I must be missing something...

Okay, so, there are 60 plots in each ward, 8 wards, in all 3 districts. That means 1,440 plots to cover every player and guild on the server. This isn't enough, obviously (maybe Square didn't really anticipate their own success or how stacked the servers get). I understand that, though I think that's stunningly poor design given the quality of the rest of the game.

But buying and selling plots between players is also illegal according to the terms of service. Unless one is spending their time sitting on a housing list just scrolling around and waiting for a plot to go blank, how is someone supposed to get a plot? I'm not understanding how Square envisioned newer players getting a housing plot.

I really hope this gets fixed. I'm really ready to commit to this game, but I feel like this huge chunk of it is off limits, especially if I want to play with my family on Gilgamesh.

Oh boy. You must be new here. As a survivor of the Great Housing Catastrophe of Jenova where a bunch of plots got demolished and left us sitting on them for four days over the Christmas Holiday due to a glitch making them un-purchasable, I just want you to know that you've started yet another of many threads about this problem. Unless you did it on purpose, in which case I'm just gonna sit and watch.

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Originally Posted by Ignacius

But buying and selling plots between players is also illegal according to the terms of service. Unless one is spending their time sitting on a housing list just scrolling around and waiting for a plot to go blank, how is someone supposed to get a plot? I'm not understanding how Square envisioned newer players getting a housing plot.

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Luck. I guess.

I got mine by checking for plots twice a day. It took about 2 months.

But yeah, the whole situation sucks. I think the apartments are coming and 3.3 and more wards in a patch after that. It sounds like they are working on it, just super slowly.

The bad news is, they are adding one of the most in-demand features at an incredibly slow pace, and not in large enough quantity to make housing something accessible by every player. The whole housing situation, and how it has been handled from basically day one, has managed to upset almost every player, with or without a house, and it continues to be a source of frustration for those who are just coming to realize the issue.

The good news is, enough players are giving up on the game, so eventually there will be plenty of houses for those who are left. Since the internet lacks voice inflection, I just want to clarify that this second statement was intended as satire.

I sympathize with your situation.

Housing, as they've implemented it in this game, is terrifically resource-intensive. SE knew that all along, but they also knew that players really wanted housing and so they rolled out a limited feature they could iterate and expand, all while trying to get a better handle on the associated technical issues.

The first housing was limited to free companies. Players had been asking for individual housing since forever, but they told us they simply didn't have the resources to pull it off. There were originally five wards and no subdivisions, and these sold out over a period of some months. Players responded positively, but everyone wanted to know when individual housing was coming. They added a sixth ward of free company plots a couple patch cycles later, as well as personal rooms in the free company houses. Everyone continued to ask after individual housing. It wasn't until the patch after that that they opened up housing to individuals, adding two more wards at first, and then subdivisions shortly after that (doubling the amount of available land). I wasn't playing at the time but I am sure there was a feeding frenzy the moment the servers went live, leaving us more or less where we are today.

The simple fact is that they cannot implement housing (in its current form) for everyone who wants it. Square Enix had an overly ambitious vision for what housing should be, and they are committed enough now that they don't really have any choice but to keep applying band-aids to the problem: providing players with alternative points of access into the housing system (personal rooms, "mansion" housing), reclaiming unused houses, and adding new housing as they can. Ishgardian housing will increase the number of available houses by fully a third, or even more if they couple it with any sort of expansion to the existing districts. Everyone knows that isn't going to solve the housing crisis, but it's something.

Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight they would have done it differently. I cannot say. I do know that the prohibition against buying and selling housing is meant to protect us, not to lock new players out of the system; they are unsupported transactions based on unenforceable agreements, and they put SE in the position of arbitrating "he said, she said" disputes including agreements that might have been made outside the game (and they probably open the door to RMT transactions as well). Take that for what you will.

Square Enix almost literally copied a housing system that exists already in a free to play MMO. The F2P MMO can sustain it and offer houses to everyone, but SE can't. It's really hard to give any credit to an argument about technical difficulties when such a fact exists.

Well, there's still a lot of housing on the smaller servers.

The problem is that people are all going to the larger servers but the housing doesn't get any bigger to compensate. This makes a more people fight for houses like what happened on legacy servers.

There should be Ishgard housing eventually so you could give that a shot when they announce it.

Okay, thanks a lot for the replies explaining. And SE, I know it's resource intensive, but make the effort. You can make it cost a lot, make it available at level cap, but make it available to every player who works for it. Make each plot their own instance and let them buy neighborhoods if you'd like. I give SE more credit than NCSoft, and even Wildstar made it work. Housing in other games has proven that you can retain subs forever by giving player-made houses, then giving them a ton of things in those houses to waste their time on.

But whatever you do, it has to be more than putting in enough plots for a few hundred more people. If it's literally only available to less than two thousand people+guilds per server then your development of housing is literally going to earn you zero new subscribers and retain less than two-thousand. That's just not economically feasible for something you're spending design money and system resources on.

there'd probably be more plots available if people weren't allowed to make alts with the express purpose of getting another house.
newer players like me who have quietly saved up are being cheated out our own quiet place in-game to call home thanks to a smaller
subsection of players monopolizing on a limited resource.

hopefully the apartment housing will have the same functionality as personal and fc housing.
and hopefully those won't all be bought up and gated by the community behind the scenes.

this isn't the case for everyone who has purchased one, obviously but i'm just noting some things
that i've become privy to since i've begun playing.

Move to one of the several servers in need of more people, where unsold plots still exist. Coeurl, for instance, still has a good 20 plots for sale. It's also important to note that Wildstar actually didn't make it work. All of Wildstar's houses are solo instances... same with Rift, Everquest II, and just about every other game that has attempted individual housing. Solo-instanced housing is an infinitely easier problem to solve than housing zones, because you always have exactly the number of housing plots needed for the players that want them. Housing zones mean you can't instance them based on demand, because people will start buying houses in their own unpopulated zone, and spool off an entirely new zone just for them, and it will waste far more resources than solo-instanced housing. Additionally, solo-instanced housing comes with it's own UI issues... issues that have been addressed and solved in varying ways, but still, issues that have to be designed around. SE wants to create an atmosphere of living in Eorzea, and housing zones were how they accomplished that... it's far more immersive than solo-instanced housing. It does have its downsides, but it also has it's upsides. We know that they're putting a lot of resources toward alleviating the housing shortage on the more populated servers, such as adding apartments in the near future and adding entirely new housing zones in the more distant future. And they've worked the housing shortage into the designs for the Company Workshop and Diadem, allowing players without a house to share Airship access with those who do. So... it is being addressed. Unfortunately, there are other issues in other areas of the game that are just as pressing, and they have a limited staff.

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Originally Posted by Neira

Square Enix almost literally copied a housing system that exists already in a free to play MMO. The F2P MMO can sustain it and offer houses to everyone, but SE can't. It's really hard to give any credit to an argument about technical difficulties when such a fact exists.

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Which F2P MMO was that? Every F2P MMO I've played has entirely instanced houses instead of an actual housing zone with all the houses existing in more or less the same place. That's a much easier technical problem to solve, and a much less resource-intensive problem than housing zones, because housing zones run into performance issues (particularly on the still-supported PS3) since it has to load every external item, every structural component, every dye color, etc. for every house in the zone every time someone loads into the zone. Instanced housing just has to load one house for one player at a time. If you have 64 people loading into the housing zone at once, with instanced housing you have to load 64 houses. With Final Fantasy's housing zones, you have to load 1,920 houses... 30 houses per player x 64 players.

The quote in your signature line is interesting... I played Ultima Online, and housing was far more of an issue than it is in Final Fantasy. I remember when their oriental expansion came out... every housing plot was taken within 2 days of launch. There weren't caps on how many houses a single character could own, and there wasn't scaling of housing prices based on the amount of gold in the economy. So in UO, the only way to actually get a house was to get lucky and plop your house down within hours of a new expansion launch, or pay someone hundreds of real-life dollars to vacate their house and give you the plot and hope they didn't just take your money and run.

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Originally Posted by CatfishCassie

move

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so your suggestion is to leave friends, family or a combination of both, as well as having to readjust to a new market and server atmosphere, when people have already spent months saving up millions of gil to even be able to avoid a plot in the first place? not to mention the gil limitations when it comes to server transfer. you're basically telling people to start over from scratch and that's just ridiculous. there are people who have transferred for a house but that's a band-aid solution and really should not be offered or treated like it's some sort of real universal answer to an ongoing problem.

they let their vision interfere with the wants and needs of the playerbase and taking it out on a the playerbase when they express earned discontentment is a bit much.

they're fixing it in a future update but that doesn't change the fact that the system is broken now

Lord of the Rings Online for your answer, a nearly identical system with (wards) containing 30 houses in an instance, of three different house sizes, able to be built in four different areas(we only have three so far), but they automatically create new wards when the old ones fill up. It has the same neighborhood style of this one, and it honestly looks like that is where FFXIV got their idea from with the similarities. There is still a reclamation type of system, but your house isn't destroyed and your unmovable items aren't lost, and there is no timer to get it back, it just recreates your house when you come back since wards aren't a limitation.

I also find the quote interesting, but I think for different reasons.

Saying Wildstar didn't make housing work because they used a more efficient system seems inadequate. SE are the ones that put themselves in this position by making sure their housing plots were definitively limited, but they're also the ones keeping themselves there. Honestly, as nice as I'm sure the neighborhoods are, if Square offered me a house with its own personal instance that I could upgrade the size of instead of trying to wrangle their current system again for a larger plot, I'd take it and be happy. The immersion is worthless given the lack of availability; it doesn't matter how well developed something is if only a certain amount of us can use it at any one time. It certainly wouldn't be worth it for me. It's absolutely not worth it if I have to leave all of my friends, family, and the FC I run behind to get a house. The nicest housing system on the planet is functionally worthless to anyone who doesn't own a plot.

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Originally Posted by Neira

Lord of the Rings Online for your answer, a nearly identical system with (wards) containing 30 houses in an instance, of three different house sizes, able to be built in four different areas(we only have three so far), but they automatically create new wards when the old ones fill up. It has the same neighborhood style of this one, and it honestly looks like that is where FFXIV got their idea from with the similarities. There is still a reclamation type of system, but your house isn't destroyed and your unmovable items aren't lost, and there is no timer to get it back, it just recreates your house when you come back since wards aren't a limitation.

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There is a limit to how many housing wards there can be in LOTRO. It is high but it exists.

At one point there was starting to be a lack of available housing due to many houses being owned by people who had ceased playing, so they introduced a reclaiming system where you would lose your house if you failed to pay the upkeep for long enough.
Housing decorations are not lost however, and one can pay upkeep for up to 6 months in advance - letting you take extended breaks from the game if needed. One can even allow other people to pay the upkeep cost for you if they want to. (Useful if know you will be away for a long time, but have friends in-game that you trust.)

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Originally Posted by MistakeNot

At one point there was starting to be a lack of available housing due to many houses being owned by people who had ceased playing, so they introduced a reclaiming system where you would lose your house if you failed to pay the upkeep for long enough.
Housing decorations are not lost however, and one can pay upkeep for up to 6 months in advance - letting you take extended breaks from the game if needed. One can even allow other people to pay the upkeep cost for you if they want to. (Useful if know you will be away for a long time, but have friends in-game that you trust.)

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Yeah, sorry about that slight inaccuracy, I remember reading there was a cap at over 200+ "wards", but didn't think it was that relevant. Also, thank you for the additional information. A pity that it seems like people would rather shove their head in the sand than admit that a free game could more effectively do what a subscription and cash shop game can not.