Just Another Housing Thread

I made a ranty video about this, which will be linked below, but ultimately it boils down to this:
I logged in 40 minutes after the servers went live, no Mediums or Larges left anywhere on Mateus. Square keeps trying to add more wards, thinking it'll band-aid the problem, but in reality it just exasperates it.

People don't buy smalls because they want smalls, and it shows in the number of relocations on Mateus that were individual houses and not FC, which was supposed to be the point of the new wards. They need to fix the housing system before they try adding anymore wards.

They need to find a way to combat house flipping (yes, it's still a problem).

I've a few thoughts, but most of them would probably hurt more than help (tax system, restricitons on larges, etc.)

Anyone else got ideas on how to improve the housing system?

Housing Rant Video

Yeah, jack the prices up to what they used to be or even more, ideally, and you'll see all the problems go away.

*whispers*

Instanced housing.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lacan

*whispers*

Instanced housing.

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*shouts loudly*

INSTANCED HOUSING!

yeah, match the prices from reddit selling Housing Forum 500m for a big one.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DraikTempest

*shouts loudly*

INSTANCED HOUSING!

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It's literally the only solution. But they won't or don't want to.

Maybe one day, we can get a clear and strong housing message across to the developers but all they see are little threads, with exploitable solutions (such as lottery, auctions, raffles).
It's like having a gathering of 100,000 people and there are 10 people spread out all banging a toy drum.

yeah, match the prices from reddit selling Housing Forum 500m for a big one. https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXIVhousingmarket/

How to stop house flipping.

A. DISABLE TRANSFERS BEFORE THE TIMER IS OVER. If SE wants to stop house flippers and not just limit their pool of potential buyers, this is a necessity. The random timer might stop you from selling a plot to a first time buyer but not to someone looking to relocate or upgrade to a bigger plot.

B. Actually I'm not sure what to do for people selling FCs. Because I don't know of a way to limit FC sellers that wouldn't be a hinder on FCs where say, the actual leader is leaving the game and wants to pass on the torch.

I'm on lamia and in less than 5 minutes of game going back up. all large houses were bought by either a personal house or a 1 person fc. My fc had 5 people trying to get. Square u messed this one up by allowing personal house transfers. Should have only allowed FCs to buy for 2 days.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DraikTempest

*shouts loudly*

INSTANCED HOUSING!

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*Cries*


Instanced houses, for the love of God please. Please.



/Weep


Not just for availability but for the bigger better features they can provide too, like easier to make back drops, higher customization, and much higher freedom to improve the system (larger houses, larger plots)- stuff that we don't need to kill or exclude Ward users to do either (detailed in other posts).



That and allowing everyone into housing adds further value into improving housing, both for the company in making features and for our own player base as more people buy and partake (as Wildstar and other pocket world housing games showed the community doesn't die, and in some cases is even bigger then, with the more powerful freedom).


Twelve give me strength XD.

Would be neat if they gave instanced housing via the Ishgard restoration stuff, instead of more housing wards. It would be a way to add a new housing type to the game while keepoing the old system in tact if they don't want to get rid of wards.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shougun

*Cries*


Instanced houses, for the love of God please. Please.



/Weep


Not just for availability but for the bigger better features they can provide too, like easier to make back drops, higher customization, and much higher freedom to improve the system (larger houses, larger plots)- stuff that we don't need to kill or exclude Ward users to do either (detailed in other posts).



That and allowing everyone into housing adds further value into improving housing, both for the company in making features and for our own player base as more people buy and partake (as Wildstar and other pocket world housing games showed the community doesn't die, and in some cases is even bigger then, with the more powerful freedom).


Twelve give me strength XD.

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Additional idea: FC Wards.

• Expands on FC utility
• FCs incentivized to increase size to get more houses.
• Potentially allow rank to effect house size (maybe? It'd be abusable.)
• Still costs a dalamund sized pile of gil for the FC and the plots.

Additional additional idea: Paid housing

• Server issue isn't a problem, money pays for servers.
• Houses have real world value and thus players find them more valuable.
• Flipping becomes less common
• More interesting housing options.

The problem with the second one is it assigning real money to the value of houses make it more vicious if housing is still limited. It would also likely encourage RMT, which would also be bad.

Yes the developers need to take a hard look at this. I too logged into an 800 person que at server launch to find the house already bought. Very disappointed given the effort to gather up to purchase a large estate

Why are people so surprised they couldn't get the plots they wanted? Just 5 minutes research would have told them how likely their chances were beforehand. Nothing happened any differently this time around then last, which is no surprise given that the patch notes did not state anything would be different.

Would you rather have a system that allows you to get a large then not have a large? Yes? Well we already know about that. My friends and I have been playing since january and not a week has gone by without people asking for that. Nothing has changed other then that a few more people have large plots today than yesterday.

If you really want a large plot suck it up and work with the system we have. My small FC and I stayed up and watched anime till 3:00am. Logged in immediately, and obtained all the plots we wanted.(4 smalls, 2 mediums in a contiguous section of myst). There was zero competition in the ward. Only one large plot was taken a little after we got the ones we wanted. When we logged out to go to bed there were still two large plots available in the ward.

Was this witchcraft? No, it was simple. We don't play on an overcrowded world. If you wanted a large you could have had one. Just transfer to a less crowded world next time. We play on Marlboro. There is always a small available somewhere and occasionally I have seen mediums available.

Don't want to transfer? Don't expect a large. You can't change SE's implementation of housing, but you can change your expectations. You might be happier if you did.

BTW the wards are a lot better then instanced housing in other games. Being able to form a neighborhood with your friends, tend each others plants, and put up obnoxious garden ornaments to annoy the neighbours is fun. We were all in the same ward previous to this, but we weren't able to get plots next to each other, and wanted to upgrade a couple to mediums (to increase our gardening yields). So we saved up gill, made a plan, and implemented it when the new wards dropped. No problems arose.

I stated this in a thread only yesterday where some people were actually defending/ignoring the current housing problems:

FFXIV is my favorite MMO ever. I'm a huge fan of it and Squeenix. But even I can see how utterly crap the housing system is. It's the worst system I've ever had to deal with in any MMO. When you're so damn blinded that you're actually defending the need to stand at a sign and click it 4 or 5 times in a repeated sequence for a random amount of time that could total 20 real life hours with the extremely high possibility of losing it anyway thanks to botters and macro users, then it may be time to reflect on your priorities.

This is a Bad. System. And we all have a right to complain about it with the very, very tiny sliver of hope that we will be heard.

Now to actually add to the conversation - I give a suggestion. One of the biggest reasons why this is such a problem is due to the desire to have "permanent" residences in world. Apartments help this, however as we all know - they are immensely inferior to actual houses. So I propose they simply make instanced houses. Have it cost more than an apartment while having all the amenities of a small house: Outside area, basement, etc. The "permanent" houses will still be in high demand due to being persistent and in world. Instanced housing will leave you secluded, while persistent will have you in a player created neighborhood.

I feel this suggestion would be a win-win for everyone looking to enjoy housing. "But how would outside work?" Take a look at Elder Scrolls Online's housing system - which I gotta say is leagues better than ours. While there aren't any player neighborhoods, everyone has the ability to have their own instanced housing and it opens up to some extremely huge housing instances - from a simple walled in cottage to a gigantic island. If we had something similar as an option, we would not be having this conversation right now.

Oh and to add - right this very moment? I'm living that life. Standing there spamming keys over and over just to try to get a plot of land that will randomly become available within 20 hours in the hope that I'll get it and not anyone else that may stumble across it. Can't even enjoy the new content *sigh*

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DraikTempest

I made a ranty video about this, which will be linked below, but ultimately it boils down to this:
I logged in 40 minutes after the servers went live,

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I stopped reading there(and certainly wont waste any time watching your video complaining about this). I cant take you seriously if you thought you were going to get a medium or large house 40 minutes after the servers went up. They added 3 wards, not 30. Thats 72 total large houses spread out over the 4 districts and 144 mediums, if i remember my distributions right. There are certainly more then 216 FCs on your server that wanted an upgrade(some of whom certainly got one), even if they had a way to allow only FCs to transfer and not individual players.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Frizze

I stopped reading there(and certainly wont waste any time watching your video complaining about this). I cant take you seriously if you thought you were going to get a medium or large house 40 minutes after the servers went up. They added 3 wards, not 30. Thats 72 total large houses spread out over the 4 districts and 144 mediums, if i remember my distributions right. There are certainly more then 216 FCs on your server that wanted an upgrade(some of whom certainly got one), even if they had a way to allow only FCs to transfer and not individual players.

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Exactly I can understand that FCs feel frustrated but at the same time instead of loosing it to solo people (that still also had to get lucky like them) they would have lost it to another FC. Its the problem with having something so limited so stop going after solo people that simply want to use the content ingame too and should not be restricted in size and complain to the ones that did this which are SE.

They could have gone instanced for personal (I would swap my big personal one in a heartbeat for that) with large houses for everyone that could afford it and then have wards for FC which then have normal small plots but with magical houses that can appear bigger on the inside, so that each FC can choose their size.

But they choose to not do that and have now done it a second time with allowing solo people to relocate. So in their eyes that is fine.

And I agree with you Frizze: Even without solo people 40 minutes after the servers went live is always too late, especially on big servers.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ctcc42

Don't want to transfer? Don't expect a large. You can't change SE's implementation of housing, but you can change your expectations. You might be happier if you did.

BTW the wards are a lot better then instanced housing in other games. Being able to form a neighborhood with your friends, tend each others plants, and put up obnoxious garden ornaments to annoy the neighbours is fun. We were all in the same ward previous to this, but we weren't able to get plots next to each other, and wanted to upgrade a couple to mediums (to increase our gardening yields). So we saved up gill, made a plan, and implemented it when the new wards dropped. No problems arose.

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by Frizze

I stopped reading there(and certainly wont waste any time watching your video complaining about this). I cant take you seriously if you thought you were going to get a medium or large house 40 minutes after the servers went up. They added 3 wards, not 30. Thats 72 total large houses spread out over the 4 districts and 144 mediums, if i remember my distributions right. There are certainly more then 216 FCs on your server that wanted an upgrade(some of whom certainly got one), even if they had a way to allow only FCs to transfer and not individual players.

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Admittedly, my problems are occuring on Mateus and I likely should have guessed that the majority of free companies on Mateus would have been up early to get a large or a medium, you're right.

Except most of the mediums and larges went to singular individuals. I got my house, it's a small, and I'll be using it till I can upgrade it in the future, but that doesn't negate how bad the system currently is. Before patch happened, I wanted to turn my Medium into the FC place and get a small for my own use, but I couldn't. I wanted to get a house before the update, but the timers stopped me because I had other things to do.

The housing system doesn't respect a player's time investment or outside commitments. I put forth a suggestion of FC wards because I suspect it'd be a nice middle ground. Make the areas smaller, maybe even a seperate thematically appropriate area. Make it unbelievably expensive, enough that people have to actually have to work together to get it. And give FCs another lever for recruitment.

But no, I am clearly incapable of making a plan to log in at the correct time (I got distracted by shiny objects) and am unwilling to transfer to another server because I've made friends and people know me here.

Also, I'd bet real world money that at least a quarter of the mediums and larges bought on Mateus are scalpers and the property will change over within the week.

What's wrong with SE? Why they can't just add more wards to give enough houses for places? And wth is that timer? And wth is that "moratorium for individuals"?

The housing system isn't perfect, which is something we can all agree on. However, let me just make it clear that FC's have every advantage over the individuals who are going for the house.

1. FC's require you to have four people. That's 3 more people that can potentially help the FC get a plot. Obviously 3 extra people isn't that much in the grand scheme of things, but it's still something. Now, let's just be generous/conservative and say that the average FC has 10-15 players who are active. That's 10-15 players that could help you get a house. Where are they?

2. If you have an FC, are people putting in their weight for the house? Or are they just on the bench swinging their legs yelling "WHERES MY HOUSE BABYRAGE?!". If you're a pretty substantial FC, you could collectively work together to just buy the plot off someone.

3. People rage about individuals getting houses but you do realize that that individual has to work twice or maybe thrice as hard as an FC does. They earn the gil on their own, they're stuck in queue just like everyone else, and it's them vs. x amount of FC members.

Mathematically, housing purchases favor the FCs. The only issue is that whoever's FC didn't get a house is mad because, well, they didn't get one. In the grand scheme of things, it worked out the way it was intended for other FCs.