Stop Promoting Housing if You Can't Deliver to All

To SQUARE ENIX FFXIV & YOSHI-P,

This enormous HOUSING FAILURE must stop! Housing MUST BE available to ALL subscribers of this game! If you want to continue to gain paid subscribers to this game for another four years and to keep the existing subscriber base, you have to stop making housing an elitism in the game. Stop basing housing availability on confines of “housing space.” Stop basing housing availability based on who has the fastest internet connection when a patch goes live. Stop promoting housing with rewards from events when 99% of the subscribers do not have a house! We all know Yoshi had a vision for housing, but it does not work if attainable availability is not for all. I don't care what you have to do, Square, to revamp the housing fiasco, but it needs to be done and done quickly.

The existing free company rules for housing are extremely outdated, because people buy and sell free companies and old free company houses through underground dealings like they are a piece of old stale bread. No player should be able to sell a plot to another player. Please include a rule that a Level 1 Placeholder cannot be a leader of a free company and hold on to an extra house. And if you honor your paying subscriber base with the suggestion below, then many of the shady housing dealings become a moot point and will cease to exist and Square will end up with less housing headaches.

Give access to housing for all of the paid subscriber base, via new rules and the honest amass of gil in order to buy a plot, an instanced plot, etc., whatever description you want to call it and make it possible! Make it so there is a notification and that particular paying subscriber is told it can now invest in housing and have a house of their own! Many of us do not care if someone else can see the house or the yard, we just want the availability to EXPERIENCE HOUSING. How is that so difficult to understand? Give us instanced housing where we can invite friends and family in to see our new abode.

Stop treating 99% of your paying subscribers as dogs, throwing them an old “housing” bone that never changes and never improves.

Amen, ALL paying subscribers should have access to housing. Period. End of story ^_^

I have been saving gil for one year, crafting, gathering, dessynthesis, for nothing...

"Hey look at this super cool thing we added! Oh you didn't login until 6:01 Eastern? Nevermind, this isn't for you."

It's absurd how badly SE handles this.

I whole heartedly agree. Loyal subscriber since beta, and I still can’t get a house.

For the first time in my gaming history. I have unsubscribed from an online game because of heartbreak.

my FC has been saving for over a year and our members have wanted to try the Diadem content and all the other exclusive content related to having an FC house and come patch day our designated member gets DC'd just after logging in with some world server error message and everything is already gone. this wouldn't be so much of a problem if there wasn't content gated behind it that only a select few lucky FC's get to have and then alot of other potential FC's dont get aces to as most housing seems to have been taken up by folks for personal use that wont even use the housing just sell it later for extortionate prices that we have to pay twice once for the person to relinquish the plot and second for the actual plot of which we are not guaranteed to get if someone quickly comes in and ninjas it, kinda wish proper housing was reserved for FC's while leaving the unlimited apartments for personal use.

I agree.

Housing is just something too few have. By this logic, it stands to reason that promotion and budget should not be given the way they have done so far. Private Rooms and Apartment rooms are simply too small. Those with these rooms also have no means to do gardening with nor can they partake of outdoor furnishing, which are some of the better decores.

I am all for solving the issue but both obvious alternatives are just terrible:
More wards = a huge amount of small houses while still having far too few medium and even fewer large. I also don't think the servers are up to this task.
Instanced housing... Need I remind you all of how terrible the instanced server situation was during Stormblood early access? (with or without cyber attacks as it were).

So yeah, a change is needed so that more than just a lucky few can enjoy a piece of content the game offers, optional or otherwise.

I've yet to understand why housing in this game isn't instanced to allow all of us to have a house if we choose to take the time to earn the gil to buy one. I know that in swtor all houses are instanced and you can have several houses of your own, your guild can have a ship to go places and a guild house as well. It's extremely frustrating to have saved and waited only to get hosed on buying a house simply cause you were unable to log in 5 seconds after the servers came up.

I saw the Reddit post of people looking to buy houses and people selling houses for a higher ass steep price. I contacted a small FC in my server. I got sick and tired of how this shitty system is. I ended up giving them my private house Free. They just had to buy the plot after I relinquished it. They wanted to pay me money but I declined. I even gave them the house deed which saved them even more money to get the house out.

SE FIX THIS FING SHIT YOU CALL A HOUSING SYSTEM.

Every FC at the Minimum should be able to purchase a house at any given moment. Small Medium or Large. If we are paying you for content and you are gating it behind owning a house. Make it possible to buy said damn house.

I feel Larges should be FC only, with their being only 72 larges in a brand new housing area they will be the first to go, it doesn\\'t help that most players orchestrate their plans via discord or reddit (or any other external means) to have their cake and eat it too, i wouldn\\'t even be surprised if most have gone the RMT route, i just can\\'t believe that in less than an hour, all of Shirogane is full (Gilgamesh) and 90% of the players have already locked their houses, why even have a devaluation timer at this point heh oh well within a few weeks the Shirogane housing area will be a ghost town with most of the housing frozen in time with empty garden plots and neglected chocobo stables and they will be on the reddit housing market for profit cause 1 billion gil just isn\\'t enough for most players...

there is no incentive. you can work hard save gil forever there are no houses available.

and honestly enix you can't expect people to earn 4-10x the amount of gil for a house from a flipper to finally earn that house?

why should i play anymore? i did everything by the book and never purchased RMT gil in game and now i can't get housing at all and nowhere in the near future?

i have no reason to craft or gather anymore if you just leave us for dead and you lose one player in the community putting things up on the market board for people

how are people going to stay along with your game if you allow loop holes to remain? do you have an idea of what message that sends to the community as a whole and people who continually exploit the integrity of this game?

Somehow SE thinks they justified themselves by creating apartments but that does not help FC's that want to utilize the workshop and have a place to gather with their members. Letting individuals but Larges is a colossal waste of space, most don't know what to do with all that estate and just throw furnishings down to free up space in their inventory

I agree I saved up over the pass few months getting excited that the new housing areas were coming, to only log in and there all gone!! Nothing is left!! This isn't fair whay promote something when only a few of your paying customers cant even enjoy it!!!!!

This was a complete and utter fail. I was sure that the new housing would be full, but none of the old plots in the other three areas were available either.
So funny that SE recently celebrated having millions of subscribers and here I am ready to close two accounts because our FC doesn't have fair access to content we shouldn't have any trouble obtaining after our hard work of farming and crafting to earn the gil to buy it.

Something is broke. Unfortunately, SE doesn't have a great track record of listening to their customers.

I nearly broke down into tears, in the 4 years or so I've been playing this game I never had enough to buy a house, I started fresh on Siren, ground up every single quest, and penny I could get my hands on, and I was looking forward to getting a house in Kugane since everything else was sold out. I waited at the gate, like everyone else, to log into the servers when they came back up, the instant I hit the button to log in, 'crash'. And it kept happening no matter what I tried. There is no means of checking patch integrity and apparently my patch had completely corrupted my client I had to completely reinstall the game because of it and my FC officer who /was/ able to log in told me within TWO MINUTES of the server going live, everything was gone. I have never been so disgusted, infuriated, or upset in my life over a game, I left World of Warcraft for this, I don't consider garrisons to be effective player housings, it's STILL a better idea and more reliable than this system has been.

Fought through a rapid-fire series of launcher crashes (like, five or six in a row) to get on, only to get shoved into a queue of more people than there are houses on my entire server.

By the time I actually got on, everything was gone.

FEELS SO GOOD TO LOSE OUT BECAUSE OF A BAD INTERFACE HUH

Don't forget the new housing items on the mog station.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ProjectT

Stop basing housing availability on confines of “housing space.” Stop basing housing availability based on who has the fastest internet connection when a patch goes live.

---

I'm able to play online during my off times when I'm working - where I work I have access to a network backbone that literally gives me in excess of megabytes of bandwidth.....insane speeds.

And yet I still landed at 700 in the queue this morning.

I was only assisting my FC to get a plot....still didn't happen.

Internet connection doesn't mean nothing....its all dumb luck sadly.

I'm in favor of a 1 plot/personal house/fc house/account/server idea however.... or instanced.....but beyond that..this system will continue to drive people away. Especially when faced with those who own multiple plots across wards on a single given server...something like that should be dealt with.

I can get reasons behind it..but its just greedy and selfish.

-Neph

Worst housing in any game EVER. SE uses the excuse that people want a "neighborhood" community feel. Well guess what SE, All the wards on my server are full and I seldom see anyone riding around, speaking to others, visiting, etc. It's like a ghost town in the neighborhoods. Housing here needs to be fixed asap if they want to keep subs. If I didn't have my medium in the beds, I would be gone with the wind.

That's exactly what happened to me. By the time I was able to log on there were no houses left of course.

that's right! I want my own Med House for subscriber, she is right! we are pay bills each months this game FFXIV! we want houses!

hahaha i love you guys, i really do!

What about solo players who want nothing to do with an FC??? They shouldn't be allowed housing because they choose to not associate with a FC???? Nonsense!!!

This is a pay-to-play game. Anyone who pays should have the ability to use any of the content should they so earn the right to do so. Since housing has minimal requirements, virtually all paying players should be able to obtain it in game. PERIOD.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by tSparkz

What about solo players who want nothing to do with an FC??? They shouldn't be allowed housing because they choose to not associate with a FC???? Nonsense!!!

---

The other side of this topic heh i do feel individuals should have their own house but they lose out on the necessities like personal rooms and the workshop, i just feel large houses should be held for FC's, I'm currently running through my wards and I'm seeing individual large houses abandonedn one still has the snow furnishing on the ground, if Square can't make housing available for everyone then i feel that is a viable option in the least, plus they should do what star wars galaxies did and have some type of system where you pay rent for the housing, maybe once per game day, that might stop the whole lev 1 alt house holding situation.

We are paying customers/subscribers. Not a single one of us should be LOCKED OUT of experiencing the housing part of the game. If we CHOOSE NOT to experience certain parts of the game, we have made a CONSCIOUS CHOICE and we still like the game and we still keep on playing and we still keep on PAYING. But, MILLIONS OF US WANT A HOUSE! For any free companies who have worked hard in the game to reach their goal of owning a house because they've never had one and they want the FC housing perks and this applies to personal houses, too, those that have CHOSEN to work hard toward their own goal of owning a house, and then for all of the goals to be slapped away in the blink of an eye! The current system is NOT FAIR TO ALL. If it is luck-based, then that makes it even worse in my eyes. Square knows this is a huge goal and a very difficult one to complete. That is why we work so hard for the house reward only to find a myriad of feeble excuses from Square or silly roadblocks with the launcher crashing, the game crashing, the infinite queue, the internet speed, etc. I don't believe their excuses anymore. It's been too many years to hear them over and over and they say nothing, not one single thing - to at least give one little glimpse of hope that they have a big remedy.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Square has known all along how to fix this housing mess. I do not know what stops them from implementing it. They are the Boss. They make the Rules. Just do it! HOUSING FOR ALL!!

What I do know is that it all makes me SICK as the atrocious housing availability stands today.

I have a member of my FC that transferred from another server partially due to the fact that 2 players owned almost an entire ward. One way to fix that would be to limit housing for personal use to ONE private home per account, the same way it is one home per FC.
My FC got lucky shortly after a few more wards were made available a couple years back, and we got a large in mist, Not even a couple weeks after we scored that plot, ALL HOUSING was gone.
Please don't make the excuse that expanding the housing areas will have a poor impact on the in game economy - the in game economy is already horrible. Many FCs suffer behind the housing wall because they can't garden, can't make t3 buffs, can't train each other's chocobos, ect.
When the housing wards fill - Make new ones. Other MMOs already do this. Give us housing in Coerthas! Add more wards to the original 3 housing areas! Add more wards to the SB areas. If you value the community spirit of this game - make it work.

Up at 3:00 AM, got stuck at the login button as things got slammed. Launcher crashed several times. By the time the server let me in, I was in queue 2509.

I'm one of the lucky few to have gotten a FC mansion in the last round. Now I'm shopping for a medium for myself. This goes against my own goals, but I honestly feel that individuals should pay significantly more for a house than a FC. It just makes common sense. Given how strapped server resources apparently are.

I also think a lottery system should be implemented to keep things fair--so the spam login bots don't have an advantage. Ideally, SE would find a way to actually meet the demand, but in lieu of that, they aren't showing any real intent to actually make the system fair or meet the demand so it should be random.

And when a house is demolished/sold? Send it back into the lottery. Kill the after selling market.

I was hoping to get a big one, was saving for quite some months on that but in the end thanks to the servers I was only able to get a small one in Ul`dah out of poor luck. (I know that its better than nothing but still..) The only restriction housing should have is Gil. If someone has enough of that they should be able to buy one. Its even worse since they create more and more seasonal housing items for a small amount of players, lock FC content behind it, have a timer since its never enough which means that you cant take a longer break as an owner and on top of that truly advertise it as a one part of SB...

But at least we can buy consumable Halloween food from the last even for quite some money in the cash shop..

I got an email advertising housing about 10 hours after all the plots had sold out (which was roughly 14 minutes after the server came back up on my server). I don't know why housing was gone at 5:14 am and I get an email at 3:29 pm advertising housing no one can get anymore. This was going to be an issue and everyone knew it. Getting an email advertising the unusable feature is just downright condescending. They've had years to sort out the housing problem. They didn't do a thing with it except add more wards and a relocation feature. That obviously didn't address the root problem, and demand far outstrips supply.

Almost average base in each server now has 6000+ active players. Plus they probably have bunch of alts. 12 wards which has 36 Large mansion was probably a terrible idea since almost majority now has enough gil to buy them.

What pisses me off is when the events give housing item aswell, they act like everyone is enjoying the housing feature, while majority do not own one. I realy wish we could sit in the same room as the developers and just ask them, if they understand what the NA/EU community is going through with the housing feature.

The only thing blocking players from owing a house should be gil.

Instanced housing seems to be the way to go. I was planning on logging in right after maintenance and try my luck but when the alarm went off said screw it. Woke up to a few technical issues I had to work through to be able to login. I feel so bad for the people who had issues and couldn't sign in for the rush.

Hearing stories about those two people who bought up a whole ward and now someone said an FC bought up a whole ward this morning is just crazy...Make housing something accessible for everyone!!!

Agreed! 4 years in and they can't still get housing right. :/

The issue for me was that I spent the entire day with built up contained and chaotic tensions. That build up I was expecting at least something for the emotional turmoil. But no. Crash. Super large queue, Slow loading into Kugane. Then one by one I watched even the smalls disappear. So crushed that my sleep was troubled and my anguish has twisted the day. My creativity has taken a nose dive!

So really. I think I should ignore this game for a very long while. This was an attack level strike against me. Don't hype a limited thing and expect no one to be harmed more than mere disappointment. Tragic really. I shouldn't be this invested.

guys stop being housing elitists for god sake

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Tridus

"Hey look at this super cool thing we added! Oh you didn't login until 6:01 Eastern? Nevermind, this isn't for you."

It's absurd how badly SE handles this.

---

6:01??? man, i wish, on Balmung it was literally all sold out within the first seconds of the server popping - i was one of the poor bastards who landed in the queue the second it popped.
This was such a blunder, spent over a year on it and my gf was panicking the entire time and never got one, it's awful. Give us an alternative Square, like the ESO housing for the rest of the playerbase and leave the neighborhood failure for the 2% of the lucky bastards. lol
Just man, give us something instead of tiny rooms with barely any windows please.

It should just be instanced, or open up MANY more wards/subdivisions. Add a 3rd subdivision that instances all the houses. Make townhouses that are mostly 'static' with little customization but have all the outdoor and indoor features of a 'plot' house. SOMETHING.

Although reading older posts their line before was it being a 'performance' concern and we all know how conservative they are with server resources; Having to pay cash for characters, item space, limited inventory, slow server ticks, etc etc.