One player owning multiple houses

Hey Everyone.
I noticed around my housing area that someone has bought a plot of land, but not building a house on it, for at least one week.
The two plots next to it look pretty same.
All plots are bought from a guild, which has just one member in it. All these character have a familiar name and are level 2, which is why I suspect that it's just one player holding all these plots.
Is this even worth reporting? Does SE take any action there?

Well, there isnt a whole lot you can do. The developers have implemented began their new method of dealing with housing so we can wait and see, try to find a housing mega thread to state your concerns and hope one of them sees it.

Other than that, do your best to enjoy the game. They are introducing some new houses with Ishgard in 6.1 I think. As far as 1 player owning multiple houses, I'm of the firm belief, if you own multiple accounts, each one is just as entitled to own a house as your "main", and all issues of shortages or supply and demand are SOLELY on said development team and 0% anyone else's. And yes there are people who take this to an extremely disrespectful extreme and fight against the spirit of the game but that's just how its been going.

SE does not take action against this, no.

Welcome to Square Enix's housing system, working as intended.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Need a Fee system in this game.

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Originally Posted by Nexxus

Need a Fee system in this game.

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That wouldn't help because most of these people also have billions of gold spread across their alts. The true solution are the things square will literally never do: one plot of land per service account period, or instanced housing so every character and every FC can get their own, non public, house.

It really is inexcusable in 2021 that any MMO is still failing on housing(WoW still hasn't even shown up!). Everquest 2 had apartments and houses throughout all the cities you could just walk up to a door and go into an instanced housing. In EQ2 you can have twenty-five!!!! houses PER character. It came out in 2004.

Since then LotRO made housing districts just like FFXIV did. And have never had the problem of housing not being available. Not even on the largest roleplay servers. If a district got too full, a new one would generate on the fly with a new name for that neighborhood. It came out in 2007. Star Wars Galaxies came out in 2003 with the ability for players to not only build a house wherever the heck they liked on the planet, but could also form into collective villages and become cities with its own spaceport, cantina, guard troops, etc. City of Heroes/Villains developed Superhero and Supervillain bases that you could build from scratch, putting together your own layouts and decorating them as you saw fit. It came out 2004.

We also have more modern games with housing. Wildstar had impecable housing where you could not only put items anywhere you like in 3D space, but could resize objects to tiny tokens or giant structures. SWTOR lets you own housing and slowly build up and expand it over time. GW2 lets you make gigantic guild halls that are more like large outdoor maps you can fly in. You can decorate them to your hearts content. ESO allows housing all over the world and you can buy every single one of them if you like, there is no limit.

This list could go on and on, but the point is: What do all of these games have in common aside from having housing? None of them have/had restrictions like FFXIV. In each and every one of them you are entitled access to that house/guild hall system if you are a player. They aren't full up. They aren't super limited. You just walk up, pay your fee or whatever you have to do and you have your house/hall. Done.

FFXIV has failed hard when it has come to accessibility of housing and I say this as someone who has one.

If we think the congestion is back now. Just wait til Ishgard Housing wars.

People need vacation homes or they might want to rent their extra houses out to people. It's the free market.

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Originally Posted by Remish

If we think the congestion is back now. Just wait til Ishgard Housing wars.

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Lottery means you won't have to be trying to log in when the servers come up from maintenance. They'll probably give players a period of 4-5 days to purchase their entry.

Thing is SE wants us to not have 1 house per player, they want us to compete for housing. I'm not sure why they've made such a ridiculous decision just because it worked in one game doesn't mean it works in another, but now they got limited space they can't and aren't willing to make it any better other than using a lottery system to avoid needing to spend hours mashing a sign and competing against bots. It's a band aid for a big open wound.

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Originally Posted by geekgirl101

Thing is SE wants us to not have 1 house per player, they want us to compete for housing. I'm not sure why they've made such a ridiculous decision just because it worked in one game doesn't mean it works in another, but now they got limited space they can't and aren't willing to make it any better other than using a lottery system to avoid needing to spend hours mashing a sign and competing against bots. It's a band aid for a big open wound.

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The housing system was designed in a time where the game's population was a lot smaller and they didn't predict it to explode as it had, on top of that it was designed with a Japanese userbase in mind - and as weird as it sounds: there are pretty vast differences between online cultures. It's not 100% perfect and all, but on the JP data centers people respect "the spirit" of the rules more than on western ones. So there was a lot more fair play with stuff like houses and apartments. Less people snatched up entire wards entirely to themselves, whereas when it came to western players the as soon as people realized they could do that, they did do that. And even now people will buy themselves a private house and a private FC house while bragging about how they have apartments for every one of their eight alts and then lose their minds screeching if you suggest that yeah, it's kind of greedy to eat up limited resources for entirely selfish purposes like that.

The entire purpose of the housing system, in its inception, was that it would just be an FC thing. Players weren't even supposed to have private houses. But players just made private FCs and demanded private houses. Every step of the way the changes to the housing system have been entirely reactionary with Square trying to tighten loopholes and such that the players exploit and abuse while refusing to stop grandfathering in stuff like people who own entire wards rather than making them adjust to the new rules, or simply doing the few things that would basically solve every problem easily.

You're more than welcome to have 2 houses if you can. One for personal and one for FC. Then you can have an apartment and a FC room. So technically 4 "houses". This is perfectly fine and if you want to rent your house you're more than welcome to. When I joined it was easy to find a small, medium or large plot of land but of course things change lol

I think that SE is in a bind now that the population is pretty high. They can't just add more servers, it's expensive for such a small part of the game, although admittedly I am a fashionista of sorts that decorates homes a lot. I even look at youtube videos and visit various websites to see other people's creation, it's a way of life! But I can't do that right now because the login queue makes it impossible to swap between alts.

Anyway....... There's nothing wrong (in terms of the rules) with buying land and doing nothing with it. You're given the right to do it and it's your right to squat on property if you like. What you're not allowed to do is sell it for real money which people have done. I've heard people selling their small property for over $1000! It's crazy. Morally I think it is wrong to buy a piece of land and sit on it but you never know the reasoning behind it. Maybe they can only play 1hr a day or every few days and eventually they plan to make a house and decorate but don't have the time/gil for it yet. The land itself I believe gets taken away if no house is built within a period of time. I could be wrong but I think you have a week or two to do it. I spent over a year in subscription fees just to login once a month to prevent demolition while I was on hiatus. It shouldn't be that way but it is. Maybe this part of the game, SE will eventually figure out a more cloud-like way to load the instances to alleviate the need for so many servers on this feature. One could hope.

Edit: I meant to say that I had made a suggestion years ago about having your own instanced island where there would be no need to load server resources unless someone was there. I think they will be including something like this soon but I don't know if it will come with a house or if it's just farmville.

I agree with the above sentiments; that SE is in a bind.. that it was their lack of foresight that got us all here and despite the housing system being in such high demand, it seems as though it is of a lower priority despite such. Having an instances island where we even get a large plot of land, perhaps even larger and more customizable than the current housing in order to lure prospective home buyers there and have it count towards your one house limit may lead to the necessary depopulation within the districts enough to where those of us who really desire landlocked places will have them a bit more easily accessible. It seems like such a smart solution but that would depend on how well they code it; For instance, all of ESOs housing is instanced so they may as well be islands (and at least one of them are) but many of them also cost a lot of real-world cash and that might be to offset the cost of maintaining server storage... but they are there forever. I have not logged into ESO since mid-2020 and all my houses and furnishings are right where I left them. Lovely, yes?

My partner and I have a Medium in The Mists and if they ever do release instance housing that does not have a demolition timer on it then that is where we are going and that house in The Mists that we've had for years will be up for sale for a new buyer to enjoy and I bet there will be a lot of cases like this.

Multiple ones I do not even mind it is the FCs that purchase whole wards on a congested server that bothers me. Im sure many will say that is fair etc but if its a congested server and these homes are never being used, really what do you need more than 6 for?

Damn, it's been years and you are still not over it. Even funnier, you're still clueless as to what they are being used for.

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Originally Posted by Eriane_Elis

You're more than welcome to have 2 houses if you can. One for personal and one for FC. Then you can have an apartment and a FC room. So technically 4 "houses".

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Using that thinking, it's actually possible for a player to have 160 "houses" per account.

Need to remember the ownership limits placed are per world, not per account. If I have one character on each of 40 different worlds, then they all get to have a personal house, FC house, FC private chambers and apartment (assuming I could find the houses available to purchase). If you want to ignore private chambers and apartments, I could still have up to 80 houses on my account.

The housing system is heavily flawed when it comes to supply and purchase. The flaws have been very apparent since Heavensward. It's exceeding strange that SE won't do anything to fix the flaws when so many other MMOs don't have their housing systems crippled.

Shared these thoughts in another thread:

It was created with the idea that only FCs would own a ward house at first and that player housing would come later. This is why we have wards. FCs were supposed to hang out in them. Well, the houses were really expensive at launch in an attempt to drain gil from the servers and not many FCs bought them. They didn't have the workshop back then and it was just a luxury/bragging item for FCs. Very few saw the small houses as being worth it (they didn't even have the basement area at the time). 2.1 was the patch that gave us FC housing and that was a HUGE patch for the team. To not see housing take off like they thought at first shifted the dev focus to other projects.

By 2.3 most FCs who wanted a house had one, so SE opened the ward to individuals to fill the wards which were mostly empty as they probably thought that housing wasn't something to really invest time/money. After the initial surges of buyers, it died down again. Again SE kinda kicked the ball down the field since it still wasn't a huge selling feature of the game. Fast forward to the mash up of FC/Player housing which is the mess we have today. Now there's not enough houses for the FCs or players.

Fun fact: the houses were never supposed to ever go "poof" and evict you if didn't login for a set time. This was in keeping with SE team's idea of taking a break to play other games. No maintenance or decay fees either. The evictions are a symptom of the overall housing problem.

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Originally Posted by Dewslam

It's not 100% perfect and all, but on the JP data centers people respect "the spirit" of the rules more than on western ones. So there was a lot more fair play with stuff like houses and apartments. Less people snatched up entire wards entirely to themselves, whereas when it came to western players the as soon as people realized they could do that, they did do that. And even now people will buy themselves a private house and a private FC house while bragging about how they have apartments for every one of their eight alts and then lose their minds screeching if you suggest that yeah, it's kind of greedy to eat up limited resources for entirely selfish purposes like that.

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Except if you actually look at the Lodestone data, JP has plenty of multi-house owners including some of the famous FFXIV housing designers.

But Western culture bad, JP culture good!

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Originally Posted by Serenitey

Multiple ones I do not even mind it is the FCs that purchase whole wards on a congested server that bothers me. Im sure many will say that is fair etc but if its a congested server and these homes are never being used, really what do you need more than 6 for?

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Some of these ward owners who purchased wards, did not do so when the servers were congested.

Taking servers like Mateus and Spriggan as examples. These servers had houses rotting away at max devaluation prices for months.

SE even gave incentives for people to transfer to new servers.

It's only years later, these servers became popular.

It's like coming to a BBQ party 10 hours later and asking why is there no food?

Man imagine if they just made instanced housing instead of this archaic mess.

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Originally Posted by TwistedTea

It's like coming to a BBQ party 10 hours later and asking why is there no food?

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lol No it isnt... unless the people are sleeping at the party. XD Most of these full bought wards arent USED at all. How do I know? Well I don't for ALL but on one a friend of mine owns a house in a ward that has only 3 other user houses the rest are all fc, and we have been there hours at a time and no one uses them. Seriously unless you are just a troll trying to argue why would a WHOLE ward be necessary to own?

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Originally Posted by Serenitey

lol No it isnt... unless the people are sleeping at the party. XD Most of these full bought wards arent USED at all. How do I know? Well I don't for ALL but on one a friend of mine owns a house in a ward that has only 3 other user houses the rest are all fc, and we have been there hours at a time and no one uses them. Seriously unless you are just a troll trying to argue why would a WHOLE ward be necessary to own?

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What makes you so certain they are not used at all? I'm fairly certain your friends aren't on a stakeout watching all of those houses 24/7 every day of the year. That those houses are retained during periods when demolition is not suspended indicates they're getting used in some way. If they weren't they'd be getting demolished.

A lot of houses are purchased solely for workshop access. The player goes in and goes straight to the workshop then leaves via teleport or log out. It could be very easy to miss the 5 seconds they're standing outside their house. SE requiring FCs to own a house for workshop access is another issue but it doesn't change that otherwise apparently empty houses are being used for that purpose.

This thread is turning into whether or not it's morally acceptable to subscribe simply to keep your house and to that I say yes. In fact I've done it for a year and I know many others who have. It's part of the subscription you pay and there's nothing wrong with that. I shouldn't be penalized for taking a break and had to pay a premium to retain the 200mil gil I invested into furniture and other things for the house (at the time). There's no recovering your items either if you go away too long and you can say good-bye to your mogstation items as well. It's a poorly made system, they know of this and they are trying to remedy it one step at a time. Hopefully everyone will be able to have their own house like old times but it is what it is and I would recommend anyone who doesn't want to lose their house and items to remain subscribed and login once a month to prevent the demolition.

Now for those people who bought like half a dozen houses, it was in their right long ago to do so and are grandfathered in. They can't move to ishgard if they wanted to, they are stuck with what they have unless they relinquish all their houses presumably. It's it morally right? I don't know, they paid their sub and it was their right to do so. It wasn't until the first exodus when housing became a bit hard to find and by the second exodus back in June, it's next to impossible unless you get really lucky. Would you really relinquish your land if you had a few plots? Probably not because you can't do that anymore.

They will have islands, maybe housing in those islands. I wouldn't worry too much about housing yet since ishgard is coming in a few weeks too.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

What makes you so certain they are not used at all? I'm fairly certain your friends aren't on a stakeout watching all of those houses 24/7 every day of the year. That those houses are retained during periods when demolition is not suspended indicates they're getting used in some way. If they weren't they'd be getting demolished.

A lot of houses are purchased solely for workshop access. The player goes in and goes straight to the workshop then leaves via teleport or log out. It could be very easy to miss the 5 seconds they're standing outside their house. SE requiring FCs to own a house for workshop access is another issue but it doesn't change that otherwise apparently empty houses are being used for that purpose.

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I'll take the Spriggan example in Goblet and now spreading in Mist (via a RMT service no less but that's another topic and I can't link anything here) :

You have one single individual, who's clearly rich, has multiple upon multiple characters and accounts. Owning the 2 divisions in a Goblet ward, every single plot. Spreading even now in other wards, Mist and probably other locations I didn't bothered to look at.
That individual likes to present her actions as : I like to decorate. Which is fine, but this is really really pushing it in a market that has extremely low offers and massive demands. All this happens, mostly because that person has the wallet for it and why SE is not going to take any action. All the person has to do, is have a notebook/excel file and visit each house like every week-end to refresh the timers. Virtual money or fees is nothing to them, let alone having multiple subs on multiple accounts.

We had a similar case in WoW with multiboxing and abuses, for once (granted it took ages), Blizzard nuked it. Only good deed they've done in recent memory.

And you know what's funny ? Hardly any visitors to these places. Just a few screenshots for Instagram/Twitter and Discord (where it's specified no RMT but you dwell in it, hypocrisy at it's finest). I just finished decorating my garden and I've already had people checking it out. These plot hoarders either do it for RMT or selfish reasons (in my example, someone with a deep wallet and wanting multiple houses to decorate and showcase on social media).

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Originally Posted by True-to-Caesar

I'll take the Spriggan example in Goblet and now spreading in Mist (via a RMT service no less but that's another topic and I can't link anything here) :

You have one single individual, who's clearly rich, has multiple upon multiple characters and accounts. Owning the 2 divisions in a Goblet ward, every single plot. Spreading even now in other wards, Mist and probably other locations I didn't bothered to look at.
That individual likes to present her actions as : I like to decorate. Which is fine, but this is really really pushing it in a market that has extremely low offers and massive demands. All this happens, mostly because that person has the wallet for it and why SE is not going to take any action. All the person has to do, is have a notebook/excel file and visit each house like every week-end to refresh the timers. Virtual money or fees is nothing to them, let alone having multiple subs on multiple accounts.

We had a similar case in WoW with multiboxing and abuses, for once (granted it took ages), Blizzard nuked it. Only good deed they've done in recent memory.

And you know what's funny ? Hardly any visitors to these places. Just a few screenshots for Instagram/Twitter and Discord (where it's specified no RMT but you dwell in it, hypocrisy at it's finest). I just finished decorating my garden and I've already had people checking it out. These plot hoarders either do it for RMT or selfish reasons (in my example, someone with a deep wallet and wanting multiple houses to decorate and showcase on social media).

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Oh, I don't dispute that a lot of the multiple plot ownership is due to greed or other reasons not healthy for content that has a limit on participation.

I was just making the point that someone not seeing a house being used doesn't automatically mean the house is not getting used. In your examples, those houses are getting used even if not for reasons that other players agree are good reasons.

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Originally Posted by True-to-Caesar

I'll take the Spriggan example in Goblet and now spreading in Mist (via a RMT service no less but that's another topic and I can't link anything here) :

You have one single individual, who's clearly rich, has multiple upon multiple characters and accounts. Owning the 2 divisions in a Goblet ward, every single plot. Spreading even now in other wards, Mist and probably other locations I didn't bothered to look at.
That individual likes to present her actions as : I like to decorate. Which is fine, but this is really really pushing it in a market that has extremely low offers and massive demands. All this happens, mostly because that person has the wallet for it and why SE is not going to take any action. All the person has to do, is have a notebook/excel file and visit each house like every week-end to refresh the timers. Virtual money or fees is nothing to them, let alone having multiple subs on multiple accounts.

We had a similar case in WoW with multiboxing and abuses, for once (granted it took ages), Blizzard nuked it. Only good deed they've done in recent memory.

And you know what's funny ? Hardly any visitors to these places. Just a few screenshots for Instagram/Twitter and Discord (where it's specified no RMT but you dwell in it, hypocrisy at it's finest). I just finished decorating my garden and I've already had people checking it out. These plot hoarders either do it for RMT or selfish reasons (in my example, someone with a deep wallet and wanting multiple houses to decorate and showcase on social media).

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Wouldnt even bet on RMT. Yeah sure there a few who just want to get a quick buck.

Most Multiowners simply dont know what else to do with their wealth. If you played FFXIV long enough (and I'm not talking about 24/7 or patchday crafting or playing) just playing the game it would be easy as nowhere else in any other MMO to accumulate a decent wealth. And if you didnt flush it down for glamour or for cute catgirls in Limsa a few hundred million gil on the side is no curiosity ingame after a few years of playing. What else can they spend their gil on? The cheap 25 or 50 Million Mounts? They dont serve of a Gilsink for rich Players. Not even close.

Its just to easy to go to a random Houseowner and asking them "Here xx Million. Mind to sell your FC/House"? And funny thing is you dont want to know how often you get the answer "Sure why not" because they want to get rid of the burden to keep a sub for the house, werent invested enough to begin with etc.

And in the case of the certain Spriggan Ward. No one gave a fuck for this server for month or didnt even spend a second for a thought about a world transfer. Those people simply have no right to be offended because they didnt took the opportunity to do the same. So as long the TOS or the General Housing Rules isnt violated we are not allowed to prented how others play Final Fantasy. And if they want to pay for more then one account we should let them. Square would be stupid to cut off income. If we like it or not.

They should remove the blue side quest icons for residential area unlocks, most players do not have access to the function...

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Originally Posted by LitheSuxman

They should remove the blue side quest icons for residential area unlocks, most players do not have access to the function...

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They do, most of people would have access to FC and FC room.

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Originally Posted by True-to-Caesar

I'll take the Spriggan example in Goblet and now spreading in Mist (via a RMT service no less but that's another topic and I can't link anything here)

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Talk about living rent free. I'd like to see your so-called claim I RMT when it was actually a former acquaintance that tried to impersonate me on that RMT site as petty revenge because she was banned for being discovered to RMT houses on there. (Yes I have screenshots of this.) Also, when you're running as many subs as I am, it's literally a ripoff to actually RMT.

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Originally Posted by True-to-Caesar

And you know what's funny ? Hardly any visitors to these places.

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Nope. I run an active FC there who likes the neighborhood and we hold public events and parties for everyone. We have a nice community here.

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Originally Posted by True-to-Caesar

I'll take the Spriggan example in Goblet and now spreading in Mist (via a RMT service no less but that's another topic and I can't link anything here)

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There was no RMT involved with this individual. Whatever opinions people may have, those sorts of accusations should be made with caution.

housing is not for normal players like us, SE doesnt care, we just need to get used to it and suffer. This is the worst part of the game!! we pay the same fee but missing 20% of the game experience. HOW UNFAIR!

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Originally Posted by Nexxus

Need a Fee system in this game.

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not at all, stop trying to punish players when our attention needs to be 100% focused on insisting se finally provides a new type of housing (instanced) that would allow housing for all!
Nonthing less.