Full disclosure: I have a house. A rinky-dink small plot in the Goblet. It was one of the least desired plots in the least popular housing area, and I stayed up through the night to snag it when personal housing opened up during Stormblood's run.
That said: I'm fairly certain Square painted themselves in a corner when they made the housing system. As I read on another thread, the idea of neighborhood wards instead of instanced housing like other MMOs came about because Square didn't have much faith in 2.0's release, going off of 1.0's poor reception and tiny playerbase. This wound up biting them in the butt when 2.0 took off and became a potential WoW-killer, but now they have hundreds of thousands of potential homeowners, and not enough plots to accommodate.
Another issue is what resources Square has available to them at a given time to work on FFXIV. Fixing the housing situation would require a massive overhaul, the likes of which would be on not a dissimilar scale to the change from 1.0 to 2.0. Now, imagine for the sake of this discussion: Square allocated the FFXIV team 100 million yen for the fiscal quarter to work on the game. What would be a better way to use that money? Performing the overhaul for the housing system would take almost all of that money. On the other hand, that money could be used to add more content to the game in other areas: more dungeons, more raids, seasonal and crossover events, costumes on the Mogstation, story content. Ultimately, the housing system will have to take a back seat to stuff that would affect and enrich more players.
In the end, I don't really think there's a hell of a lot Square can do about the housing system, so my best suggestion would be to get an apartment and relax.
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09-03-2019, 04:58 AMKayRadleyHonestly, I'm not sure the housing system can be adequately fixed
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09-03-2019, 06:20 AMArrhin
I think they should just add on to, and expand the apartment system. Give some more space, maybe a little more interesting architecture inside, and a balcony that can be used for outdoor type furnishings and gardens. Allow for a local mailbox and the ability to tp right into it if desired, heck, make a nice big, whatever style apartment that can be used as FC headquarters. I mean the open world stuff will still be most desired but if they could replicate that experience as much as possible in the apartments it could go a long way.
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09-03-2019, 07:08 AMFeronar
I think adding instanced rural housing might work. Each instance would be a private piece of land with only 1 housing plot on it by itself surrounded by wilderness, rather than other houses. I don't think it would take much more effort than the current apartment system, and it would also cause less server load than the wards, since each house would only need to be loaded when a player is present, as opposed to the wards which have to be loaded 24/7. This system, like the apartments, could be implemented on top of the currently existing ward system, which would continue to work as before.
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09-03-2019, 09:56 AMJojoya
We know they are working on housing issues, so it's not neglected in the budget. Changes just aren't happening fast enough to satisfy the players who wanted to buy a house yesterday.
We need to stay patient while keeping the discussion going in constructive fashion instead of using "you suck, do this or I quit!" ultimatums. That will never get a good response. -
09-03-2019, 11:11 AMRufalusIt sort of worked in the beginning, it was just made with different intent than what players have come to expect and demand from it. It was viewed as more of a luxury than a need, with exorbitant plot prices out of most people's reach. Plots of all sizes remained unsold and available week after week (most worlds) while people saved diligently. If you wanted house access you just joined one of the FCs that owned one and that's housing working as intended. A little fluff side thing.Quote:
Originally Posted by KayRadley
The high volume of complaints started when personal housing was added to the game later on, sharing the same wards as FCs rather than being built on a new separate system as had previously been indicated. Now just owning an instanced private room inside an FC estate wasn't enough for people and they coveted their own land, but the old neighborhood ward system couldn't support such demand.
I think it's not just big growth of the playerbase that took s-e by surprise but also the percentage of those players who NEED personal plots rather than players just seeing it as an option alongside FC rooms, apartments, tenancy sharing plots, inn rooms. They might've begun with something more scalable if they had that hindsight. -
09-03-2019, 11:30 AMBig_BapAmen, you should post more often in here.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rufalus
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09-03-2019, 02:29 PMShurrikhanThen what about at least making Apartments compelling?Quote:
Originally Posted by KayRadley
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09-03-2019, 03:36 PMEternalAmbrosia
I have never owned an apartment in FFXIV, I've always wanted a house (I own one now, thanks to paying for a server transfer...). People say settle for apartments but houses are a thing and they are multi-leveled with a yard and garden capabilities as well as mail, etc and you have the ability to be a tenant in your partner's house to design it together.
I would prefer to see instance housing being an option for those who don't want an apartment.
I really don't think they'd scrap housing over apartments, but I could see apartments being more appealing if they have an outdoor garden with a cute balcony or even windowsill gardens. I'd also be inclined to get an apartment if they came in sizes similar to houses, not just one room... and have the ability to co-own an apartment with a spouse or couple of friends (It's fun to design a house together). -
09-04-2019, 06:22 AMBig_BapCompelling?Quote:
Originally Posted by Shurrikhan
They are permanent.
They cost 16-20x less than a small house on your server when housing was released. If you were not around for that, small houses didn't even have a basement.
Some people just want to have it all... -
09-04-2019, 08:52 AMAlyanna_Elingval
SE made two mistakes that really messed up their housing market and will be hard to fix without completely overhauling the system.
1) They didn't have rules in place to limit purchases to one private and one FC house from the start. People should never been allowed to buy multiple private or FC houses.
2) This was probably the worst mistake they made. They drastically lowered the costs of houses across the board. They significantly increased the demand by doing this, while not creating equivalent supply.
There's really no way to unring that bell, and housing doesn't negatively affect enough people for SE to devote the resources to completely overhauling it or creating something like instanced housing. -
09-04-2019, 09:00 AMEdaxEspecially MewQuote:
Originally Posted by Big_Bap
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09-04-2019, 11:15 AMBig_BapI should have specified, we actually do what has to be done to get where we are. Others don't. Glad to see you're still unable to reply to a whole post ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Edax
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09-04-2019, 02:24 PMBesameJust looks at you and chuckles...Quote:
Originally Posted by Big_Bap
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09-04-2019, 02:26 PMBesame
My little apt is pretty cute and cozy. It's in the Mist and I only have the wind chimes track set so I can hear the waves crashing in the background.
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09-04-2019, 05:53 PMShurrikhanExcept, what about when the price has nothing at all to do with whether or not they are compelling? What about when people want more than a re-titled FC Room, or, even worse, want some sense of community that comes from neighboring houses (and even arguably different rooms in the same FC) but not from apartments?Quote:
Originally Posted by Big_Bap
Edit/Further: I bought an apartment so I could easily teleport to a friends' FC house. I've scarcely been inside or decorated it because it provides none of the things I'd actually look for in purchasing a space. As a mere room, I like the Kugane or Gridania inns at least as much as anything I could make for myself.
So, why didn't I just buy a house instead? Because there were none left. Why not an FC Room? Because I was in a different FC at the time, and this version of a FC room wouldn't self-destruct upon departure. -
09-08-2019, 11:41 AMKayRadleyCompared to the alternative I faced, which was a big fat load of "nothing" in terms of housing, that sounds fairly compelling to me.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shurrikhan
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09-08-2019, 07:05 PMEnla
I still don't get why they don't allow us to upgrade apartments. It'd provide a stable gil-sink to a game that desperately needs it, and would allow people to actually have a shot at owning something larger than a dinky little room. Plus I can't imagine apartments would be more stressful on the servers than adding new wards to meet demand, since you don't have to keep the instance active unless someone is using it. We don't even need like mansion sized rooms either. You can make something about the size of a medium, maybe give it it's own layout that's slightly smaller to still entice people to buy a proper plot, and people would be happier than clams just to have the extra space.
As for all the amenities that housing provides like gardening and so on, why not just make access to instances like a communal gardening plot part of said gil-sink? For like 200k you get full access to a roof-top communal area where you can plant in a 3x3 plot. Or, SE could actually give us 3x1 window-sill planters so people without yards at least have a shot at crossbreeding?
I don't know there's literally a solution staring SE right in the face that requires fairly minimal resources compared to many of the alternatives - barring the 'do nothing' alternative they've been going with for years, and yet they still refuse to take it. I know they're really enamored with the idea of wards but I honestly can't think of a single ward I've housed/been with a guild in that wasn't deader than a doorknob. The /one/ time I was in a fairly active ward was when an old FC I was with had the good fortune to be housed next to another active FC that stood by the marketboard enough for us to interact. But I'd hardly call that an 'active ward' so much as an active /part/ of the ward. The rest was dead. Maybe things are different on the JP servers? -
09-08-2019, 07:32 PMMrThinkerThey said its in the pipeline. We just don't know WHERE and WHEN in the pipeline it is.Quote:
Originally Posted by Enla
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09-09-2019, 01:04 AMBig_BapIf houses still had their original price tags, they wouldn't be as compelling as they are today. It's quite simple to understand the correlation so I don't know why you're struggling with the concept.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shurrikhan
Apartments are not re-titled FC rooms darling, they are the exact same thing you were getting for a small house back in the days, minus the exterior. If you think 20 outdoor furnishing slots justified the insanely large gil chasm for what small houses used to be and the apartments we now have, you cannot be helped.
Your feelings towards being part of a community are meaningless as housing was never meant to be accessible to all. You want to have neighbors? Work for it. You have 0 excuses for not already owning a house considering you've been around since 2011. -
09-09-2019, 06:12 AMShurrikhanI'm not struggling with the concept, though it seems you might be.Quote:
Originally Posted by Big_Bap
The price tag is irrelevant when there are none left.
And, again... I've owned a small house before I transferred. Heck, I've owned a medium. I've of course owned an FC room. I now own an apartment. The FC room, if not a simple inn room, is by far the closest in feel to the apartment. -
09-09-2019, 06:33 AMBig_BapSorry to burst your bubble, but there are empty plots on your server at this very moment. There is also thousands of plots available on sight on other servers. Not to mention that you're capable of acquiring any FC house out there.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shurrikhan
Houses are cheap and apartments are even cheaper despite having the same square footage of a small house in 2.1.
You actually got a laugh out of me with that last part as you make it sound like you are repeating information when in fact, it is the first time you even talk about it. Are you sure you are okay? You've been around long enough, transferring to another server is no excuse. Doubt anyone was holding you at gunpoint as you were selecting your destination world on the Mogstation.
Edit: :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shurrikhan
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09-10-2019, 08:05 AMEnlaHonestly I'm just glad to know it's on their radar after brushing the issue aside for so long.Quote:
Originally Posted by MrThinker