Making a Fairer Housing System

Apart from the obvious shortage, some things about the present housing system have been bothering me. The way the game treats players whose houses are reclaimed strikes me as particularly unfair, but there are other issues, too.
I'd like to see a housing system that is more equitable and where players do not stand to lose anything (apart from some gil) if the game reclaims their house or they are evicted from a house/room at the whim of another player.

These are the things I would like to see changed:

The Reclamation System
Well, it's been implemented, I'm assuming it's here to stay but I feel the way it operates at present is unnecessarily punitive towards those players who lose their house.
If your house is reclaimed due to inactivity, 80% of your gil and most of your furniture is stored for a period of 35 days. If you do not collect it within this time you lose everything.

Your furniture should be stored permanently.
Your character, the gear in the Armoire, the items in your bags, even the items in your retainer's bags, all these things are stored indefinitely. So, why should furniture be any different?
Destroying everything if people do not log in for 35 days is unfair.

You lose all your gil if you do not claim it within the 35 days.
Again, why? I can see the reasoning behind only giving us 80% back but why is there a time limit? If a player returns and wants to buy another house, this just puts another obstacle in their way.

Some furniture is destroyed on removal. I don't like this idea at all.
While I can live with it that these items are destroyed if you chose to remove them, in the case of a house reclamation or eviction due to being kicked from a Free Company, it strikes me as being particularly unfair.

Tenants
Tenants seem to have little, if any security. Since the house will be reclaimed if the owner is inactive, regardless of how active the tenants are, tenants stand to lose not only access to a house and gardens they might be using but also any items of furniture that break on removal. Again, it's unfair.

FC Housing
You can be locked out of your personal room.
The FC leader has this power by default and may give permission to other ranks to set housing access. I am an FC leader and I want to see this changed.
Under no circumstances should any player have to power to deny another access to something they have paid for with their own gil.

FC leaders should not have the power to lock the house against their own members. If you don't want somebody in the FC House, you probably don't want them in the company.

This has already led to abuse, some FC members recently had to pay their FC leader to access their rooms when they wanted to leave (you can't leave an FC unless you demolish your room first).

Breakable furniture - again, if you are kicked from your FC you will lose these items. Remember, some FCs kick for inactivity. Even if the kick is due to bad behaviour and well-deserved, I still think losing items of furniture as a result is unfair.

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Originally Posted by Solarra

You lose all your gil if you do not claim it within the 35 days.
Again, why? I can see the reasoning behind only giving us 80% back but why is there a time limit? If a player returns and wants to buy another house, this just puts another obstacle in their way.

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This is likely because housing was supposed to also be a massive gil sink to remove gil from the game (there's so many places that add gil and very few places that actually remove it). Bad as it probably sounds, we do need ways to remove money from the game or the economy will eventually just fall over with everyone having more cash than they can actually spend it on.

When they enabled demolishing, even though they probably didn't want to, they gave us back 80% of the gil for the purchase of the house, probably to try and less upset people that lost their house. They were probably fine to leave things as they were without demolishing, but we as the community demanded more houses and forced them into taking action as they seem technically unable to add more houses at the current time.

The 35 day timer on retrieving the gil (and other items) is their way of still trying to keep it as a gil sink, although it's now nowhere near as effective as it was.

So sucky as it sounds, it really is a necessary evil :(

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Originally Posted by worldofneil

they gave us back 80% of the gil for the purchase of the house, probably to try and less upset people that lost their house

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I get that, I just feel that having a timer on claiming it is a bit unfair. That way only some people get some of their gil back.
The time from demolishing to reclaiming is very short; things happen, people get sick, lose their jobs, family members get sick or work takes them abroad any one of these could cause you to take a long break from the game.

However, people losing gil was only one small part of what bothers me about the system as it is.

35 days to reclaim what was put on the NPC...

I might be wrong... but!

When 2.0 went live after the game was down for recreation they placed the Calamity Salvager for 1.0 players to reclaim items they used to own before. Now if I'm not mistaken the Calamity Salvager carried your items from 1.0 until you picked it up. I didn't return for a couple of months after 2.0 went live and still could pick up my stuff. I don't remember a timer to reclaim items for that. I might be mistaken though and I don't know where to look that up...

If that's correct though then why is it possible to have items there forever but for housing items it's just 35 days? In the end it's the same situation: Items placed on NPC cause character was inactive. Player returns eventually and get's to reclaim his/her stuff.

I agree with everything the OP said. These are some of the more obvious flaws in the system that have almost nothing to do with cost or data management and are more quality of life adjustments to help improve the system as it is. Also, to further comment on some points:

1) The amount of data needed to store items indefinitely on a NPC is trivial. It's not an issue, the timer was arbitrary upon development, more likely based on a 30 day subscription period than anything else.
2) Housing is in part designed as a gil sink, but that offers no valid rationalization for such a short timer. Housing is incredibly finite and the amount of further gil being sunk into it is negligible until additional housing is added. On top of that, while someone may get 80% of their home back, they still lost 20% and the home will be purchased likely instantly for 100% value. That discrepancy, on top of many older home owners buying their home for less than 100% value, makes it undeniable that even if 80% of your price was returned, it would still be taking more gil out of the system than it is returning.

I might add more points later if I see a need, but good topic OP.

I 100% support the suggestions posted by Solarra and Neira.

Since FFXIV's housing system is not presently very inclusive, I would also recommend that they look at Aion's housing system. In Aion, there is premium, limited-availability non-instanced housing like we see in FFXIV. But they also have an Apartment Complex with small instanced rooms that every player can enjoy. These rooms are small, have low capacity for decorating, have no yard, and instanced, but free. And they are never taken from you if you take a break.

Players that love housing will still want the superior non-instanced houses that we have now, but at least everyone who subscribes to this game would have a little something to enjoy if they added this type of system. This also wouldn't interfere with their overall vision of mostly non-instanced housing.

Anyway just a suggestion, and hopefully one they can consider if we will never have enough wards to allow all players to use the housing system.

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Originally Posted by ZephyrMenodora

they also have an Apartment Complex with small instanced rooms that every player can enjoy. These rooms are small, have low capacity for decorating,

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SE already announced this is coming but there no details on how it will work, most assume it will be like a FC room.

This is great news at least! I'm looking forward to this :)

Those rooms will be the ishgard housing, its a mansion with about 512 room, so its basically an apartment system for people who dont have a house (they are working on a way for people to do gardening since there wont be yards). No word if it will be added to the other zones, but new housing wards will be added in about 3.3, and the ishgard housing will be about 3.4.

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Originally Posted by Victoria_Silverdawn

Those rooms will be the ishgard housing, its a mansion with about 512 room, so its basically an apartment system for people who dont have a house (they are working on a way for people to do gardening since there wont be yards). No word if it will be added to the other zones, but new housing wards will be added in about 3.3, and the ishgard housing will be about 3.4.

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They never confirmed that the apartment style was going to be Ishgard housing as far as I'm aware did they. I could have sworn it was coming before Ishgard. Do you have a source?

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Originally Posted by Solarra

Tenants
Tenants seem to have little, if any security. Since the house will be reclaimed if the owner is inactive, regardless of how active the tenants are, tenants stand to lose not only access to a house and gardens they might be using but also any items of furniture that break on removal. Again, it's unfair.

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Tenants will never be able to reset the timer, because personal housing is a luxury contrary to FC housing which is a necessity, so that way the plots can be free again faster.

I think the tenant system needs looking at because it puts people in a position where what happens to their belongs depends entirely on the behaviour of another player. The owner goes inactive, they lose all the fixtures in their room, possibly some furniture along with access to a house.

Tenancy is a good stop-gap while houses are in such desperately short supply. I can see that allowing tenants to take over a house where the owner goes inactive or wants to relinquish could be very problematic and open to abuse, so I understand why Square don't allow it.
However, I don't see why they cannot save the entire contents of a tenant's room and store it indefinitely so they can become a tenant elsewhere or transfer all their stuff to the new apartment housing when it becomes available. Same with people who are kicked from their FC.

Sorry, but I disagree that any changes are needed for tennants. Tennancy was only added because people wanted to share a house with a partner or friend and I think a lot of people were probably surprised when they allowed it to be shared with 3 other people instead of just 1. Ultimately though, it is the still the house of the person who's name is on the deed.

If it's a group of people then they should be using a FC house, although having the option to change a personal house to an FC house (one-way only) would be brilliant.

I read that people are worried about the houses not being enough to stabilize the economy, why not make it where you have to pay a monthly bill for the house.

Shared housing with a shared decay timer had the potential to be a genuine remedy to the current system. If every personal house out there all of a sudden had three more people using it and able to keep it as their own, there would be considerably fewer people actually needing a house. Yes, it would have the potential to be abused in the fact that someone could refresh it for all four people, but that's still one person who is playing and paying for that house compared to the glaring flaw with hundreds of homes purchased for resale with no use at all.

They wouldn't have literally quadrupled the number of home owners, but I don't think saying it's been doubled would be unreasonable. It also didn't take extra server space, and every ward addition will compound the number of home owners. Yet, with the way shared housing currently works, people can literally watch their homes be scheduled for demolition because the one owner hasn't logged on, even if the three tenants are there constantly.

It just seems to me that it's only about the money in this case.

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Originally Posted by Solarra

I think the tenant system needs looking at because it puts people in a position where what happens to their belongs depends entirely on the behaviour of another player. The owner goes inactive, they lose all the fixtures in their room, possibly some furniture along with access to a house.

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Outside of a window to get their stuff if the house goes I dont think tenants need anything else.

They didn't purchase the house, they are trusting the owner and imo shouldn't be able to reset the timer.

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Originally Posted by Syrehn

They never confirmed that the apartment style was going to be Ishgard housing as far as I'm aware did they. I could have sworn it was coming before Ishgard. Do you have a source?

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Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XXVI Digest (01/12/2016)

0:33:32
Q: Auto-reclamation for housing starts this month, but can you tell us if there will be any future additions of plots?
A: We'll be increasing the number of plots for existing housing areas in Patch 3.3. After we expand those areas, we'll add apartment-style housing in Ishgard areas afterwards, starting with one apartment-style building which will hold about 512 residences. We’re also planning to make chocobo stables available for use to residents of apartment-style housing. Gardening patches are still proving somewhat difficult, but we’re currently developing new “planter pots” that will allow gardening

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Originally Posted by Victoria_Silverdawn

A: We'll be increasing the number of plots for existing housing areas in Patch 3.3. After we expand those areas, we'll add apartment-style housing in Ishgard areas afterwards, starting with one apartment-style building which will hold about 512 residences.

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They'll start with one building that holds 512 residents, and that'll be the end of it. No more units after that... why 512 units and not 5120 units? Why are they unwilling to provide ways to allow players to easily reclaim 80% of the cost their current residence? What are they so afraid of? that it would be the first thing that hackers would try to obtain? Or people exploiting the system by selling there residence and then claiming the account was hacked to reclaim the everything? Sure it's possible. But it's not going to destroy the economy. People always complain about the economy, regardless? Or more to the point, people always complain? As I am doing right now?

Personally I feel that when they implemented private rooms they should of allowed everyone to have one at the rising stone as well as a garden plot near the entrance to Mor Dhona.

Would it have been an amazing way to give everyone houses? No but at least people wouldn't:

1, Feel they need to join an fc to have a private room.
2, Potentially lose that private room due to stuff happening outside their control
3, Everyone would have access to gardening instead of the few who either own houses or are lucky enough to be given access to their fcs one.

Hell It would have even kinda made sense from a story point you having a room at the scions base of operations.

They need to get on the ball with the housing move feature. My FC has been waiting over a year for this.

There shouldn't be a 2 class system for housing at all. Everyone should be able to get a house in the wards, period.
Locking players out that cannot camp the plots 24/7 or cannot pay those ridiculous prices from those that grab them, is a bad idea.
There is no reason for "apartments". SWG had huge player made cities and Anarchy Online has whole cities that companies can pop and player housing.
All those mmos came out more than a decade ago and suddenly technology is preventing them from doing it?
Sorry, but that has to be a blatant lie.

Well, probably the same lie as not being able to do bigger / higher def summons for summoners because of resources limits on players systems (in the meantime, they added some really shiny / huge / detailed mounts for all players and not only summoners, which probably cost a lot of resources :) )

Housing in this game is a racket. In lots of MMO's, housing is a fairly STANDARD thing. But here, it's a privilege for those who have no life and have the time to camp around waiting for an opening. I don't buy SE's excuse that the server space is not in the budget.

This shouldn't be too hard to do. Create instanced housing on a per character basis with a fixed price at whatever level (50? 60?) you want. Allow people to upgrade the size of the "plot" and the house, change its background, its sky, etc. This is absolutely within SquareEnix's ability. If they needed to, they could charge a 1-2 dollar surcharge for the ability to cover any additional server cost. That would also allow them to set up access and block lists, better item counts, and more (worth it).

Then, you can buy a plot in a neighborhood if you want. Then, when you're kicked off the plot for inactivity, it just saves the house and items somewhere so you can reclaim it as instanced housing later if you want.

I'm not sure why Square wouldn't have already been working on this. They'll never be able to cover the demand through their ward and possible apartment system.