Housing and FCs...

I just got to say it: The housing system in this game feels like it's making free companies far too rigid. Basically, let's say there is a healthy server and a bunch of free companies form. They all build up funds, get a house, do raids and community activities, etc. Then the wear and tear of time happens and the FCs lose a lot of members. However, the FC owners have a huge amount of time and gil invested in their houses.

What I've observed is that instead of what happens in other games (people tend to break up or merge to keep the torch going), people in this game cling to their housing and never let it go. Then there are people who start new FCs, buy a new house, and can't find enough members or just did it so they can own another house.

More housing isn't going to fix this issue and I'm afraid the only answer is going to be ripping the entire system out and evicting the land owners. :(

Once again....a complaint from an overpopulated server.

And a complete lack of regard for servers who are not overpopulated.

How typical.

Plenty of housing on my server, maybe come make a FC on a server with housing instead of thinking every housing situation is like yours

It really does bother me how easy to it is to hang onto a large house if you have little intent of actually using it much or playing the game period.

I know there's someone who owns at least three larges on my server between their main account and their alt accounts, except they only bothered decorating the main house.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

It really does bother me how easy to it is to hang onto a large house if you have little intent of actually using it much or playing the game period.

I know there's someone who owns at least three larges on my server between their main account and their alt accounts, except they only bothered decorating the main house.

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They said in the last live latter they are going to make Housing Account locked so if you have a House on one character you can’t have 1 on others, but it seem to me that if you have more then one character on the said server then you can use the same House. So if it true the there’s you’re fix for that.

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Originally Posted by Hazuki87

They said in the last live latter they are going to make Housing Account locked so if you have a House on one character you can’t have 1 on others, but it seem to me that if you have more then one character on the said server then you can use the same House. So if it true the there’s you’re fix for that.

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That person did say that the player who owns the houses owns them across multiple accounts though, so making housing account-locked wouldn’t really be helpful in that situation. Besides, it’s already been done, but players who have acquired multiple houses on a single account before the fact have been grandfathered in, although it would be nice if multiple characters on a single account could have access to a single private house.

Housing isn't a problem. Most worlds have plenty of available smalls if not also mediums.

Balmung's problem is Balmung's problem. The players there need to solve it on their own.

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Originally Posted by NephthysVasudan

Once again....a complaint from an overpopulated server.

And a complete lack of regard for servers who are not overpopulated.

How typical.

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Well, given how this works in the long run it can potentially impact any server. The fact the old vanguard are getting into this problem first and the newer servers don't have the issue yet is kind of a mute point. Not going to argue that the best solution is to get out of dodge and go to a low pop until something happens here.

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Originally Posted by Colt47

Well, given how this works in the long run it can potentially impact any server. The fact the old vanguard are getting into this problem first and the newer servers don't have the issue yet is kind of a mute point.

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Not really. Several factors contribute to Balmung's population, some of which are simply not applicable to other servers.

It's a very old server (I believe it was legacy?) so it has had plenty of time to accumulate a high population. Since very early days the community has made it the main rp hub which has greatly contributed to its popularity. Roleplayers will most times go to a highly populated server because for that specific activity server population has immense impact on the quality and frequency of rp. Balmung is also in NA, which has significantly less language barriers than EU, so you don't get as many players being naturally funneled to specific servers. For example in EU french speaking players tend to flock to Moogle while german speaking players tend to go to Shiva.

Additionally if my time in WoW taught me anything about this it's that server population will always be very disproportionate. Even though the WoW devs have made several attempts over the course of a decade to entice players to transfer to other servers for free, it never really created a large enough dent to be considered a true success. Big servers remained big, small servers remained small. They even ended up merging a lot of servers because the populations there just didn't grow despite it growing elsewhere.

So while technically speaking any server could experience Balmung's population related housing issues, the truth is the chance is extremely low for this issue to become serious on more than a handful of servers. The housing system is far from perfect but on the majority of servers it's actually working out pretty well since 4.2. These days 99% of complaints I see about housing availability comes from bloated servers, and it's usually Balmung. Whereas before the complaints were much more widespread.

I don't envision SE rebooting the housing system with servers like Balmung as a driving factor. Bloated servers suck on both sides of the fence. It inhibits some fun factors for players and it gives devs more work. Housing does act as an incentive to transfer, so it's actually in SE's interests to keep housing as it is for now. If SE ever reboot the housing system, they're going to look at a far bigger picture than Balmung.

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Originally Posted by Colt47

Well, given how this works in the long run it can potentially impact any server. The fact the old vanguard are getting into this problem first and the newer servers don't have the issue yet is kind of a mute point. Not going to argue that the best solution is to get out of dodge and go to a low pop until something happens here.

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No, not really. Outside of Balmung, Gilgamesh, and maybe Leviathan, all the other NA servers have more plots and apartments than there are active accounts and new plots open up every day thanks to the demolition timer. Unless all of the other servers suddenly ballooned in population like the Big Three I don't see this cancer ever spreading in a way that requires SE to excise the whole system.

Grammar Nazi time: It's moot point, by the way.

Alright I'll throw a bone.....
You want to help alleviate the stress somewhat?
Revoke ownership of homes on accounts who have more than one that where grandfathered in.
Issue a notice - Give them 45 days. Force them to pick one - just one - return their goods as is in mechanics. - Give them their Gil back if need be.

But this does not in any shape form or fashion ignore the elephant in the room from most complaints I keep seeing.

Your on an overpopulated server.
There is a reason there is incentive to move off said server.

Your dealing with a limited resource on a server that is overpopulated. This does not mean the issue is on SE's side when the system is working rather well on other servers.

No its not perfect....and yeah there could be improvements. But don't wreck it for everyone else.

The housing limit of one per account was a godsend. Wish it was done from beginning, we hadn't had su much drama about it. Now housing no more an issue.

And Balmung is very well know it is full as an egg. Going there today, you know in advance everything there is taken.

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Originally Posted by Colt47

I just got to say it: The housing system in this game feels like it's making free companies far too rigid. Basically, let's say there is a healthy server and a bunch of free companies form. They all build up funds, get a house, do raids and community activities, etc. Then the wear and tear of time happens and the FCs lose a lot of members. However, the FC owners have a huge amount of time and gil invested in their houses.

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On a healthy server, the housing situation actually isnt that bad - Balmung is not a healthy a server.

Besides that I'm not really sure what your concern here is?

Is it that there are only limited houses available and you're unhappy with "dead" FCs holding on to some of them?
In that case: If the FC is truely dead, if no one is using the house anymore, it will get thrown back on the market 45 days after the last time someone from that FC entered the house. Problem solved - as long as someone is till active, whats the problem?

If its the the whole "people are unwilling to merge their FCs because of houses"-thing, I'm not really sure what the problem is - and I'm also unsure how thats not a problem in other games?
Quite frankly: Even if housing wouldnt be limited I wouldnt want to give up our FC-house all that quickly. Just last weekend I spend about 12 hours, 4 million gil and 600k MGP to re-model parts of it when I bought the new GC-furniture. (And thats after previously spending countless hours over the past months - not just me but other members aswell. Not to mention things like workshop and sub/airship-progress)
Maybe other games dont offer that much options to decorate houses, but at least here I wouldnt want to see all that work go to waste.
I dare say that people would still clinge to their houses, even if the new FC also has one or if it would be easy enough to buy a priavte one - decoarting is so much work and can be quite a gil-sink, I wouldnt let that go easly either.
And what is the point or real benefit of merging, breaking or in a sense even joining FCs anyways? Communication works just aswell via LS - so two FCs that want to merge but dont want to give up their respective houses could just aswell form a LS (assuming they dont have more than 128 members together...) to use for communication, while still enjoying the benefits of their FC in their respective one.

Shell FCs might still exists, but they're a lot less of a problem now - you can only own one personal house and one FC-house on your account with the new changes. That means if you truely want to have two houses, you're prohibted from joining an FC with housing.

Again... quite ironic that you're talking about a "healthy" server there - because on our healthy servers housing isnt that much of an issue anymore and if you or your FC wants to buy a house, they can - if they look around a bit and are willing to settle for a small one in the Goblet for starters.

lots of smalls on my server, some mediums and largest too.

I don't think anyone on this thread has actually addressed the point being made here yet. Which is too bad, because it's a very interesting point. And it doesn't only affect servers without available housing.

Do you have any suggestions on how to solve this problem? Because you're right, if your FC dies, you're probably going to stick with it so as not to lose the housing. It's going to be very difficult to convince two dead FCs with housing to merge into one. Maybe if there was a way to keep the stuff associated with the housing, not only furniture and such but things like FC workshop progress. I don't know how you'd merge FCs even in that case, though.

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Originally Posted by Talraen

Maybe if there was a way to keep the stuff associated with the housing, not only furniture and such but things like FC workshop progress

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Two things that would be amazing -
1. breaking workshops out of housing. FCs need to be affiliated with a certain GC, I'd like to see public, instanced workshops made available to FCs that hit a certain rank, instead of tying them to houses. Make the workshop log also tied to the FC rather than the house. Two things you get from this: a lot more FCs become viable as they no longer NEED a house, 2. you remove the incentive to owning a house from people who are in it just for the workshop.

2. FC merge. I can see why this doesn't exist as it's too much of a headache, but at the same time it can be very simplified and will give smaller FCs a chance to merge and grow without either FC losing things by virtue of abandoning their original FCs. And suddenly from needing two houses, you also need just the one.

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Originally Posted by BillyKaplan

Two things that would be amazing -
1. breaking workshops out of housing. FCs need to be affiliated with a certain GC, I'd like to see public, instanced workshops made available to FCs that hit a certain rank, instead of tying them to houses. Make the workshop log also tied to the FC rather than the house. Two things you get from this: a lot more FCs become viable as they no longer NEED a house, 2. you remove the incentive to owning a house from people who are in it just for the workshop.

2. FC merge. I can see why this doesn't exist as it's too much of a headache, but at the same time it can be very simplified and will give smaller FCs a chance to merge and grow without either FC losing things by virtue of abandoning their original FCs. And suddenly from needing two houses, you also need just the one.

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I agree with point 1, that you should be able to have a free company workshop without housing. I don't know if that addresses the issue the OP brought up, though. If the workshop is still tied to the FC, I'm still going to hesitate to leave my FC (and lose all that work) to merge with someone else's. So the FC merge you propose would need to take workshops into account. I'm not sure of a clean way to do that, but that's a problem that needs to be solved.

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Originally Posted by Talraen

So the FC merge you propose would need to take workshops into account.

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Some things are easier than others. For instance, the construction log, and areas discovered by submarines and airships. If one FC has it, the merged FC will, too. Other things will be trickier - do you have, combined, too many airships and submarines? Are your FC chests too full? Stuff like that. Which is why I said it can be very simple - you can't merge the FCs until you have few enough vehicles. This can be selected as late as the actual merge process. "You have 5 airships. A possible 4 are allowed per fc. Please select which is to be discarded" and it's up to the the players to decide together which airship to give up on, and to strip it for parts prior to doing so.
Ultimately there won't be a situation where nothing is lost, that would be unfair to people who don't merge FCs, and will make it prone to abuse. You leave an fc, you lose something. You want to merge FCs, the end result is still a single, regular FC, so despite all your hard work, it's just not fair for you to keep two FC's worth of anything.

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Originally Posted by Vidu

On a healthy server, the housing situation actually isnt that bad - Balmung is not a healthy a server.

Besides that I'm not really sure what your concern here is?

Is it that there are only limited houses available and you're unhappy with "dead" FCs holding on to some of them?
In that case: If the FC is truely dead, if no one is using the house anymore, it will get thrown back on the market 45 days after the last time someone from that FC entered the house. Problem solved - as long as someone is till active, whats the problem?

If its the the whole "people are unwilling to merge their FCs because of houses"-thing, I'm not really sure what the problem is - and I'm also unsure how thats not a problem in other games?

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The concern is mostly with the flaw of the system, which is that it can't handle the negative case and can only work under ideal conditions. A good system should have ways to deal with the negative case, which was probably never looked at when they implemented the system to begin with.

There probably needs to be a way to elegantly move the time and financial commitment of one FC that is having it's swan song into a pool that is transferable. They are doing a lot to fix the issues of one person owning too many houses, but the core of the housing crisis is the lack of good liquidation. The current system encourages hoarding and there are people that just log on for a day or two a week keeping a sub just to make sure that housing commitment isn't put into default.

Right now I'm just hoping that the crowd coming in here going "Oh look, a balmunger is complaining about his server" don't flood out the actual message, which has nothing to do with personal grievances or with the server I'm residing on. I merely observed it on the server that is having the issues because the server I am on represents the negative case. a

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Originally Posted by Colt47

The concern is mostly with the flaw of the system, which is that it can't handle the negative case and can only work under ideal conditions. A good system should have ways to deal with the negative case, which was probably never looked at when they implemented the system to begin with.

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I am not saying by any means that the housing system is perfect, but few things are designed to work even in poor conditions. They're designed to work in normal conditions...Balmung's population isn't a normal condition.

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Originally Posted by Colt47

There probably needs to be a way to elegantly move the time and financial commitment of one FC that is having it's swan song into a pool that is transferable. They are doing a lot to fix the issues of one person owning too many houses, but the core of the housing crisis is the lack of good liquidation. The current system encourages hoarding and there are people that just log on for a day or two a week keeping a sub just to make sure that housing commitment isn't put into default.

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Nope, I still dont understand your problem - "lack of good liquidation"?
After 45 days a house will get auto-demolished while the FC-leader (or private person) is getting a refund on their gil - and yes, there should be a system in place to resell your house to the server instead of having to wait it out, but thats about it.
What would "good liquidation" be in your book?
People who are staying subbed and making sure there house isnt getting demolished are having a clear intrest in keeping that house - and at least for myself I can tell you that thats not only because I'd worry to not get my dream-plot again but also because I like the way I've decorated my house and dont want to do that again. Is it so weird that someone wants to keep something they've build up? I feel you're missing that point - people might keep houses not only because they're worried they wont get another again but also because they actually really like what they did with their house.
Of course they dont want to see their housing commitment go to waste - but that doesnt only include cmaping before a spot and snatching it but also the hours and hours they put into decorating., which you seem to miss completly. We're not having that many people "hoarding" houses anymore - we do have people holding on to houses because they want to or because those houses mean something to them.

Ideally we would get instanced housing and they said they would expand on apartments, if I recall correctly.

For FC-merges, we most likely only need a re-sell function - problem solved, 80% of gil refunded. But I doubt that many people are that attached to their gil and more to their time spend with and in the house. Gil is easy to come by, houses are cheap - I doubt anyone is against a merger because they'd lose 4, 18 or even 50 million (or rather a farction of that) by giving up their FC-house but rather because of "emotional attatchment" to the place. And thats nothing that SE can fix.

Let me ask you: what would your solution be?

...honestly, currently it seems that your problem is that people are attached to their houses - thats nothing SE can fix, because the reason for that isnt only "I got a house, cant let it go" but most likely also "I got a house, I've made this my home, I decorated it nicely, I like it - I dont wanna lose this place".

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Originally Posted by Talraen

I don't think anyone on this thread has actually addressed the point being made here yet. Which is too bad, because it's a very interesting point. And it doesn't only affect servers without available housing.
Do you have any suggestions on how to solve this problem? Because you're right, if your FC dies, you're probably going to stick with it so as not to lose the housing. It's going to be very difficult to convince two dead FCs with housing to merge into one. Maybe if there was a way to keep the stuff associated with the housing, not only furniture and such but things like FC workshop progress. I don't know how you'd merge FCs even in that case, though.

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I dont believe that housing is the only thing to consider during a merger - and specifically not with the focus on workshop and airship-progress.
There are many things to consider and most of them arent really in SEs hand or are related to ingame systems like housing:

- Who is going to be the FC-master of the new FC?
- Which FC-name is being kept? Which tag?
- Hierachie-structers can be different - how do you deal with that? Do you agree on one system or do you create a new one? Even if the two FC-masters are friends, they might have different styles of managing their FCs.
- What are the common rules on chest, FC-buffs and if you have them: garden and vessels?
- If you have different GC-affiliations: Which one do you pick?
- Is everyone actually onboard with merging? Or do you have people in your FC who'd prefer to stay smaller or maybe dont like someone from the other FC?
- ...and now for housing: Which house do you keep? Even if we untie the workshop and airship progress from it: Do you keep the medium one in the Goblet from FC A or do you settle for the small one in Shirogane that FC B got? Who is going to decorate it? The furniture isnt lost when you give up the house - the FC-leader of the FC thats being "absorbed" will get all the furniture (or maybe you even have to remove it beforehand... I'm not sure right now). You only need to agree on how to decorate the house afterwards, which is normal FC-buisness (at least if you have mutliple people caring about the look of the house)
For workshop and airship progress the answer should actually be the easiestes: you keep the FC with more progress - having an FC own two houses is obviously out of the question or we'd start seeing FCs owning multiple houses like people used to do. If you have two FCs merging and one has more progress than the other one, no one loses anything (it only gets tricky when the FCs have different kind of progress on the airship-map, for example.)

Housing, even with the workshop-progress, is only one factor in a list of difficult questions that one has to ask when merging FCs - I dont believe that "but our house!" is the only reason people dont merge, but also things like certain rights attached to their rank that they dont wanna lose, being used to a certain structur within the current FC and, specially for masters and highranking officers, a headache included in having to deal with the merger.
Even if we'd have an easy way to merge FCs by both FC-leaders hitting a "merge us, please!"-button all of those questions I've just listed would still stand and would have to be dealt with. And thats nothing SE can help anyone with or can create a system for.

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Originally Posted by Penthea

I am not saying by any means that the housing system is perfect, but few things are designed to work even in poor conditions. They're designed to work in normal conditions...Balmung's population isn't a normal condition.

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I'm not convinced the problem is the population, though. There are plenty of people to group together and do content with, just that the population is fragmented since the primary guild organization system got tied into the old housing system. There are other issues such as new players not being able to come into the server, but I'm just hoping they can get a system in that makes liquidating their extra housing more appealing. If that doesn't work the only real solution will be doing a culling of sorts.

I agree with the above poster that merging existing FCs is a complex task. If SE were to allow the merging of assets, than the two sides would likely have to merge their assets under a single account of whom the ownership would need to be determined. The truth is breaking up a long standing guild is a messy process regardless of the game since even with a single guild, there's often going to be members left floating around. If the guild worked off a communal system where funds from running people through dungeons were pooled into a central repository, the Guild Master and those in charge would have to figure out how to deal with that since technically no one person is in ownership of that fund, at least from a purely political standpoint. There were numerous tales in World of Warcraft of wealthy guild leaders running off with the treasury, usually with a name change, followed by a dozen or more angry people doing detective work to figure out where that person ran off to.

Vidu, people aren't allowing the auto demolish to happen because the amount they get from the default of the house is paltry in comparison to the sum of time and gil used in the purchase of the house. Good liquidation should not involve property value in this case because the amount of gil needed is going to change based on server and the point in time that the house went into default. The best option would be a housing token based on the size of the plot, which can be used to purchase a plot of the same size upon returning to the game. Additionally, all assets that were in the home as decorations should be permanently stored and accredited to the proper FC owner. Probably a tab that the FC owner and permitted associates have access to.

That's my own take on it, but it beats the heck out of gil.

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Originally Posted by Colt47

Vidu, people aren't allowing the auto demolish to happen because the amount they get from the default of the house is paltry in comparison to the sum of time and gil used in the purchase of the house. Good liquidation should not involve property value in this case because the amount of gil needed is going to change based on server and the point in time that the house went into default. The best option would be a housing token based on the size of the plot, which can be used to purchase a plot of the same size upon returning to the game. Additionally, all assets that were in the home as decorations should be permanently stored and accredited to the proper FC owner. Probably a tab that the FC owner and permitted associates have access to.

That's my own take on it, but it beats the heck out of gil.

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There are a few things you've got wrong here - or at least not up to date:

1) You'll always get a refund of 80% of the gil you've paid for the plot (so if you've paid the full 20 million for a premimum-class medium plot, you'll get 16 million back)
2) Prices are actually the same across all servers now

In regards to the token-system... I dont think thats a good idea, because it would require that there are always plots open of any size - with the gil-refund you could at least say "Oh well, screw this house, I'll buy something else for the money!". Same goes for housing-owners who specifally dont want a house anymore but would like to get some gil back.

If an FC-house gets demolished, that means that a whole FC didnt log in for over 45 days - that FC is dead. Whoever comes back is probably better off looking for a new FC or starting from scratch, but thats a personal opinion, obviously.

I agree that furniture and gil should be stored permanently and not only for 30 days after demolition, but thats about it.

I dont think a token-system would work better than the gil-refund, because it would limit you to actually only get that one plotsize back, while gil would allow you to do whatever you want (thats why I prefer cash over giftcards as gift! ...but I disgress)
You'll lose 20% of what you paid, but honestly: Gil is so, so easy to come by. For small plots the 20% are barely noticeable - and if you've made 50 million (max amount you can pay for a mansion currently), you can make 10 million to make up for the loss.
Gil is easy to earn but hard to spend in this game - the only real concern would time invested in making the house and FC a home. And thats nothing SE can compensate for.

There is no real incentive to merge 2 small fc if both have housing... you don't gain anything really from having more people other than more gc seals and more chat to sift through... in fact with limited gardening space and such it could be detrimental...

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Originally Posted by Okamimaru

There is no real incentive to merge 2 small fc if both have housing... you don't gain anything really from having more people other than more gc seals and more chat to sift through... in fact with limited gardening space and such it could be detrimental...

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Couldn’t agree more. I wish there were actual options for merging smalls like that, and obviously benefits. Hell I wish we had more content for FC’s in general, outside of crafting something together in the workshop and going to diadem they offer nothing to FC’s to do together.

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Originally Posted by BreyVoreas93

Couldn’t agree more. I wish there were actual options for merging smalls like that, and obviously benefits. Hell I wish we had more content for FC’s in general, outside of crafting something together in the workshop and going to diadem they offer nothing to FC’s to do together.

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Not going to lie I'd love it if FC's could share housing. Or if one FC could 'rent' out the house to another and have them share the facilities until the other FC can secure their own. Or just FC alliances in general...

Did they add the "Everyone gets 1" House thing yet?
Meaning, 1 PER SERVER at the very least...