Reclaim land from inactive accounts post 3.0?

[LaylaTsarra]

My wife and I have enough gil to get a small plot, and we want to get married IG, however we would like a house to share and currently there aren't any.

Problem with housing as it exists now is you can't share it with a partner. One of the bonuses of marriage should be the OPTION to allow those married to actually share a house and have access to it's features much like Free Company housing.

[DoctorPepper]

Then they need to fix the issue with availability. There are a lot of options to do this and it needs to be done. I hate that within 10min of land coming available on my server, they get sold out. This is a stupid way to do Personal Housing (FC housing like this isnt bad though).

I agree 100% with this, I just feel it should be SE's responsibility and that it shouldn't be the player who spent 10+ million on a plot that gets screwed over. In my opinion, personal housing should have been an instanced thing, where everybody gets a chance to participate, and FC housing be the public thing. I don't really know why they turned around and pushed both options into the same areas. It's sad to see content like gardening and chocobo training/dyeing locked behind a system that some people have no option to participate in.

[Dree-Elle]

You already forfeit leadership of a Free Company after 35 days, why should housing be any different? Play the game, or pay the price.

Our original Free Company leader has been logged out for 273 days and counting. We have confirmation from people who know him in real life that he will never be returning to the game. He has been replaced thrice over, and yet, all of the real estate he bought with a handful of alts solely for gardening purposes lies empty, bits and bytes rotting away.

How the hell is this even approaching fair?

ETA: Since people don't seem to get what I'm saying, let me put it this way: In real life, if you do not pay the rent, the landlord will evict you. The monthly subscription that you pay is your rent. It helps pay for upkeep on servers which have limited capacity for things such as housing. If you are not subscribed, the landlord (in this case, Square Enix) has every right to evict you from your virtual house so that a paying tenant can move in and help pay for server upkeep.

Adding more housing is not the solution; there is no room for it, and no matter how many wards they add, it will never be enough. Square Enix is not the world's largest video game publisher, they most likely have to make do with what they have.

Instanced housing is also not the answer. I, as well as many others, enjoy having our homes accessible for people to walk into and look around, to be a part of an actual neighborhood. Instanced housing cannot provide this. In larger FCs with many, many rooms in their halls, I have no patience to scroll through dozens of pages to find a single member's room (which aren't even in alphabetical order). Making an "instance portal" from, oh, say, Lavender Beds, leading to hundreds upon hundreds of "instanced houses" would make the situation even worse.

Saying one has the "right" to keep virtual belongngs forever while not even playing the game, no matter what the excuse is, just reeks of entitlement. If I were to take a sudden unexpected "hiatus" from the game and lost my FC and my house, oh well. Them's the breaks. I knew what I was getting into when i signed up, and I know that one day, the servers will be turned off for good. It's a virtual world, with virtual money, virtual housing, virtual life. The fact that some people don't seem to be able to distinguish this just makes me sad.

*And yes, occasionally I do pop off here about stuff pertaining to the game. So what? I know when I'm fighting a losing battle, which is to say, constantly. So I'm out. Hopefully someone running the game finally actually does something about this situation. But believe me when I say that when they do, it will most likely piss someone/everyone off.

[Nexxa]

You already forfeit leadership of a Free Company after 35 days, why should housing be any different? Play the game, or pay the price.

A bit harsh way of wording perhaps but I agree. At this point active players are being screwed out of not only luxuries but content by people who, in many cases, will never touch the game again.

[MageBlack]

I agree 100% with this, I just feel it should be SE's responsibility and that it shouldn't be the player who spent 10+ million on a plot that gets screwed over. In my opinion, personal housing should have been an instanced thing, where everybody gets a chance to participate, and FC housing be the public thing. I don't really know why they turned around and pushed both options into the same areas. It's sad to see content like gardening and chocobo training/dyeing locked behind a system that some people have no option to participate in.

i agree as well. I dont want the reclaim system, if they do it should be like a 3 month time or something long but at some point, they will need to clean out the empty, unused houses. I 100% agree with the personal homes in an instance. Also make it a reward when you get to a certain part in the story (with a nice long Relic Weapon esque quest chain to get it). And yes, so many people, like myself, have no home or even a FC home so we are locked out of exiting content and ALL THE UPCOMING STUFF AS WELL! why would they add in all this new stuff to housing when people are locked out of it for no other reason then not being on in time. I want to build an airship and explore the skies too. Please SE?

[DoctorPepper]

You already forfeit leadership of a Free Company after 35 days, why should housing be any different? Play the game, or pay the price.

Our original Free Company leader has been logged out for 273 days and counting. We have confirmation from people who know him in real life that he will never be returning to the game. He has been replaced thrice over, and yet, all of the real estate he bought with a handful of alts solely for gardening purposes lies empty, bits and bytes rotting away.

How the hell is this even approaching fair?

There are two sides to the coin and you're only looking at one of them. I agree, your old FC leader sucks for doing that and not properly transferring things over, but that doesn't apply to every case.

If the plots were FC exclusive I could agree with the reclaim system but the problem is that they mixed personal housing in with it. Things can come up in real life, lose your job, vet bill, house burns down, etc. that would put you into a situation where you might not be able to play for months. It's a lot easier for 1 person out of an entire FC to get on sometimes than it is for a single person by themselves.

[DarthBuzzer]

Housing plots should definitely be reclaimed after 31 days. Adding more plots would only fix the problem temporarily since the new plots would be gone quickly with no more available untill more are added. I think its pretty selfish to still have control of a plot after long inactivity. SE needs to keep paying and playing customers happy and frankly those who go inactive have less priority of those wanting to buy a house. it might be harsh, but its the best way forward unless SE completely remakes the housing system.

[Titor]

I have posted a full post on this here, completely against reclaiming land.
Tl;dr version:
People go away for personal problems, illnesses, military, health issues, etc, with every intent to return.
People who bought mediums/larges may have been saving up for months, and the amount for them is no trivial matter on a legacy server, so it would be a detrimental loss
It would NOT solve the issue in the long-run. It is not even a good band-aid. It is unfair (thought the current system is unfair, this would just shift it in the other direction
What we SHOULD be doing is asking for more wards, try to get SE to prioritize it, that way it could be fair for both current homeowners and people who want to buy homes now.

[DoctorPepper]

I have posted a full post on this here, completely against reclaiming land.
Tl;dr version:
People go away for personal problems, illnesses, military, health issues, etc, with every intent to return.
People who bought mediums/larges may have been saving up for months, and the amount for them is no trivial matter on a legacy server, so it would be a detrimental loss
It would NOT solve the issue in the long-run. It is not even a good band-aid. It is unfair (thought the current system is unfair, this would just shift it in the other direction
What we SHOULD be doing is asking for more wards, try to get SE to prioritize it, that way it could be fair for both current homeowners and people who want to buy homes now.

Completely agree with this.

[Gralna]

I have posted a full post on this here, completely against reclaiming land.
Tl;dr version:
People go away for personal problems, illnesses, military, health issues, etc, with every intent to return.
People who bought mediums/larges may have been saving up for months, and the amount for them is no trivial matter on a legacy server, so it would be a detrimental loss
It would NOT solve the issue in the long-run. It is not even a good band-aid. It is unfair (thought the current system is unfair, this would just shift it in the other direction
What we SHOULD be doing is asking for more wards, try to get SE to prioritize it, that way it could be fair for both current homeowners and people who want to buy homes now.

Except that those people who leave with plans to return are in the minority, sure there is a population surge with every update and most likely even more come 3.0, but we have yet to see population hit the peak it did right after 2.0 launched. This shows that steadily, people who are leaving the game, are doing so with the intent of not coming back. They tried it, they didn't like it for some reason or another and cancelled their sub. How is it fair to paying customers for that persons plots to sit vacant for the rest of the many years (hopefully) this game will be around?

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm not against more wards being added, in fact I'd love that more than reclaim system being added. However, devs have already mentioned the reason for not adding enough wards was limited server storage. Reclaim would be easier to implement while we wait for SE to get more servers, since until they do get them, we are very unlikely to get any decent amount of wards added.