We deserve an explanantion.

I'm not talking about the mess with the lottery. For the past few years the housing system has been a dog-eat-dog, FOMO mess that puts housing almost entirely out of reach of normal casual players. Housing should not be limited. Fuck neighborhoods to be honest, I don't even see anyone in my neighborhood anyway. While there may be technical limitations that prevent the devs from adding more wards you can't tell me there are limitations which prevent them from creating instanced housing. Apartments are proof that it is possible for them to do. I would rather Yoshida and the devs give us a "long and complex explanation" as to why, after 3+ years, they still accept and continue to push for a system that turns a laidback feature into a vicious fucking competition where you will miss out if you join the game at the wrong time. I don't even care if they have to push back plans and not have it done for a few years. Just knowing that instanced housing is on the agenda would make me feel a million times better about it. Neighborhoods aren't worth having to trust in the grace of god to get a house. Frankly I'm sick and tired of seeing this system go unchanged and I'm done being ignored. The community, both the loyal players of 10+ years and the people joining just now, deserve much better than this.

I just don't get how they can take so long to add new housing districts, have them fill up in less than an hour, then proceed to stop adding new wards for a couple years and say "yeah our work here is done"

Tbh I like the idea of having a neighbourhood, but there's no reason for not having some kind of alternative for the people who want to get that same experience of owning a house (apartments SUCK so dont even come for me saying they exist). I think neighbourhoods should stay as a much more complex system to get into (cuz it's been like that for years and it seems like the devs dont know how to change that) AND we also need a very similair alternative like instanced housing that gets talked about a lot on here and seems to be absolutely ignored as a possibility by the dev team.

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Originally Posted by KikiTia

I'm not talking about the mess with the lottery. For 10 years the housing system has been a dog-eat-dog, FOBO mess that puts housing almost entirely out of reach of normal casual players.

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No, it hasn't. It is only for the last 2-3 years or so that getting a house has been difficult. Before that you could generally get a house without much problem or waiting (except on Balmung).

As to why housing wards instead of instanced housing, it is not a question of technical limitations. It is because the devs like open wards where you have neighbours, and prefer that over instanced housing. They think that housing should be somewhat limited and not something everybody and their dog can get - apartements are for everyone else.

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Originally Posted by MistakeNot

No, it hasn't. It is only for the last 2-3 years or so that getting a house has been difficult. Before that you could generally get a house without much problem or waiting (except on Balmung).

As to why housing wards instead of instanced housing, it is not a question of technical limitations. It is because the devs like open wards where you have neighbours, and prefer that over instanced housing. They think that housing should be somewhat limited and not something everybody and their dog can get - apartements are for everyone else.

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Yeah that's fair, I'll admit I haven't been around long enough to have known that, so thank you for correcting me. Still I wish they would explain to us why they insist on these band aid patches as opposed to larger, systematic change. We shouldn't have to guess their intentions and hope they know what they are doing.

Agree with post above, the dev doesn't have listen to players all the time (sometimes players don't know what they want). They should stick to their vision and if players don't like they can play other games with instanced housing.

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Originally Posted by MistakeNot

No, it hasn't. It is only for the last 2-3 years or so that getting a house has been difficult. Before that you could generally get a house without much problem or waiting (except on Balmung).

As to why housing wards instead of instanced housing, it is not a question of technical limitations. It is because the devs like open wards where you have neighbours, and prefer that over instanced housing. They think that housing should be somewhat limited and not something everybody and their dog can get - apartements are for everyone else.

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"Somewhat Limited" is really downplaying it imo.

Hubris and not communicating/not listening to a part of their player base is part of what killed FFXIV and brought us this dev team and ARR. At that time we were promised much better. That our new devs would put in actual effort to make the game amazing and accessible. And I will not lie, we got some of that.

But what I see now when one of the devs reacts dramatically to housing questions? Pride. I see pride and I see someone who is refusing to understand their player base. (Hrothgar ears make me see it further but that's for another part of this forum). And I absolutely do not feel we have gotten good communication.

There's a sticky at the top of this forum that is quite old, but very interesting to read in current times. Is Yoshida still grateful for our feedback? Or is he sick of hearing it? Were those promises only for that time or meant to be continuous? Why is the only dev sticky from over a decade ago?

I half wonder if the reason they went so very heavy on FC wards, is because they are aware of the bad press they get about housing. Leaving several FC wards half empty, they can then go "But look, all these houses are still available!"

Frankly I never have trust or hope for corporations, but I cannot elaborate how utterly disappointed I have been in this game since EW. I do not think I would have the wordcount, nor would I be able to take the jumbled mess in my brain and sort them out well enough.

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Originally Posted by Dionysius

Agree with post above, the dev doesn't have listen to players all the time (sometimes players don't know what they want). They should stick to their vision and if players don't like they can play other games with instanced housing.

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I thought that too until my friends and I lost our chance at a large FC House due to being past the 200 spot in the server queue. We literally got on 10 minutes after the patch and every single large on the server had been taken. And now because of the way the system works the only way for us to get a large house is to pray to god someone with a large quits the game or an FC with a large disbands, or worse yet we have to pay 10x the asking price to go through relocation with someone who owns a large. Creative integrity is all well and good, but it's an issue if it comes at the expense of 80%+ of the player base.

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Originally Posted by Dionysius

(sometimes players don't know what they want).

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I might be speaking from a slightly biased perspective as a person who quit this game a few times due to frustrations with trying to get into a house and how the devs managed housing through the years, but I am pretty sure after a decade, the fact that players have been begging for more housing means that they want more housing, no matter how it comes.

Frankly instanced housing would be intelligent and solve issues for a lot of people. Not just getting a house, but also, for instance, that you can expand estate settings and let people kick or ban people out of their house. That would reduce stalking, harassment, and other toxic behavior. There are as many players, if not more, that would love that, than players who actually live on wards with active players.

My ward's dead. All of my old FC's wards, across several servers and years, were dead. My current FC's old ward was dead. My current FC's current ward is dead (but at least we can blame that being Empy). My apartment's ward is dead.

For chuck's sake keep a few "live" wards for the people who just have to show off or want to try to band together and be social. Rededicate unused servers to something else, maybe an expandable apartment system that lets you add on rooms or upgrade size or put in a greenhouse balcony. Maybe it can have a list of upgrades pertaining to sizes of each floor, floors, greenery room for a garden, and you get 4 slots to choose your customizations. That would make most players downright ecstatic.

This is miserable. Players are miserable. Devs are miserable. Everyone's miserable and been miserable for a decade. Players have quit over it, players have remained hoping for it, new players have come, and they're all significantly more upset than not. If everyone* hates this, solve it.

(everyone refers to an apparent majority of house-wanting players)

When I first started playing this game years and one account ago (had to ditch the old due to constant harassment from an ex-FC member), the housing quest all but implied housing wasn't for the common folk but was for special folk, like me, like every player character. I was so excited I said in my FC chat "Oh cool! What level do we get a house?" The resounding answer was to give the usual information on what was required, followed up by a "But they're impossible to get, you'll probably never get one." That was eight years ago. I got my house two months ago due to persistence and literal, sheer luck of clicking the placard at just the right second. I'm hardly a super-FFXIV-fanboy but I waited, with a few long breaks between, eight years. I think that's fairly good evidence that this system might have a problem.

I think if they are gonna exclude a large amount of the playerbase from a portion of the game they should get a discount on their subs since they are missing an opportunity to play the complete game. Or better yet, just do something with apartments so we can upgrade them into equivalent size houses with the same perks that come with owning a house in the game.

It's pretty bad that it's been like this pretty much since personal housing was added to the game, I can still see the post from Yoshi-p about patch 2.38 at the top of the housing forum. If they've been trying for over 8 years to fix housing and can't do it then they need to try something else, or at least give players the exclusive features locked behind a house somewhere else. FC houses don't help either since most FC houses are just the personal house for the FC leader and no one else is allowed to use them.

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Originally Posted by VerdeLuck

It's pretty bad that it's been like this pretty much since personal housing was added to the game, I can still see the post from Yoshi-p about patch 2.38 at the top of the housing forum. If they've been trying for over 8 years to fix housing and can't do it then they need to try something else, or at least give players the exclusive features locked behind a house somewhere else. FC houses don't help either since most FC houses are just the personal house for the FC leader and no one else is allowed to use them.

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The problem is the core of the system, and instead of reworking that, they've been patching it and adding band-aids and praying thats enough.

It never has been and never will be.

You deserve nothing. Read the ToS.

Ive been playing for over 500 years and not once have i seen a single house for sale! This system is so broken it's amazing. Se must have evil intentions for them to let this continue for so long. Housing is the single most important feature of this game and they dont even offer a small chance to move to a less crowded server that may have open housing. Not even once over those 500 years! Burn the witch!

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Originally Posted by Bladehawk

Ive been playing for over 500 years and not once have i seen a single house for sale! This system is so broken it's amazing. Se must have evil intentions for them to let this continue for so long. Housing is the single most important feature of this game and they dont even offer a small chance to move to a less crowded server that may have open housing. Not even once over those 500 years! Burn the witch!

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I play on those dead servers and the housing is full here too. So so much for that.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

I play on those dead servers and the housing is full here too. So so much for that.

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More new worlds on the way. Then more after that. Then possibly even more in 7.0 Tons of new housing total in the works

everyone clamoring for housing yet will still afk for hours in limsa.
I have seen maybe 3 people in two years in the housing ward where I am and other than RP venues the wards are dead and void of life.

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Originally Posted by Bladehawk

More new worlds on the way. Then more after that. Then possibly even more in 7.0 Tons of new housing total in the works

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Ah, so you're one of those "Here's a bandaid for your Broken Arm" types.

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Originally Posted by Bladehawk

More new worlds on the way. Then more after that. Then possibly even more in 7.0 Tons of new housing total in the works

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4 new worlds being all the houses added in the next year and a half when there's already a problem with there being too few seems like a poor solution. Those houses are going to be snapped up instantly and then we're back at the waiting game till 7.0, where those houses will also be snapped up instantly leaving everyone else without a house.

https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1Q...qA5jslaHhhRLqm

If you want house, you must go the extra mile. Or a thousand. This is my ward on Materia - the empty plots have NO entries, so its not empty due to a bug or anything. I used a google photos to link inside [IMG] tags , but it doesn't seem to be displaying. Anyway, completely empty ward, except 2 other houses! And yes, I moved here solely because I was sick and tired of trying to get one. Got a large plot, ward 24 plot 52 in Ishgard, the one I dreamed about, completely uncontested! Who cares about ping when you can have a house xD

It is more complicated as it is, if you say you can do better running a server from your apartment or the likes think again, it is very complex running stuff at this scale as well as adding things takes up ressources as well, if they should do anything they should expand the current wards instead, maybe making it tripple amount of housing... could see the Mist as a big half circular cove or something for that matter as it is.

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Originally Posted by Theox

Tbh I like the idea of having a neighbourhood, but there's no reason for not having some kind of alternative for the people who want to get that same experience of owning a house (apartments SUCK so dont even come for me saying they exist). I think neighbourhoods should stay as a much more complex system to get into (cuz it's been like that for years and it seems like the devs dont know how to change that) AND we also need a very similair alternative like instanced housing that gets talked about a lot on here and seems to be absolutely ignored as a possibility by the dev team.

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At this point, they'd be better off figuring out ways to simulate a neighborhood, e.g. by people opting in to create the exterior impression of one (i.e. say 5 people decide to do this, it populates the "neighborhood" with the 5 houses opting in... and fills in the gaps based on preferences), than using the current model too. I'd like a neighborhood as well but I don't like the houses a lot of people design so at present it's actually resulting in a negative rather than positive experience to me, and all for what? It comes at the cost of instanced housing.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

Ah, so you're one of those "Here's a bandaid for your Broken Arm" types.

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Things are getting better as far as housing availability goes (there is always room for improvement) and your tiny scratch is not a broken arm no matter how often you scream and stamp your feet and insist that it is.

So, not reading through it all, might have already been said.

1. Neighborhoods
Has been established for years that Yoshi P. wants a neighborhood experience. Lively and actively social housing wards full of players. There are comments about this in older article interviews.

2. Instanced Housing
So many people just don't get it. There is an instance server. It governs all the current housing interiors, probably each of the housing wards, every apartment interior, every dungeon, raid, trial, the Firmament's DoL gathering area, the Ocean fishing boats, and any other case of something that is instanced, is run on these servers.

You think you can add the stress of thousands and thousands of housing interiors onto this without crashing the entire game?

Everyone keeps screaming instanced housing, without realizing just what it would take to deliver that. They'd need to add new servers for every world, just to handle the strain, and that means sub prices would go up to cover it all.

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Originally Posted by Valfreyja

So, not reading through it all, might have already been said.

1. Neighborhoods
Has been established for years that Yoshi P. wants a neighborhood experience. Lively and actively social housing wards full of players. There are comments about this in older article interviews.

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What Yoshi P wants is not in line with the reality of the severe supply shortage especially on NA servers.

Even on Balmung, having owned houses in all residential areas, I barely saw my neighbours. Maybe twice a year.

The neighbourhood feel is nice in theory but in practice with increasing server populations it results in atrocious access to the majority of the playerbase for ward housing.

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2. Instanced Housing
So many people just don't get it. There is an instance server. It governs all the current housing interiors, probably each of the housing wards, every apartment interior, every dungeon, raid, trial, the Firmament's DoL gathering area, the Ocean fishing boats, and any other case of something that is instanced, is run on these servers.

You think you can add the stress of thousands and thousands of housing interiors onto this without crashing the entire game?

Everyone keeps screaming instanced housing, without realizing just what it would take to deliver that. They'd need to add new servers for every world, just to handle the strain, and that means sub prices would go up to cover it all.

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Limited ward housing consumes more server resources as the ward houses are always partially loaded.

And SE's solution so far has been to add even more wards (new servers or reallocating existing server resources) thus increasing the server stress even further.

But yet you think fully instanced housing would cause more server stress than limited ward housing?

The housing apologists on here are sickening.

It's like they're saying if you wanted an IRL house, why didn't you buy one in the 1980's. Just wow. Freakin FFXIV Boomers.

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Originally Posted by Masenko

The housing apologists on here are sickening.

It's like they're saying if you wanted an IRL house, why didn't you buy one in the 1980's. Just wow. Freakin FFXIV Boomers.

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It really does make me sick, man. It's like you have a bunch of amateur armchair accountants looking out for Square Enix's pocket to make sure no money falls out. It has to be some kind of weird stockholm syndrome or something where they think this kind of dogshit for a game this size that makes this much money is normal. That's even the more realistic of the two takes, the other more insane one being that this is somehow part of a vision for Final Fantasy where this is a good thing. If this is their vision, they are blind.

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Originally Posted by TwistedTea

But yet you think fully instanced housing would cause more server stress than limited ward housing?

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Instanced housing has 1 issue. What if you want to see houses of others? For inspiration, or just to sometimes take a look, being able to view go into other houses is a welcome feature. If you spent effort making it look nice, you might also want to show that off to others.

But still, if instanced housing would only show a few extra houses that are nearby (like for example 4 houses, which are semi random selected), it might already be a decent alternative. The semi-random part then simply can mean that someone who is working on his house was loaded in, or a house that was also loaded in for someone else. or it simply loads in another random house. This should allow some compression to take place as only a few houses need to be loaded in for ward rendering (server wide this might still be 100 houses, for 200 players). However, you will never see the other players actively walking (although maybe there are even ways to do this).

Instanced housing should take less resources, but it shouldnt be a 1:1 ratio either. I want to see other houses, that is part of the housing system! And instead of complete randomizing and just teleporting to a house, the house facade is something that matters, and usualy is visible enough from a distance. Being able to see multiple at once is on that more efficient than just hopping from house to house.

There are ways, but they are complex. Islands on that at least are a bit more simplistic in design. And hopefully some knowledge from that can be used for housing as well. Because i suspect that those actualy will take more resources per house than wards would (because wards technicaly have more restrictions).

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Originally Posted by UkcsAlias

Instanced housing has 1 issue. What if you want to see houses of others? For inspiration, or just to sometimes take a look, being able to view go into other houses is a welcome feature. If you spent effort making it look nice, you might also want to show that off to others.

But still, if instanced housing would only show a few extra houses that are nearby (like for example 4 houses, which are semi random selected), it might already be a decent alternative. The semi-random part then simply can mean that someone who is working on his house was loaded in, or a house that was also loaded in for someone else. or it simply loads in another random house. This should allow some compression to take place as only a few houses need to be loaded in for ward rendering (server wide this might still be 100 houses, for 200 players). However, you will never see the other players actively walking (although maybe there are even ways to do this). Some creep? Crazy EX on your yard? Spammer? A random horse? Someone parkouring on your roof? Just put them on a list. Why not?

Instanced housing should take less resources, but it shouldnt be a 1:1 ratio either. I want to see other houses, that is part of the housing system! And instead of complete randomizing and just teleporting to a house, the house facade is something that matters, and usualy is visible enough from a distance. Being able to see multiple at once is on that more efficient than just hopping from house to house.

There are ways, but they are complex. Islands on that at least are a bit more simplistic in design. And hopefully some knowledge from that can be used for housing as well. Because i suspect that those actualy will take more resources per house than wards would (because wards technicaly have more restrictions).

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Just apply an ID, similar to a phone number for people to visit instanced homesteads. You dont need neighbors. The instance can open whenever people are inside and close when people arent, similar to a dungeon. They wouldnt constantly be in use. Only a few, like an RP venue ( which would probably benefit greatly from access control) would be in high use.

There really is just no reason not to do it at this point. Just make it a freaking house surrounded by trees in the middle of the woods, or a snowfield, desert. Just any random inaccessible backdrop so you can have an exterior and interior functionally the same as whatever size house you want.