After all these months and being owner of a house all i can say, FFXIV has one of the worse designed, planned and executed housing systems in the MMORPG market. Period.


The time invesment/effort on getting a house isnt comparable with the limited options, limited designed (having server space problems over this is so late 90`) and limited philosophy behind it all. For much less several games give you much better housing, with far more options and more unique-ness to it.

FFXIV housing.

-All houses are the same square estructure. Want a round house? Want to move that stair other side? Want to have the house in another position? A diamond shaped fence maybe? Want an irregular angled house? All no.
-Housing items are limited. Some of them cant be dyed, others requiere insane high end materials to even be gotten, making a casual activity like housing suddenly a grind. No mirror option for items, cant place them as you would like, no "3D" placement.
-Housing is plain useless. Gardens, yeah! ok, gardens, and thats it, beyond that housing is useless and seems to not have any special feature in the far future (SE didnt even think about having shared permissions with incoming marriage till they were asked about it, something totally logic for a housing system, revealing how little investment of R&D is going to housing)
-Guild and Personal housing mixed up. This is another killer, having whole group of players and single players fighting for plots is just... lacks of foresight.

Games with much less resources got all those points right to a degree, or at least tried. Housing in FFXIV is whatever but what housing is about, an unique, placid, casual, short term, fun and lasting activity. Housing is not unique (what makes housing unique is customization, not accessibility) housing is not placid when you can`t share it with almost no one, is not casual since it requieres lots of work towards it, isn`t short term for most people, is not fun when again, everyone is outside cause there isn`t many players there cause... SERVERS! and isn`t a lasting activity. With so few and limited customization options, housing burns out after 2 or 3 remodelings, after that, the only thing you visit your house is garden (which also burns out really quick even with the promise of materials) and universal item NPCs.

Im not saying that FFXIV should have something like Wildstar or Rift`s housing (rifts being the best by lightyears) but damn, could have at least tried, instead, hurried everything up, hyped it, and didn`t delivered. Seriously, 2014 housing system without item mirror feature. Really.