What the solution to the housing crisis SHOULD be

[Velisra]

I know there are a lot of other threads about this issue here and in other forum sections, but this is rather long, and I'm hoping that it presents a somewhat different view of what the solution to the housing crisis should be. I'm also hoping that the folks who have been around much longer than I have will forgive my impertinence and take this in the spirit that it's meant--just my opinion and thoughts on a solution based on what I know about the issue, and of course from the point of view of a fairly new player to the game.

I'm pretty new around here still, but the housing crisis is a big issue for me. I think about it a lot because it's a part of the game that I can't play even though I'm paying for a subscription every month. It's a big ol' locked gate right now, with no key to be found. I thought about it even more yesterday, after the "I had it in my hand" moment in the morning that didn't end with me owning a plot. (If you are interested, click for the story.)

I look through the housing wards every time I'm in town. I happened to see a small plot available in Mist early in the morning, and eagerly searched for it so that I could go there and buy it. I wanted it for the FC, but I didn't have buying privs. My daughter was logging in to fix that, and someone came and bought the plot right in front of me. I looked in the chat box, and the person had typed ">_>" and then I sent him a tell--I was just so deflated and disappointed at that moment. I said, "man, I was standing right there..." and he said, "I'm sorry. I waited from 8:25 to 8:30 to see if this was arranged, and then I went to the other housing areas to see if there was anything else available. When there wasn't I came back to buy this." To his credit, he really did sound like he was sorry, and honestly, if our positions had been reversed and I'd been the one to get the plot, I would have felt badly for him.

From what I've read in the forums and around the Internet about this issue, it seems that a lot of folks want SE to boot inactive players and/or FCs from their homes and make those homes available to other players, presumably on a first-come, first-served basis. Before this morning, I kind of agreed with that. I mean, these folks who aren't even subscribed to the game? Why the hell should they have a house when others who are actively paying to play every month have no opportunity to own a house?

But now I think that's just not the right answer. It's not an answer that the player base should accept from SE. The bottom line is that the housing system was never implemented with equality for all players in mind, and that's just not acceptable. All subscribed players pay the same fees to play the game, and all subscribed players should be entitled to an equal opportunity to experience ALL the content in the game, including the housing system content. When a player unsubscribes from a game like this, the expectation is that upon their return--whether it's weeks, months or years later--their characters and items will be exactly as they were left. As far as I'm aware, this is the default behavior of most games of this nature.

No one should have to feel badly that they have a house and someone else doesn't. No one should be locked out of content because the content is limited in this way. No one should return to the game after some time away to find that they are homeless.

FF is an awesome game, not least because there's not this feeling of competition with other players for things like resources, mobs, etc. like there is in other MMOs. It's very much an "us against the bad guys" situation, and the lore supports that. However, the housing system doesn't support it. The housing system in its current iteration is intensely competitive, which feels very wrong. Evictions of inactive players and/or FCs is a band aid fix that won't last, and will also cause more problems than it solves. There absolutely should be a plot available for every character on the server, and every FC on the server, without exception.

What the solution SHOULD be

When SE introduced housing, they made a mess of it. It's poorly implemented, and it's not acceptable that the availability is limited to the lucky few, even after being increased twice. When SE first released FF, it was also poorly implemented--so much so that the game was rebuilt from the ground up. Even so, as I understand it, legacy players kept what was theirs, and their characters and items earned in 1.0 were transferred to ARR.

The player housing system currently in place in ARR should receive the same exceptional treatment and care that the game itself received. The housing system should be rebuilt; the players and FCs that currently own property, whether currently subscribed to the game or not, should retain exactly what is theirs, and the system should also accommodate ever single other player and/or FC.

If instanced housing is the only answer to making housing available equally to all players and FCs that desire it, so be it. Instancing is widely used in FF to great effect, and I have every faith that SE could pull this off with flying colors if only they set their minds and resources to solving the problem instead of affixing another band aid.

The player base should accept nothing less than a complete rebuild of the housing system from SE.

[Naunet]

Agreed. They need to start over with this system. Salvage bits and pieces if they can - maybe just maintain the wards for FCs only, but if they're too much of a resource drain...

Instanced housing is THE only real answer to let everyone who wants a house have a house. There's just no way around it.

[Youkulm]

Could not agree more. SE messed up housing badly and they're too busy putting bandaids on to realize it just needs an overhaul. The wards were never a good idea. Eventually they would be all gone due to new and old FCs anyway. This was always going to be a problem even when housing was new. I don't know how they could have possibly over looked this? And lets not even get into the huge disaster that personal housing turned the wards into.

Housing NEEDS to be instanced so it is available to EVERYONE that can afford it. Locking subscribers out of content because they "didn't get there first" isn't right. It's not like raiding where you have a choice to do it. We aren't even given a choice... were just told "Please look forward to it" .. meaning.. what? You want me to sub for another year while I wait for content I may never have?

If they can't affords the servers for more housing wards then I see a huge problem when people start unsubbing because they can't get houses... because then their "money" issues will just get worse... ( which has been a discussion with my moderately sized FC. We don't want a merger, we love our FC and we can afford a house. Heck we can afford to buy a house from someone else.. but guess what? No one has been actively selling. That's 20 subs down the drain while we take a break waiting for wards. )

I understand when people don't get why this is such a huge deal.... but for rest of us... housing is an integral part of the game. It's a place of community for you and your FC. I have had and have been in an FC with housing and for some people its a lot of fun. I get it if you're not into it... but for the rest of us :c we just want to not be homeless.

The Mog House system was perfect in 11, why did they stray so far?

Instanced housing. PLEASE.

[Nyalia]

I'm not defending FFXIV's housing setup here, nor saying you all don't have valid points, nor saying that nothing needs to be done. But, I would like to say that instancing housing doesn't instantly solve the problem, and is not necessarily the correct or only solution required. Unless I'm mistaken, SE has posted elsewhere that providing instanced housing would be just as much of a resource drain, if not more so, than the current system, and certainly couldn't be provided alongside it. How then, you say, can they provide nearly unlimited personal rooms? I have no idea, I just know what I remember reading. What I mean though is that we don't know how SE has implemented their databases and network connection interfaces. It does sound though like they couldn't resolve this issue without rewriting the system from scratch, and that is a huge resource drain. It seems like it would require them to stop creating new content and stop looking into resolving the other space issue - personal storage space.



That said, I feel like if they did what you propose and spent the time to rewrite the system, they could resolve both of these space issues at once. Rewrite the retainer, armoire, and housing systems all together. Give us an instanced house (on a floating island in the sea of clouds for all I care) where we can store items off-character. Pool the retainer inventories into a storage locker there. Let us sell items from that storage locker and craft and glamour with materials in that storage locker (a feature that's supposed to be added to retainer inventories). Let us pay in-game money to increase the number of items we can have in a house. Let those of us who currently have houses launch them into the sky, keeping our current house exactly as it is, except in an instance instead of a neighborhood.

Neighborhoods aren't that cool. Having them doesn't make people talk about how awesome FFXIV's housing system is. It just makes people talk about how FFXIV's housing system is inaccessible, elitist, and poorly designed. Those are the conversations I see around the internet and forum sites, not people gushing about how cool it is to have a neighborhood in the game.

Forget the ground. Let us colonize the skies, keeping our houses exactly as they are but also letting more people have them. Rewrite your databases to optimize for instanced housing. Forget the neighborhoods - turn the neighborhood zones into some new content zone later on.



Anyway, what will really happen is some people will lose their hard-earned houses for being inactive. (I feel bad for the US veterans who will come back from the middle east to find their in-game property confiscated because they had the gall to spend a couple months serving their country.) They'll add a bit more inefficiently-handled housing and a way for people to move to biggest houses. The problem will be alleviated for a bit. Complaining will die down. Then the houses will fill again, and complaining will resume. A while later, they'll add more housing. Rinse and repeat. True solutions would take time, but quick fixes are cheap.

[ChameleonMS]

Evictions of inactive players and/or FCs is a band aid fix that won't last. ...
The player base should accept nothing less than a complete rebuild of the housing system from SE.

I support you general idea (I up voted).

As a software developer by profession I will add this perspective.

High Impact issues - is an issue that is affecting many people and preventing those people from using a feature of the system.
I believe we can all agree the housing availability issue meets that requirement.

When a high impact issue occurs step one is always, get as many people back to using the system feature via a workaround as soon as possible.
In this case, freeing up land from inactive players is the work around.

A work around is not the final solution. It is just what is available without X time of redesign and implementation.
A Work around's primary purpose is to buy the development team time to create and implement a permanent solution while satisfying large contingent of the affected user base.

[ChameleonMS]

I feel bad for the US veterans who will come back from the middle east to find their in-game property confiscated because they had the gall to spend a couple months serving their country.

I do not feel bad for them. They are still earning money (actually more money while away than at home) and could easily maintain the subscription while away.
I do feel bad for the people due to life circumstance had to leave the game and cannot afford to maintain their subscriptions. Then when life gets better for them, and they can come back, their stuff is gone.

Now, stuff being gone, assumes that SE will rip and destroy their housing data. I doubt SE will be doing that. It will likely get put in to a backup system somewhere and when the person returns they will have access to everything except the actual house.

[Rina_Leonhart]

Assuming they actually have internet access to get onto the game, as well as a computer as they may have had to leave theirs at home for all we know. Could be navy, they have communication blackouts where they are not allowed to call anyone or use the internet. Could be special ops which are out in the field doing a mission and can't use a computer. So, if SE still decides to go the 'must enter the house once every 30-60 days heck, even 90 days route', they won't be able to keep their houses due to their jobs. Yeah, it was their choice to join the service, but some joined in order to get college funded to better their lives. So, if it is subscription based, so be it, but at least give a decent amount of time for people rather than 30 days. Maybe they can make a system that tags your account as inactive due to health/military reasons only for x amount of time so they can keep their houses and it's the truly abandoned that gets relinquished.

[Raso]

I think what they need to do is make the unique systems in Housing such as airships and chocobo stable available to everyone. Make it so housing isnt so damn important to play the game.

My FC is pretty new and so am I but there isnt a single house available on the server and thus we can not change our chocobo's color or even level it up past 10, or even touch the airships that they keep talking about they are going to expand... I want to actually play the entire game

Heck I would pay an extra dollar a month for a house...

[Kinseykinz]

Wait, have the actually announced how houses will be forfeited yet? I mean, they have mentioned it's coming...but do we have exact details? Because without exact details, everyone is jumping in a bit.

Here's what we know.
1. At SOME point in the future, we'll be able to share our personal homes w/ up to 5 people.
2. At SOME point in the future, SE will try to re-absorb unused homes/land
3. Currently, FC's can kick a member who owns a room and all of that members 'stuff' (at least the non breakables) is transferred to an npc for them to retrieve it from so they don't loose everything(I do not know what happens to items like the Garuda couch as i've never been ousted from a FC).
4. The ORIGINAL home forefeit plan was based on FC homes only (homes that should be logically used by more than 1 person at least weekly)...but it revolved around the actual home not being entered for a set amount (I want to say 30 or 60) days.
-The community was NOT at all happy with SE's original 'foreclosure' plan however, keep in mind, at that time, SE had no NPC to retrieve your housing items from, nor did they have personal housing. I don't even think at this time, we had the auto pass of FC leadership if you had an inactive master. (FC mastership will already pass to the next highest ranked/longest membership member of your FC after a set amount of time (I forget the time maybe 60-90 days?). So all this factored into the blowback at the time.
5.They also said, once they can figure out how to get the 'vacant' out of the current wards, and move people in, they'd open up different housing somewhere (potentially Ishgard).

But now, the new systems will likely be based on several things: (IE what I think they are actually setting us up for/planning)

1. House usage....as long as SOMEONE with proper access to the house uses it within a set amount of time (FC home or Personal), you retain ownership. So if you have a personal home, and you need to leave the game for an extended period of time, invite a friend to share access of your home (or 2), and as long as they walk into it on occasions, you retain your home WITHOUT having to sub. Basically, one reason SE is offering 'house sharing' is to alleviate some of the 'my job made me leave x amount of months, please don't take my home away' option.
-This method works for both FC and personal housing. If you have at least 5 people sharing a house, and none of them can be bothered to enter it in 1-3 months time (depending on SE's window), then really you likely don't need it.
2. They also now have a system in place that can return your belongings...so while you still might be out the land/home purchase price (which to be frank is the risk you take), your stuff remains in tact.
3. They might also just tie it to 'active' subscriptions...so as long as 1 person in the FC/personal home has an active subscription, the house remains...and it's only lost if EVERYONE in that house has an inactive SUB for x amount of days/months.
4. Once they have their new system in place, whatever it may be, they will watch to see how each server/ward fills and opens up. Based on this, they will offer additional housing (potentially different than the 'open zone' we have now) in another and/or adjoining areas.


Will this make everyone happy? No, NOTHING will make everyone happy....ever. But will it solve a lot of the problems currently with housing. Yes. And it's likely one of the most fair ways to do it. If NO ONE is using the house, when even personal homes can have multiple users (future implentation), and all their stuff can be returned, really there is no reason to complain. People have already been losing their 'FC room' investment gill (300K) every time they buy a FC room and then demolish it to move....and I believe if you get booted from the FC you're out the gil as well. So being out the initial cost, is also not new to this game (albeit personal/FC homes cost more).

[Dante_V]

I agree 100% with the OP. My thoughts exactly. I can almost guarantee that 100% of the people who want a house and do not have one still won't have one after the evictions. This is just basic supply and demand.