More houses?

[Nialle]

If they don't want to expand housing wards again, then they need to implement the reclaimation of plots held by accounts without an active sub. Keeping housing plots rare and not giving the option of inactive accounts to lose their claim to ones they aren't even using is unfair to active players.

[Nyalia]

If they don't want to expand housing wards again, then they need to implement the reclaimation of plots held by accounts without an active sub. Keeping housing plots rare and not giving the option of inactive accounts to lose their claim to ones they aren't even using is unfair to active players.

So, it's more fair if a player spends couple months doing something other than FF (school, overseas vacation, military assignment, etc) and they come back to find their 37 million gil mansion (minimum price on my server - 34m fully depreciated plus 3m for the permit; it would cost 71m+ to get it back at full price) gone along with all the items that can't be picked up and are lost when the house is lost (ex primal decorations, ADS Illuminants, Armoires etc)? How is THAT fair?

SE made a number of decisions I strongly disagree with regarding housing, but the way to fix it isn't to randomly delete people's hard-earned housing just because they aren't using it 24/7. That just compounds the problem. If SE wants to fix housing, they just need to either give us truly instanced housing like we've been asking for (the neighborhood thing is really not much of a plus) or give us personal housing that's truly separate from FC housing. Heck, just leave what we have the way we have it and create one-house instances similar to the rooms and have them accessible from a common entrance in any ward. You go to the zone, or the NPC guarding the pass, and you get a menu like for personal housing where you can choose a house to visit. It takes you to a small valley area with just the house. Boom, housing issues fixed, no limit to housing. Leave the housing currently in place for people who want to show off and give everyone else a private house off on their own.

As far as I can tell, the FFXIV developers have a tendency to go "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we do things such-and-such a way? Some people will really get a kick out of it!" and they do not think about the scalability, long-term effects, or all the people who don't care about the "coolness" factor. Someone thought it'd be really neat if houses were in a public area where you could wander by and see other people's houses and you could display trophies on your front lawn and you'd have neighbors and such. But, they didn't think about how such a design, while cool, has serious scalability issues and does not jive with their server storage model (at least, I assume it doesn't, else they'd be have a dynamic number of wards that would grow with demand).

Cool presentation does have its advantages, but designing a feature in an MMO with a strict limit on the number of people who can participate in it EVER, and then tying more and more new features to that feature with strict limits, that's just really poorly thought out design. It's not cool when you gate content behind seniority. A new player on Balmung cannot have a personal house, ever. They cannot play around with Gardening on their own. They cannot grow their own chocobo food. What happens when Gold Saucer comes out? How much content will they be gated from participating in? I'm assuming chocobo food and stables will be involved in chocobo breeding for the races.