Housing needs to be adjusted :(

Just waited trying to get this house for 20+ hours, it must be close for being able to purchase I thought.. as me and 7 other people waited for what was now 4 hours for today.
and then someone runs up and relocates their free company to a spot that was nearly available for purchase.. she moved from 2 plots over and said she moved for convenience to the market board..

What kind of system is this? why do people that already have houses get priority and first come first serve over those that still need one? and have spent hours and hours trying to do so?
Its so warped.. Back in the old days I know there was still an unfairity to getting houses, but there wasnt this stupid timer business.. atleast it was actually first come first serve.. this new way of competetion and wasting needless hours, in all honesty is terrible..
Please tell me they have plans to readjust this abysmal system :(

I came back to the game after 6 months, used to have a house for myself and my free company.
but the system the way it is now, I just simply don't have the time to fight for one.

Thank you for hearing my little rant, I'm just a little dishearted seeing this today.

I'm really sorry to hear that. It's super crushing when you commit so much time to something and realize it was just swiped right under your nose. Sadly, this has been the system for years now, and I promise you're not the only person that has one of these stories.

Best advice I can give you is take a break, get some fresh air, and come back to it with a clear head. I hear there's supposedly a peak hour on average when most houses go on sale. I think it's 10hrs after opening up.

Even better - in Endwalker there will be adjustments to current housing and supposedly an added instanced area (please take that with a huge grain of salt).

So for Endwalker, there will be first come first server (I believe the system we have now), personal housing only wards, FC housing only wards, and a new lottery system where instead of standing clicking the placard for 4 hours you can put in a deposit and in a week there will be one randomly chosen.

Even brighter news, but again take this with a HUGE grain of salt, are island sanctuaries. Supposedly, you can have housing on the island, but we really don't know what this entails. I'll give you a link with zepla / meoni talking about it :).

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._on_endwalker/

From one of the posters:
Blank canvas, what type of building to place

You can also call over your friends to your island, visit your friend's island, tend to crops, looking after/raising animals is more the concept we were going for

There is content focus on house garden furniture(referring to current housing system), but for Island Sanctuary you could see a bit of a rank higher because there's a bit more broad things in there in the mix

Oh goodness thank you so much for the informative reply!

I had no idea the housing was like this for years now :( as a newcomer to the system I was indeed taken back by it..
but thank you very much, I will follow your advice, take a break and also hope for the best in Endwalker!

On the element of being instanced housing, one which I would absolutely love to be true, I would take a banquet worth of salt because while we had a content creator say that was a thing I've not actually seen any source of interview that agrees to that statement- even the content creator's own interview with Yoshida does not explicitly say what the creator said.

What we can say is there will be some sort of building placement, there is a sense of blank slate start, there is gathering, minions roaming around, animal raising and tending of some sort, casual, friends can visit, optional, inspiration from content like Animal Crossing (but not to expect that depth since that's a full complete game and this is well a nice piece of side content, one I do hope does well and gets to expand). If it's not true maybe they can make pushes to make it more so, so another reason why I hope it does well. Like initially maybe you could see some slots to use out and indoor furnishings.. not as much as a 'house' but enough you can add extra to the world space beyond the systems they already have (farming, minions, raising). Or maybe you could associate an inn room or apartment room with an exterior building appearance. Of course full power instanced housing would be neat, not trying to lessen it if that is an option. A content that is made by the same company that likely (my guess) deep roots in this content is FFXI's mog garden.

Not trying to be the wet rag, just worried that the impression of full powered housing might be a misunderstanding (I doubt the content creator did it on purpose if it was, and if it wasn't I wonder if they perhaps had some opportunity to talk to Yoshida outside of the interview as I'm not seeing where they got that from). Saying content creator since I'm trying to avoid speaking like it's a negative to that user, who I've heard a lot of nice things about generally.

Other information that may pertain to your experience is they're going to make a lottery system for /some/ of the Ishgard wards coming in 6.1, FC only for /some/, and some general. This being to try and help players get a sense of either fairness (lottery), or in the FC case I imagine to help empower the community vibe (as each house would have multiple players associated rather than potentially just one).

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Originally Posted by Blacksail

Oh goodness thank you so much for the informative reply!

I had no idea the housing was like this for years now :( as a newcomer to the system I was indeed taken back by it..
but thank you very much, I will follow your advice, take a break and also hope for the best in Endwalker!

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First of all, welcome to XIV! It's great to have you here :)

Secondly, yeah sadly this is a very well known problem. Their Band-Aid to fix the issue were apartments. I believe there's a post / comment somewhere that Yoshi responds to the harsh housing system with how even he, the game's producer, doesn't have house or their FC doesn't have a house (this is pure gossip, I think I read it in an article a while ago lol).

They've been trying to push their current system b/c neighborhood community-feel was very important to them when developing the whole housing system. Unfortunately, that's not really what you see in game lol. I think I've had maybe 2 sentences with my neighbors over the past 2 years, b/c that's how rare it is to see anyone in the housing wards lol.

Hopefully, island sanctuaries will fix this issue. Many of us have been clamoring for instanced housing (Elder Scrolls Online housing comes to my mind when I have suggested it in the past). So, if what I've been hearing is accurate (which again, it very well could not be accurate so please don't depend on this piece of content to answer all our problems), it seems like this will be a welcome piece of content for those of us who really enjoy all the housing stuff but are exhausted by its limitations (RMT-buyers controlling the market / bots / extremely limited house designing features / etc).

So hang in there! If you want a house in the game, you totally can do it, and hopefully Endwalker will bring great news to us who enjoy housing in the game! :D

I'm in the same boat, OP; when I first came to this game a few months ago, I saw the advertisements for housing and was excited at the idea!

I played through the game for a bit to accrue what I thought was the minimum gil, got myself an apartment first to give myself something to work with while I continued working toward the larger goal, and goodness, the first time I really started looking through the housing wards and doing research on how it actually is...

Well, I came close to quitting the game at that point. The critical point is this: I really, REALLY don't like the idea that I'm paying for a service, and ultimately don't have access to a portion of the game content due to overwhelmingly poor design of the system. So I'm essentially contributing to other people being able to enjoy a nice thing but I don't get to because of "limited resources". If it's "limited", then why am I paying for it?

And that's ultimately the crux of the problem, they built the system to be limited and have done literally nothing to improve it at all over the years. Even the addition of new wards and the change to a lottery system doesn't actually fix anything, it's just to provide a smidge of smoothing to a horrific system.

Plus I have zero hope that the island system will be anything like proper housing. Admittedly, it sounds like Garrisons from WoW to me; not a bad thing per se, it still sounds like fun, but it's probably not going to be proper housing (which is what the vast majority of us want).

Anyway, as the system currently is, I won't have anything to do with housing until SE decides to take it seriously and provides it for everyone. That includes FCs, hanging out with people, etc., I won't do any of it because I don't want it rubbed in my face, lol.

I continue to use my apartment because I adore it, but that's the limit of my patience with wards.

Edit: Apologies, a lot of other folks proffered much nicer replies than I did, although I can't bring myself to change it as it's ultimately honest. I spent a day delving into the housing system only to be completely crushed by it, getting hopes dashed, and I'm still a bit salty about it especially after the shenanigans I've experienced in other games like WoW where Devs all too frequently create fake "scarcity" in order to push players toward time-played and monetary purchases.

Thank you all very much for the replies. It helps in that atleast I don't feel so alone in my troubles! also the hopes for something better in the future has me feeling at ease.

The island sanctuary sounds wonderful, similiar to Mog Gardens in FFXI perhaps, which I really enjoyed. So thank you all again for the positive words and replies. While I definitely think theres a better way to do housing, whatever they implement in the future has to be an improvement to now!

in 6.1 there will be a new housing area in Ishgard. From the media tour interviews, it looks like there are wards that will be designated as lottery wards (and some will be first come first serve like all current housing wards). You may get lucky and get a house in Ishgard via the lottery system.

Step 1: Don't wait for 20 hours, ever. You're only hurting yourself. Just don't. Stop that.

Step 2: Join a housing discord like Sadu's and wait for plots to pop through there.

Step 3: DO NOT camp until prime hours which are listed on that discord. You'll only be there for 2 hours or so compared to 20.

System sucks but it is what it is and the only thing that's changing is adding in a lottery system for half the wards (which is basically the same system we have now, just without the camping involved but same length of time). I wish you luck in the future.

I feel for you but can't really blame the FC, they in their full right of doing that.

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Originally Posted by Sotaris

I feel for you but can't really blame the FC, they in their full right of doing that.

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Also this, everyone who has a house has relo'd on someone else because they've had it done to them and no one will put someone else before them when it comes to housing/a plot they want.

OP, welcome back to the game! Sorry for that, but housing is in a really funky spot at the moment. As others said, Endwalker should help with Island Sanctuary (assuming rumors are true), and if not, there is an entirely new housing district coming in Ishgard…so have hope and keep your chin up!

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Originally Posted by Sotaris

I feel for you but can't really blame the FC, they in their full right of doing that.

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This.
Everyone has the same right to a plot whether they are relocating, buying for the first time or buying for a fc. It doesn't matter if you camped for 20 hours or someone got it straight away everyone has the same right to that plot. Yes it's annoying when it gets swiped but like someone else said you shouldn't be camping for 20 hours.

sorry for off topic, but i do not feel like making spanking new thread for this:
if there is anyone with experience, how much harder is it to get house on NA dc vs EU dc currently?
obviously the system is exactly the same, but i guess i am thinking of the competition, possible bullying happening to the lucky winner, do you even see flee plots daily
the last and only NA house I owned and bought was in 3.3, it was one of those new plots and relatively easy to acquire despite being medium, world was leviathan

since coming to EU dc i've had quite few house, both private and FC, and of all sizes. i've grandfathered private houses on two characters on one server only, no idea if i am part of the problem and kinda don't really care.

my experience on EU dc is kinda like this: sometimes, quite often actually, you can spot +half dozen people clicking away, but often people just click for like 10 minutes before leaving. i am absolutely sure that insane clicking marathons happen here too, but the ease at which people come and go makes me feel strangely hopeful, as in i am happy that these people are not ruining their day and health for this nonsense. i won my newest plot vs bot, so that seems to happen, no big surprise there. guess i am also curious of any anecdotal accounts about how common you think that the botting is?

Honestly, with all of the other issues involved in housing acquisition, the relocation issue seems to be one of the biggest. It makes the timer kind of pointless. It encourages people to just buy a house, any house, so they can move for free later on. It screws over people who are willing/able to put in the time and effort to try to get a specific plot. With the incoming lottery system, I do wonder how this is going to change relocation protocol. Surely they're not going to allow someone to reloc and kill a running lottery draw so maybe we'll be seeing a suspension of the free relocation policy in as a whole. Frankly, in my eyes, this would be a good thing.

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Originally Posted by Burmecia

sorry for off topic, but i do not feel like making spanking new thread for this:
if there is anyone with experience, how much harder is it to get house on NA dc vs EU dc currently?

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Its pretty even right now I would think with the new boom in the playerbase across all the DCs in terms of difficulty acquiring housing. I remember JP being empty for a long time with houses sitting everywhere and now they're packed to my knowledge.

Medium plots popping in NA are rare-ish and usually gone within 5m of them going up by a relocation. Larges are unicorns and gone in less time.

Bots are basically the norm in NA as well. Every house has at least a handful there.

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Originally Posted by Burmecia

sorry for off topic, but i do not feel like making spanking new thread for this:
if there is anyone with experience, how much harder is it to get house on NA dc vs EU dc currently?
obviously the system is exactly the same, but i guess i am thinking of the competition, possible bullying happening to the lucky winner, do you even see flee plots daily
the last and only NA house I owned and bought was in 3.3, it was one of those new plots and relatively easy to acquire despite being medium, world was leviathan

since coming to EU dc i've had quite few house, both private and FC, and of all sizes. i've grandfathered private houses on two characters on one server only, no idea if i am part of the problem and kinda don't really care.

my experience on EU dc is kinda like this: sometimes, quite often actually, you can spot +half dozen people clicking away, but often people just click for like 10 minutes before leaving. i am absolutely sure that insane clicking marathons happen here too, but the ease at which people come and go makes me feel strangely hopeful, as in i am happy that these people are not ruining their day and health for this nonsense. i won my newest plot vs bot, so that seems to happen, no big surprise there. guess i am also curious of any anecdotal accounts about how common you think that the botting is?

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I have no data to backup but I would imagine its on par, seeing both DC is nearly full, some servers will have it worse than others.

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Originally Posted by LianaThorne

I remember JP being empty for a long time with houses sitting everywhere and now they're packed to my knowledge.

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Atomos used to have at least a couple plots across the wards available at all times. These days, they're all taken with only one or two plots opening up every couple days. If anyone's thinking about rolling on a JP server thinking they'll have a better chance at getting a house, don't. Your chances are equally good/bad on NA vs. JP.

Relocation should not have priority. Ever. You want the plot you wait with everyone else.

I recently moved my fc house one plot over for the better view, so I pointed the people camping there just down the road. It was then however taken by someone who had been loitering by the place I just moved to, I guess they were busy getting their gil or something and I swooped in while they were away. Because they took my plot when they got back. They came from mist so a plot opened up over there. I felt bad to be resting timers for people but I also cannot help how the system is I am just working in it and I wanted a better spot. My fc house is a small, it started in goblet that I grabbed instantly one very early morning, I then straight away went to the lavender beds where I was keeping an eye on another plot and relocated there, then relocated to kugane when I spotted a place and now most recently moved one plot along. It's one heck of a gil sink I'll say that much..

Hi I'm a newb player and this is my first time posting. Just curious about something. I heard about them not wanting instanced housing because they want the world to seem full and alive. Can't they just have one of each size house in the ward be instanced? Or is something like this not possible. I am old lol and don't know much about computers

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Originally Posted by Helgarm

Hi I'm a newb player and this is my first time posting. Just curious about something. I heard about them not wanting instanced housing because they want the world to seem full and alive. Can't they just have one of each size house in the ward be instanced? Or is something like this not possible. I am old lol and don't know much about computers

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In a general sense it's possible- much more has been done than just that idea.

The issue of course is not just a general sense, since each program has limitations that once built upon become difficult to change (with investments of time, talent, and money). Which given say apartments, something I highly doubt even if they value the neighborhood idea, would have wanted limited as they are, and such .. I think for our game there are likely major issues at the core preventing it to exist easily. Similar issue for glamour log, or account bound mogshop purchases. There is also of course dev desire, say even if it was possible and easy (which I'm not suggesting it's easy).

The whole full alive thing I kind of think "pfffft" to in the current wards, mostly, lol, but I do think a FC only ward may provide an interesting opportunity to help boost that. Personally would have rathered my own more powerful space*, like a Wildstar or ESO type system, and don't really feel much was gained with the mixed system while a number of interesting ideas were lost (it's mostly dead where I visit regularly, and some customizations and features are not possible or at least practical given sharing an open space), but I do imagine the FC ward may improve that quite a bit. I think moving an FC to that ward would be a nice effect. Also to note the housing system was originally for FCs only and was changed due to player demand for personal house though they costed so much many didn't own one but then they were made cheaper and the game more popular and now many servers have no room in the desired locations. *(I imagine Island Sanctuary is going to scratch a lot of these itches, and am excited for it)

Bright side is the objects for houses are pretty cool and impressive, always like looking at the images of people who fought with system to make very pretty and intricate designs (I really think SE should optionally remove all restrictions on indoor placement, like toggle collision and Z axis ability- especially since there are now 3rd party addons doing this anyways).

I like eso's housing, don't like there dungeons. Thank you for replying

The system is ruthless and it sucks. At the same time, it is what it is, do your best to buy ANY house and search for plots you enjoy later.

If I could give you tips:
- there are discords for several datacenters that people "swoop" (which means, they search for what houses are available and ping for it)
- after the house opens, you can safely wait around 10~~8h before starting with the clicking madness. most houses open in a window of 4h after reaching 10h. it could go longer than that, but still.

Yes. I waited a few weeks for a house now- still dont have one I might add. each time one comes up for sale a bot buys it to resell it later OR someone relocates. It never fails. And Enix is silent on this and isn't doing anything to fix it- and the new house purchasing wont help much if at all. There definitely needs to be instanced housing because "neighborhoods" to create interactions doesn't happen as it was assumed it should. It would be nice to have an instance somewhere in Sagolii desert, or Upper La Noscea as a backdrop. - but accessed from a housing tab, not actually having to traverse to those zones, but it would add a depth of immersion to do so regardless of the convenience of it.
I would prefer maybe housing like Black Desert or Wild Star.

It wouldn't be an RPG if I couldn't enter random peoples houses

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Originally Posted by _Pigzig

It wouldn't be an RPG if I couldn't enter random peoples houses

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You would still be able to enter other players' houses even if instanced. They would just need to have guest access enabled just as players currently need to enable guest access for their houses, private chambers and apartments.

Housing, the most played, and least enjoyed PvP content.