Let's Fix Housing!

Hi everyone!

Rigth now there's a lot of complaints about the housing system and i'm one of those who would change it for the better. If you need convincing, I suggest you go see Zepla's video on the subject on Youtube.

But instead of complaining, let's find ideas to improove the system!

Up to now the idea i like the most is a raffle where people put their names on a list and after a certain amount of time, a random winner get designed. Tere also could be a downpayment to make sure you can afford the house to enter the raffle (would be given back to the player if they loose the raffle)

Let's make this a more enjoyable experience for everyone!

The only thing that is going to improve the system is to have a system that allows every player who wants a house to buy one. Anything else is going to leave players upset when they can't get a house.

The wards were a nice idea that have not worked out in practice with the expanding active player population. We need the instanced housing system to be expanded to include plots, not just apartments.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ate-of-Housing This thread had basically the same idea. I agree that adding instanced housing (with the same features) IN ADDITION TO the existing housing would be the best way to fix the system, as some people don't really care about the neighborhood feel and just want to have their own thing to design.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

The wards were a nice idea that have not worked out in practice with the expanding active player population. We need the instanced housing system to be expanded to include plots, not just apartments.

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I would think a small residential street instance in each of the hub cities, that has 3-5 houses in it. Could even offer the option of which size to buy, and be able to renovate to a larger house for the difference in cost of each type. Would allow people to get into housing a bit earlier, and be able to get a larger house. Could even have it so that other people can come visit who don't live on that street, similar to the way you can go ward to ward. Still limit it to 1 house per server per account of course.

I got the gasoline just need someone to bring the matches!

You do realize we have a Housing forum, yes? True, it's a bloody dumpster fire, but that's the place for discussions like this.

yes please do not start yet another thread about the same subject. make your voices loud on the existing threads that already exists. muddying up the pool with tiny threads that go nowhere are useless in the eyes of the people who look over the forums for topics to send to the devs.

A raffle just shifts the RNG from one place to another. It doesn't solve anything. I really wish people would stop bringing that one up, it's terrible. Instanced housing would honestly be the only way to give everyone a house with the current limitations in place.

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Originally Posted by Vahlnir

A raffle just shifts the RNG from one place to another. It doesn't solve anything. I really wish people would stop bringing that one up, it's terrible. Instanced housing would honestly be the only way to give everyone a house with the current limitations in place.

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Also, I don't think the people who keep bringing up this idea realize that they will be going up against way more people on their server in that kind of system than the system in place now. The RNG would be even worse.

I just wish SE would add instanced housing (I'm still hoping they do this for Ishgard, but know they won't) in addition to the wards. Or make apartments larger with the ability to have an instanced outside area.

And make workshops not tied to FC houses only if they aren't going to make it so every FC can have a house.

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Originally Posted by Arillyn

Also, I don't think the people who keep bringing up this idea realize that they will be going up against way more people on their server in that kind of system than the system in place now. The RNG would be even worse.

I just wish SE would add instanced housing (I'm still hoping they do this for Ishgard, but know they won't) in addition to the wards. Or make apartments larger with the ability to have an instanced outside area.

And make workshops not tied to FC houses only if they aren't going to make it so every FC can have a house.

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They did give me that instanced housing feel in The Firmament whenever I started doing the post restoration quests. I think it's a possibility. Unlikely, but still possible.

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Originally Posted by Vahlnir

They did give me that instanced housing feel in The Firmament whenever I started doing the post restoration quests. I think it's a possibility. Unlikely, but still possible.

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I am hoping so for the same reasons, I can see them doing that. It would be amazing if they did so that anyone who wants a house can have one. I guess we'll have to wait and see though.

My personal opinion is that there's no way to "improve" the current system without an overhaul or addition of a different system.
Raffles and waiting lists are bandaids to a problem that amounts to a lack of control when it comes to a feature designed around the idea of player expression.

My money-is-no-object, ideal version of housing would be something like, honestly kind of like the ishgardian restoration now that I think about it, but less server-based and more fc based. With a Hub housing area that takes the place of the giant apartment building, player houses that can be added dynamically as needed, and a progression-based philosophy with interacting with the ward (not just decorate and done)

So 1, you need an FC to participate (in this system at least)
2, this is an instanced system (one housing instance system per fc, browse fc wards through a directory I guess.)
and 3, you would not be able to participate in the current system AND this system, but this system would probably allow you to have alts with houses.

The hub:
It should cost a pretty penny (I would say more than a top tier large house), and maybe a truckload of fc credits to be able to enter the system, but when you do, you get a sizeable chunk of land where you can place a small house (with a workshop behind it with airships and subs visible).

This is where the process of getting your members their houses starts. The hub area can be built up by depositing materials that can be crafted or bought with gc seals/tomes. (basically play the game and get rewarded with tangible rewards) Upgrading the hub area will alternate increasing workshop size/effeciency, increasing garden size limit/efficiency, house size (From small, to medium, to mansion, to GIGAMANSION making it be the centerpiece of the ward), and (if your FC meets the roster check) opening up the ability to clear away some rubble/brush/stone/what-have-you that is surrounding the hub area so that you can unlock additional, personal, housing plots for the members of the FC.

Maybe have some furnature that can only be used in hub houses like the aetherial wheel, the fc chests and some other buff-giving items so that people will frequent the main building for utility purposes more than just "hey that's some decoration, ok time to go afk elsewhere"

Land unlocking events:
When you get the ability to unlock a plot you will need X amount of people to start "clearing" the area. (Say, get 4 people together to start interacting with the spot, once everyone is ineracting with it, an obstruction is cleared. basically an immersive ready check)

Once the initial clearing has finished an event will start in that area, moving non-participants outside the zone and locking participants inside (think a dungeon wall). This event can be anywhere from a simple guild-hest or FATE level monster encounter where you have to clear a simple monster kill threshold to deem the area safe, to a treasure dungeon boss / eureka NM level of difficulty boss, to something silly like the valentione's event moogle matching game.

Once the event is cleared, a cutscene will play where the FC mammets will rush in and hastilly clear out the remaining blockadges, revealing a fresh area for housing. (during this cutscene the participants will be teleported safely outside the area to avoid any issues with getting stuck, and nonparticipants will see the mammets rushing in and creating a huge dust cloud while the plot(s) load in).

I don't really care how many plots this event would open up lol. It could be one event per plot or per small neighborhood (for this system to work the map has to be fairly modular, so clustering houses into neat neighborhoods is advisable), or it could scale on difficulty where easy kill x of y events would unlock one house, puzzle events could unlock a small cluster, and big bads could unlock the neighborhood, and just have the game pick at (semi) random which unlock severity you'll get. (no wait I like this one. It adds some spice!)


Player houses:
All plots identically sized, can be invested in to progress from small to mansion. (I'd say the yard will grow with the house by clearing some decorative rubble/shrubery/stonework/etc instead of having the decoratable lawnspace shrink as your house grows) Progression line will be cheaper than the hub house, but still pretty costly to give people something to work towards.

Considering population:
This FC ward would probably have to be broken up into separate wards or loading sections to be playable. (god, FCs can be huge) Something like, what, 8 wards (with 8 subdivisions), with 32 housing slots in each? I mean already that's a lot of houses compared to what we have now.. (NO! PIE IN THE SKY! AIN'T NOTHIN' HOLDING ME BACK) I think that should probably be acceptably navigatable through aethernet shards and loading lines at the east (next ward), west (previous ward), north (hub and option to change to subdivision). Especially if we can name the subdivisions.. yeah...

But that's like the biggest of the biggest FCs, I don't think most FCs would need that much space. I'm thinking of the average FC maybe needing 1 ward for everyone who are intent on progressing housing. The demo timer would still be a thing, and maybe you would get the option to... send the plot back to nature.. (to put it nicely) if you don't have enough active members to fill the plot. And since the houses would all have the same options for customization it would probably be really easy to just copy and paste the whole house, interior and all, into a new spot if someone wanted to move their house, so ward cleanup and reorganizing wouldn't be too bad of a hit if you happen to need to condense your population into fewer wards.



Yeah Idk , I REALLY like the idea of being able to literally create a community with my FC and watching things grow as everyone expresses their creativity.

My more down to earth idea for a better housing system is to modify the wards (more realistically, design new, but similar wards) so that every plot can potentially be the same size (aka, you can have a small, medium, or large house on any given plot, you just have to put down the chunk of money you can afford to get the size house you want), so we get rid of the damn hoarded small house shuffle scramble. (People buying small houses, not because they want that house to decorate, but so they can bypass the purchase timer and FC restriction when new wards open up with larger, more desireable, plots are available) And invest in some of that sweet sweet dynamic server scaling technology that a bunch of other games use for similar systems, so that when one ward fills a new one opens up for purchase.

Or or or, Sea of clouds housing! Where there are no neighborhoods, you've just got a plot of land (scaleable from small to mansion of course) on a floating rock somewhere out in the sky. It's just you. Probably have a directory to individual plots (searchable by name) at an airship dock. Would be able to change the ground texture to be grass, or snow, or sand, or whatever texture the devs allow us to have really, and no I didn't copy WildStar's housing in the sky™ design what are you talking about? Totally original pls do steal.

1) Indoor gardening plots which allow cross breeding. Maybe like 4 plant spaces in a square formation.

2) Raise housing prices to cut the competition.

3) Bigger apartments which cost the same as small houses.

4) Allow alt characters to be added to the friends list so that they can be made tenants.

Emotionally would love to drop a second dalamud on housing. (I've only two items in the game where I'm so dramatic :P, please don't read as I think the game is terrible or something- the game is very good and even in housing itself I think the objects are really nice, I just think the housing system itself was not a great choice for the style of game and sheer audience scale it caters to).

Practically speaking I just want a system that enhances the current housing system AND allows for everyone to have a house that wants one and at the same time remove many chains of the current system and allowing a lot more creativity / freedom (by making wards a sort of physical PO box, but the interior and a magical personal exterior space being universally available to all players to something akin to Wild Star). I'd love to see more features and a more constant growth of the system with you as a sort of second character-lite, and I don't want to see anyone left out because they got the wrong type of content (no 'sorry ward users' or 'sorry FC / instanced users, can't have basement' or whatever).

On a far more compromising level I think airships inspired by a node based system, where much of the decoration is just options over manual placement (level 2 highwind, slot 2 equipped with a furnace room and Ul'dah Syndicate decoration package), I think could also work really well without actually damaging current housing users (as I think giving current players, who enjoy the wards, the middle finger is not most optimal- here obviously ward users could enjoy both and those who only have one would get access to the missing features via the airship). Of course pure customize housing based airship would be very cool and I'm not arguing against that, but I meant a node based system would be a lot more memory friendly which also might come with the added benefit of being easy to quickly summon without frying the servers so they might give us a world map or something and I'd squeeee for that. As I love the FF world map vibe. For the slotting one might imagine some sRPG with homesteads, like Assassins Creed, or Skyrim where you've segments with options within, that sort of equipment slotting can reduce memory consumption (if you pick a style then it decorates for you, so you can customize but also doesn't take loads of server transfering to know what it needs to do, also might be a nice choice for those who want a fancy home but are terrible / not wanting to spend time decorating), vs more customize housing which needs many many slots, some creativity lol, and needs to remember the exact position of each one of those pieces (not just what but where).

EQ2's housing is perfect. You see a neighborhood, but there are multiple instances of the house/apartment when you click ont he door. SE always just says they can't do it cause of data load or code or something, so I've given up on getting a house.

IMO the best solution to the people crying about not being able to get a house would be to release a new housing zone in sea of clouds where every house is instanced on its own little floating island as a majority of the complainers I see want their home in its own instanced little world with no neighbors.

I also feel like Ishgard should be opened as a housing area as well but have a system based on crafting that requires players to actually build their home after earning a space to put it on. Then add that only contributions on your own server count for it because I'm tired of login queues caused by visitors essentially parking in my driveway... >.>

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Originally Posted by RitsukoSonoda

IMO the best solution to the people crying about not being able to get a house would be to release a new housing zone in sea of clouds where every house is instanced on its own little floating island as a majority of the complainers I see want their home in its own instanced little world with no neighbors.

I also feel like Ishgard should be opened as a housing area as well but have a system based on crafting that requires players to actually build their home after earning a space to put it on. Then add that only contributions on your own server count for it because I'm tired of login queues caused by visitors essentially parking in my driveway... >.>

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The solution to people "Crying" about losing "Bidding" wars to bots. Is to add more wards, or more housing. I don't agree with the raffle system either, the RNG would just be ridiculous. They need to add more housing. That's all there is to it. I love the Neighbourhood feel to Residential areas so I wouldn't want instance only housing, just wouldn't feel right.

It sucks though, wasting 4 days of your life trying to out click bots. Yeah, real fun. Nothing quite like spending sleepless nights in the hopes that MAYBE you might get it, only to watch a random person spawn in, click it and somehow get it before you.

I agree with the last part though. The random people who join servers just to sit and AFK in places like Limsa 24/7 is just stupid..Famfrit has an issue with that lol. But doesn't really affect housing.

The only thing that is going to fix the housing system is completely removing it and rebuilding it from the ground up.

First let’s destroy all FC homes that are blatantly inactive since I saw literally hundreds of them with 1-3 members and share the same last name as their neighbor suspiciously. Or ya know just wait for the suspension to be up since Auto demolish hasn’t been active for 5 months and before that several more due to japan’s natural disasters like Earthquakes. When it’s up for a month then we can analyze

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Originally Posted by Jirah

First let’s destroy all FC homes that are blatantly inactive since I saw literally hundreds of them with 1-3 members and share the same last name as their neighbor suspiciously. Or ya know just wait for the suspension to be up since Auto demolish hasn’t been active for 5 months and before that several more due to japan’s natural disasters like Earthquakes. When it’s up for a month then we can analyze

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Was it not turned back on after the newest patch? I've seen three houses go up for sale in Famfrit today and last night, so I just assumed it was back on again.

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Originally Posted by Kymeowma

Was it not turned back on after the newest patch? I've seen three houses go up for sale in Famfrit today and last night, so I just assumed it was back on again.

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There have been no announcements from SE officially, and they always let people know well in advance when the timer is going to be reimplemented.

I just want the inside housing item limit to be increased. 200 for a small just isn't enough honestly. 250 would be around a sweet spot or 270. All of these new items are added, great and all but no increases to inside item limits /sigh
it's as frustrating as the lack of good ponytails (there are zero good ones, except what the NPC's have) or long hairstyles.

I've seen 2 houses for sale on SARG and a few on sale on SIREN a few days ago- either the person was banned or timers are back on, but we haven't been told- which I feel housing already being stupidly frustrating to deal with as it is, a slight relief would be to know if timers have been turned back on- I want to move my house away from all of these hideous shirogane themed houses. Maybe I'll turn my house into a mog home in protest