want hoard and flip, they can at least pay an additional sub fee.

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Originally Posted by CookieMonsta

I think from the beginning, it should've been only ONE house per ACCOUNT. That way, if people want hoard and flip, they can at least pay an additional sub fee.

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2* or you cannot have a personal house and ever lead an fc and there is no reason an fc leader shouldn't be able to own their own house when all other members can.

Yeah 2 houses per account would have been much more reasonable, but even with that + reclamation system in place, there are not nearly enough houses to go around. The fact that people can use the system as-is to make lots of gil just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

So I am going to leave these excerpts from past producer letters here for your enjoyment...

I may just get a ban for this but its direct from Yoshi, but it is kindda calling them out on and they aren't responding to housing threads for a reason I assume so idk lol




[0:24:17]
Q: If a housing area becomes full, will it automatically create a new instance? Or is that something you will have to do manually?
A: In order to use the server space efficiently, we will make sure that the housing area is completely full through by checking the server source code and then add instances through updates when necessary. Therefore, the process will not be automatic. We will carefully monitor how much space is available and plan ahead whenever additional space is required.


[0:29:43]
Q: Is it possible to have a storefront with a counter in your housing area?
A: Yes, this is possible. We will continue to add objects for the housing area. In order to set up a store within your house, you will need to place a store-like object within your house, have the house accessible to everyone, and then have the retainer act as the seller.


[0:30:31]
Q: Will the houses have balconies?
A: It will differ depending on the type of house. While some will have balconies, others will not.

Letter from the Producer LIVE VI Q&A

[0:08:26]
Q: What kind of bonuses will players receive by using housing?
A: I've mentioned a couple of things here and there in the past, like placing items such as towers on your property. By placing various items around the house, players can receive a variety of different enhancing effects. As an example, you and your friends or free company members can receive a two-week-long EXP bonus or a bonus to gil received. Of course, we won't create anything that pressures players into buying a house, but they will still have benefits.


[0:09:27]
Q: If you buy a small house and piece of land, when it starts to get too cramped will it be possible to upgrade to a larger house?
A: We're working on a system for moving that will be introduced in a patch. Also, depending on lag and stress on the servers, we may allow players to own a second house. But yes, you can be sure that when we're finished, you'll be able to upgrade to a bigger house.


[0:10:11]
Q: Will it be possible to sell land deeds in the market ward or other places?
A: Yes, it will be possible. They can also be traded. Just as an example, you could give a house to that special someone in your free company as a present.


[0:10:53]
Q:Is it possible to have multiple houses? For example, to have a primary residence in Limsa Lominsa and a villa in Gridania or Ul'dah?
A: Right, it's just like what I was talking about before. Having a main house with another house located in a different country. Once we have a better understanding of the burden this will place on the servers, we might be able to implement this.

Letter from the Producer LIVE Part IV & Q&A Summary

[0:45:55]
Q: Will houses be personal or shared?
A: First it will be joint housing. A house of this size is going to require everyone to dish out some dough. It’s pretty expensive.

You can make furniture available to people of the same free company, or, if you want, you can set permission levels so all of your friends can use the furniture and what not. There are quite a few settings.

The reason why we’ve decided to establish them as free company bases first is because inside of the houses there is a new kind of system that involves parks and towers.

Parks would give a bonus to everyone in the free company, like an extra 25% to experience points earned. It could make crafting faster to level, or maybe give success bonuses for HQ crafting. It's a system that allows members to add things that will give boons to the entire free company. You’ll be able to increase the size of your house, and also your company can rank-up through free company points, allowing you to place more parks and towers around.


I’d first like to create a strong community within FFXIV. When new members join, you’ll be able to get more points, and we’d like to establish a system that encourages people to support new players coming into the game. Once the community has had time to come together we will then allow players to have their own private housing and branch out from there

Even for an MMO, I believe it’s nice to have a place to call home.

Letter from the Producer LIVE Part III & Q&A Summary (09/27/2012)

[0:59:26]
Q: Can you explain housing in more detail?
A: The image that we just showed was concept art for the Limsa Lominsa housing area. We’ve been working on mock-ups, and you can see a dummy house right here. This house is just a placeholder we’re using to check house sizes and such, and it’s not an actual design. In this picture, you can see a wider view of the same area. There are several areas where players can build houses, and a large open area. Basically, there will be three different types of housing areas areas: desert, forest, and sea. Here we have the concept art for the forest housing area. This isn’t finalized, of course. We’ll publish more information as soon as we can.

Players will first choose an area they prefer and then purchase land there. Kind of like “I like this spot!” Once they purchase the land with gil at the signboard, players will buy the right to build a house there.

Once players have constructed a basic house, they can open a special housing widget to browse and purchase housing materials, such as roofing. You could also commission crafters to build roofing, which could then be equipped, in a sense, onto your house to change its external appearance. You can even hang tapestries on your walls. So that’s basically how you can change your house.

The yard… I shouldn’t show anymore actually… As I mentioned previously, houses will also have yards where you can place objects. For example, if you place a chocobo stable in your yard, you will be able to raise several chocobos there.

There will be updates dedicated specifically to the housing system. Content won’t end with a single release; we plan to introduce new features, such as additional ways to play with your yard. Additionally, players will be able to drag and drop objects within their house easily, in both the PC and PS3 versions. We’re working hard to create a very flexible system.

Houses can be used as headquarters for linkshells and Free Companies, and they can eventually be expanded to allow individual rooms. To prevent disputes over land, housing areas will be instanced. After the maximum number of houses are sold in one instance, players will be asked to purchase land in a different one. More instances will be added as necessary.

Also, land will be available in small, medium, and large sizes. Certain structures will require huge tracts of land to build.

We should be able to provide more details near the conclusion of the Beta Test.



And this just for fun lol....

44:17
Q: This wasn't mentioned in the FFXIV 2.0 announcement, but are there any updates on jumping and swimming?
A: Let's start with jumping. Since we're completely renovating the map for FFXIV 2.0, we'll have to perform a lot of tests when implementing jumping. We've debated waiting until Version 2.0 to do so. We are currently running various tests on it actually.

For swimming, we're looking at implementation sometime after 2.0. We think that being able to swim wouldn't be much fun by itself, so we'll also be adding areas that you can explore underwater, temples and the like. Please keep in mind that we're still in the very early stages of development.
* A work-in-progress video of jumping animations was shown at 44:52.

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Originally Posted by AnimaAnimus

2* or you cannot have a personal house and ever lead an fc and there is no reason an fc leader shouldn't be able to own their own house when all other members can.

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In that case you could easily count the FC as it's own entity and have player limits based on the plot size to FC member ratio but i can already see the pitchforks rising if they did something like that.

In what I copy/pasted above they stated they were going to constantly monitor it to add more space as needed and you could buy a standard size house and add towers with fc points to make it more spacious inside and to encourage people to help new players, so a small house wouldn't really have been that bad for a larger sized fc.

My guess is more of it was planned but either fell to the wayside or couldn't be implemented. Either way their silence on the subject seems to make them seem more and more like they just don't care. They need to learn that silence on a subject that is greatly discussed speaks volumes.

The same thing as the reclamation system: with how absurdly limited the availability is, especially when directly compared to demand - a "one personal house per account" policy should have been there right from the very start. Just another example of that phenomenally awesome mindset of SE that seems to surface in certain cases, you know where they go "leaving it to the players is the best thing to do". And as all others, this is one is also just another example of why that mindset does not work. Personally, I'm utterly disgusted at the whole concept of house hoarding and wouldn't mind seeing the offenders banned (or at least suspended).

As for all the things that have been planned and mentioned in live letters...... I guess all that just fell through. And I'm willing to bet all that ultimately came down to money, beneath the "more priority" issues and the "deadlines to meet" issues.

This is true, but SE does have its set of default answers.

In version 1 it was "wait til version 2"
in version 2 it was "we are looking into it"
now its dwindled down to just dead silence which is why I think people are getting so antsy, frustrated and nay sayery

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Originally Posted by AnimaAnimus

A: In order to use the server space efficiently

A: the burden this will place on the servers

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keep these things in mind when understanding the housing situation

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Originally Posted by Kolaina

keep these things in mind when understanding the housing situation

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Not a single person should feel pity for the dev team server space be damned, they implemented the system knowing full well this was going to happen.

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Originally Posted by AnimaAnimus

So I am going to leave these excerpts from past producer letters here for your enjoyment...

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I laughed then died a little inside. This sort of thing has been reoccuringly obvious with other things like job balancing too, specifically 2.0 warrior and 3.0 BRD/MCH.

Yeah you could actually go back and go through them and compile a whole long list of things they promised and then we never heard about again.

I can understand if it just isn't possible but when ppl are asking about it repeatedly, tell them that, don't just sit there and say nothing. Sure there are a ton of threads on this forum but if they put out there the reasons instead of just staying quiet maybe things wouldn't seem so bleak and we could cut down on the number of repeat threads. A up to date forum FAQ would be wonderful. And the whole language barrier is a poor excuse at this point. When you have a multi-lingual game you need to keep up a multi-lingual forum response system if you're going to have one at all instead of blatantly ignoring almost if not over half your playerbase. I understand the NA team has its hands tied when it comes to answering so it is the jp side of things that are treating English, German and French speaking players with indifference.

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Originally Posted by Rawrz

Apparently, it's a common thing amongst servers for one person to buy multiple estates, entirely for the purpose of resale, 3-5 times the original price. Since housing is a limited commodity, these prices become realistic.Buying housing with large amounts of money to make ludicrous amounts of money, dominating the housing sector of the economy. Is this acceptable behavior? Do you feel that players should be able to own houses on alts?

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Well, according to this it's not even legal:

http://i.imgur.com/6i5Iduh.png

(not my conversation, by the way)

from what I remember I think was proven to be faked

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Originally Posted by AnimaAnimus

from what I remember I think was proven to be faked

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Well that sounds more like wishful thinking than reality. I've read a number of excuses (new GM, uninformed GM, etc) regarding that conversation.. yours is the first time I've seen someone suggest it was faked. I find it much more likely that SE is looking to protect themselves against having to deal with housing trade deals gone bad.

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Originally Posted by Rawrz

Do you feel that players should be able to own houses on alts?

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Any argument against alts owning houses can be used against personal houses in general, or small FC houses. Let's pretend you want to take away someone's personal house so you can have one. Why do you deserve a personal house more than a FC deserves a house? Why does a 4 person FC deserve a house over a 50 person FC?

As far as the widespread and rampant flipping of houses, where are the flippers buying the houses from? All plots are sold out, so they are either getting them from people they paid to relinquish, people who just abandoned them, or they bought them 17 years ago before they all sold out.

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Originally Posted by Jynx

Not a single person should feel pity for the dev team server space be damned, they implemented the system knowing full well this was going to happen.

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I suppose they should have just.. not implemented it at all then. Server space isn't infinite, and I can't recall a single time the devs stated it would be possible for every individual character to own a house if they so wished.

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Originally Posted by Jynx

Not a single person should feel pity for the dev team server space be damned, they implemented the system knowing full well this was going to happen.

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i guess i should only pity those who even when personal housing was announced didnt plan ahead, get motivated and acquire the gil necessary to afford their vanity.
in truth its not about pity towards 1 side or the other. its about understanding housing in its current state can not be supplied to each and every individual and its not going to happen on wards to meet the demand with out being a detriment to the rest of the game. server space is limited thats all i am saying

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Originally Posted by Kolaina

its about understanding housing in its current state can not be supplied to each and every individual and its not going to happen on wards to meet the demand with out being a detriment to the rest of the game. server space is limited thats all i am saying

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I don't see your logic.
Making housing available to everybody is not going to be to the detriment of the game unless Square decide not to make the funding available to implement it properly and then instruct the devs to go ahead anyway but cut something else. Unless you work for them you have no way of knowing if that is going to happen.

The most important point of the OP was that under the present system some players have been able to buy multiple properties with the sole intention of profiting from others. Reclamation doesn't prevent this and it's something a lot of us feel should be stopped.
Housing is in short supply, so it makes no sense to allow more than a single personal house and a FC house on each account.

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Originally Posted by Solarra

Housing is in short supply, so it makes no sense to allow more than a single personal house and a FC house on each account.

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which i do not disagree with. but unless they upgrade servers in which the are able to provide based on current demand, not everyone will be able to get a house. is that not what peoples issues are? hypothetically they could meet demand, on wards. on top of that, plan ahead for any possible additions to the community, adding even more housing. then accounting for potential new fcs. how much data will this take up? keep in mind theyd have to account for every piece of furnishing, garden etc. how much is enough? and when they have enough + extra for 'just in case', how much space is left for growing content?

as for my personal thoughts on the matter. personal housing never should have been implimented. they gave people rooms for their own personal space. anything else a house provides should be provided by the fc, stables as an example. if locked out of fc stables, id question choice of fc.
all housing has done is create negativity in those who want but are with out. in which knowingly being unable to provide for the masses, never should have given in to the demand for personal housing

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Originally Posted by Solarra

Housing is in short supply, so it makes no sense to allow more than a single personal house and a FC house on each account.

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They need to allow alts the ability to access their mains personal house. They can join the same FC and use it's features. I have two fully leveled alts and they can't even use the mender in my house.

The way they implentented the housing feature was bad from the start. I know there is the whole server issue stuff going on, but this game is showering us with housing stuff, stuff that majority of players on each server are not able to use, because they can not afford or because there is a lack of free housing plot.

I highly recommend SE to play Wildstar for a week or two and learn from them on how to do housing right. Housing should be:
1, There should be a plot for every player, just because someone joined the game a year later, does not mean, they should be punished for it.
2, Housing should be locked behind a questline or it should be very affordable for every player. Maybe they could give a hut for free and you pay to upgrade it into a mansion.
3, Let the players pick their own neighbours, I rather live in a neighbourhood with friends and FC/LS members, then strangers that will never say a word to me.

I doubt any of these features will be added to the game, because SE has a BIG server memory issue, that they need to sort ASAP or else this game will never move forward.

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Originally Posted by LaylaTsarra

They need to allow alts the ability to access their mains personal house. They can join the same FC and use it's features. I have two fully leveled alts and they can't even use the mender in my house.

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I agree with you 100% If they restricted the private house to one character on each account that would just be piling more unfairness onto an already unfair system.


I have to say I get tired of constantly seeing the server issue being brought up by other players. None of us in are a position to know exactly why housing has been so poorly implemented, yet every time it is raised, a lot of people seem to feel the need to make excuses for Square and basically tell the rest of us to 'hush up'. We are asking for a heavily promoted feature of the game to be made available to all, that's hardly unreasonable.
Why housing is only accessible to a tiny proportion of players isn't the issue under discussion. I don't care why; it's not my problem, nobody is paying me to provide it.

Housing is scarce, everyone knows some players have been buying multiple properties simply to make a profit and still Square is doing nothing to prevent it.

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Originally Posted by Rawrz

Apparently, it's a common thing amongst servers for one person to buy multiple estates, entirely for the purpose of resale, 3-5 times the original price.

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this is not at all common (at least on my server), if it was common you should see plots for sale in PF everyday and i don't.

it also can't be common because someone who wants to do that needs to have open plots to buy and my server never has any open plots.

Regarding the server limitations, the main issues seem to be maintaining all of the furniture in all of the plots in a subdivision of a ward. Why not move to an instanced system? House exterior and interior are fully instanced, can be culled when not in use, perhaps limited to one house per FC and one personal per player. The whole concept of permissions would stay, so you'd still be able to have guests, so you can bring non-FC members on airship missions or to advance workshop projects. It seems like a more tenable system, plus I imagine it'd make moving easier: just dump everything in the old house into the inventory of the new house upon move. Then the players can re-place furniture and such.

This is a pretty low price you had to pay. It's common to take 3x gil worth of the plot. And with the extras u got u made a real good deal.

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Originally Posted by Laerune

2, Housing should be locked behind a questline or it should be very affordable for every player. Maybe they could give a hut for free and you pay to upgrade it into a mansion.

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In a perfect hell, they'll make it like the relic quests and you'll have to choose between obtaining/building on/upgrading your plot or upgrading your relic with the items obtained.

Well soon plots will be free from players who dindt log in for 45 days.
I hope that i get a small Plot for myself cause there no space at all on my server.
But even after looking arround for Plots mby barely 10 Plots will get free from inactiv players.

I came across a house flipper the other day. He wanted 20 million gil to release a small house. His highest class was level 50 so he must have just been an alt.

I really want a house, but I'm not giving someone 20 million gil to release an item they aren't even using. The housing system in this game is terrible.

I just don't know why housing isn't all instanced. You have your house which you can teleport to at any time to set up a private instance. Anyone can choose to visit by teleporting from your character menu, whether in FC, friendlist, or in the field. if an instance already exists, they will join it. Permissions can be adjusted if you want to deny certain types of visitor and leave it as friend or FC only. You can save a few favorites, generally houses you have permissions for. Private rooms work that way, why not all of housing? it would also give us bigger yards to work with for the exterior since it wouldn't need to be fenced in so small.