the whole housing situation in this game upsets me

[Dante_V]

I don't think housing relinquishment will fix any problem what so ever tbh. The demand for houses is so high and the supply so low that it would really make no difference at all. Let's say 100 houses on your server meet the criteria, and there are 10k people who want one (an extremely modest estimate considering some of these server pops) what are your chances here?

You also have to deduct from that supply the houses that are out of price range for some. Let's say 60 of those 100 are small houses and only 8k of the people can afford the smaller house, now the chances of acquiring a small plot are even lower.

In the end they have to add more houses and they need to find a way to do it effectively for everyone.

[Kosmos992k]

Someone's got to burst your daydream.

I don't see you offering any constructive suggestions, however....

Burst away, Yoshida-san is living in his own daydream if he thinks that the current crappy system is even remotely less than a grand failure. I don't care what he says, while the housing covers less than 50% of the potential buyers it will continue to be seen as a failure by most. He can rule out instanced housing, just as he has ruled out other things that have in fact come to pass. Remember his categorical statement that housing would be available to all and be more affordable than FC housing? Yeah, that happened, right? Things change, and at the moment, the housing system is completely inadequate for the purpose.

He can go one about server issues all he likes, he was the one who said that housing would be available to all, not a tiny limited minority of individuals who either are to tier crafters or gil buyers. Until he and his team come up with a solution I see no reason why anyone should stop complaining, stop trying to embarrass him with his own words or stop trying to propose solutions to emphasize that the situation REQUIRES a solution - unless his solution is to wait 10 years until the game fades in population to the point where finally supply might meet demand.

To quote Yoshida's words;

During a previous Letter from the Producer LIVE, I mentioned that we would make it possible for players who don’t belong to a Free Company to have a house with a yard so they can garden and raise chocobos, and the current system is designed to do this. We will be doing our best to provide more land as soon as possible, so please bear with us a little longer.

That was October 2014, I think we have waited a little longer, and yet the housing system abjectly fails to deliver on these very words.

Just wondering, but how does that explain FC rooms? Each FC room can have up to 512 rooms, and each of those rooms are "saved". They're always saying things that contradict how things are, like "We can't give you more retainers because the servers can't handle it, but you can buy it off the Mogstation!". So I'm led to believe they're either lying, or their team is just incredibly incompetent (not too be too offensive but I'm just speaking from what they allow us to see, and that's incompetence).
**snip**
Honestly I'm starting to not believe a word that comes out of Yoshida's mouth...**snip**

Indeed FC chambers are instanced and have to be saved and contain the same number of placed items as a small house, they don't offer the utility or personal ownership of a house, but they do require similar storage, and yet ar instanced. This is a great point thanks for making it. I also am wondering about Yoshida's words on housing, I'll not go as far as you did though, I'll just say that his credibility on housing is currently about as good as the housing system is successful - which plainly it is not.

Please do tell me how I drastically overestimated the amount of plots? I'm referring to data centre numbers. I drastically underestimated actually, 1440 lots would be 10080 plots on Elemental alone, assuming half of those are owned by FC which gives us up to 2.58 million personal rooms per DC. Even if we were to do it by world, that's still 368,000 personal rooms per world.

Hmm....for some reason I was thinking my FC is lot 31 on Mist ward 2, but looking at the maps it has to be the medium lot 30 right on the corner overlooking the bay. I could have sworn it said 31 on the map the last time I looked, but it has to be 30. I'll have to go back and modify my prior post to reflect the math.

Either way, T2Teddy has the right of it, there are a completely insufficient number of homes available for the server populations on all but the least populated worlds, and even those are oversubscribed for housing. I'm not sure why you're discussing housing lot numbers at the data center level, we are all locked into our own world server, so unless housing suddenly gets abstracted to the data center level and not the world, your 10,080 lots is completely misleading and irrelevant to personal housing needs on individual servers. Personal chambers are NOT personal housing. Don't even bother continuing to push that idea, it's like telling someone who wants to buy a house in real life that they will have to make do with a room at the Day's Inn.

Random suggestion - Grand Company Housing. Each ward/subdiv gets one new structure, a Grand Company barracks, which is just a single-floor small house decorated with the Grand Company furnishings for that company that has a stables and personal room door.
**snip**
The personal rooms likewise work exactly like they do for FC houses, cost the same, and have the same limit.
**snip**
That would provide a form of housing for ~25,000 players. Which... I guess is actually not very many, but still, it's something? Of course, after two days, all the houses would be bought by RMTs and their greetings would be website addresses...

Um, how is this different from simply providing a communal stable and letting players continue to use the free Inn room? Or for that matter simply joining a suitable Free Company and purchasing a chamber there? This doesn't sound like a solution since it's not really meeting the main problem head on, personal housing needs to be personal. The chambers in the FC houses are somewhat personal because you can redecorate and rearrange everything there. But that still doesn't really meet the demand for personal HOUSING, since it's a single room, with no external view and no gardening, chocobo stable, etc...

[TouchandFeel]

I personally feel that they should create another tier to the housing system, a mid-tier if you will, with city apartments.

They would be instanced, slightly larger than a FC room with an open balcony that looks out over a cityscape backdrop and would be accessed by interacting with an "entrance" that is placed somewhere in the cities simulating the door to the apartment complex. Since you wouldn't have a yard and couldn't therefore place outdoor furnishings, there would be special pots and planters that could be placed that you could plant and grow seeds in. As for chocobo stables, they should just have one available to use near the entrance to the apartments.

[Dalvy]

QFT. They need to dust off the idea of instanced housing. Current interiors are already instanced. FC Rooms? Instances. I kinda wonder if the whole "how do we make it easily visit-able?" is the real issue and not the server load.

I think .hack's fake MMO had an interesting approach. Homes were built inside instances zones that the owner customized to their liking. It was more for guilds who could afford to purchase private space, but the gist is that people can be given temporary permission to teleport to a player home located in an instanced zone.

Either way, the current system screws over players who are new, want to decorate a home of their own, and have to fight for a plot (esp on large servers)

[Nyalia]

Um, how is this different from simply providing a communal stable and letting players continue to use the free Inn room?

Because it has the words "Grand Company" in it. From past experience, SE is infinitely more likely to consider an idea that is segregated by GC. <_<

But really, it's a version of the Apartments idea that uses existing resources almost exclusively. They'd just need to add three new buildings to the game and then copy/paste some existing code and slap on timeouts. Solutions that use minimal new resources are easier to implement than ones that request they completely overhaul the system from scratch.

Also, it's not the same as the free inn room at all...

[Kosmos992k]

Because it has the words "Grand Company" in it. From past experience, SE is infinitely more likely to consider an idea that is segregated by GC. <_<

I'm sorry, I don't see how tagging it with the words "Grand Company" makes instanced housing any more or less likely. Nor do I see how giving wider access to personal chambers covers personal housing since it's an interior space only and does not bring the other benefits of housing with it.

I do agree that instanced housing is possible, the Personal Chambers prove that instanced homes could work in the game. But I think that any instanced housing needs to include provisions for all the functionality that comes with personal house ownership.

[Souljacker]

I'm sorry, I don't see how tagging it with the words "Grand Company" makes instanced housing any more or less likely.

The point I think she was making is that SE is much more likely to shoehorn more 'fixes' into their bad ideas than scrap their bad ideas and replace them with good ones. That's why we still have classes even though barely anyone ever takes off the soul crystal. That's why we still have retainers that are inferior to the bazaars\AH system we had in XI in every way. That's why we still have market boards with barely adequate search and sort features.

And, why we still have so much tied to their vision of Grand Companies when in reality, Grand Companies were nothing more than a watered down set of Nation missions that didn't even give any sense of accomplishment like there was in XI. Outside the story mission they could really be removed and nothing of value would have been lost.

It comes from trying to be as UNLIKE XI as possible, but still being unable to fight against core elements because they were just done so bloody well. The end result is mostly a mess and it's probably never going to be fully cleaned up. Some things are going in the right direction, like the new jobs not bothering with the silly base class idea, but the framework has already been laid and they will never be able to remove a lot of the brokenness. We're also going to be limited by the armory system tying things to weapons. That idea just never made any sense at all when switching jobs in XI already existed. But it is what it is, and it's not going to change.

I've given up on housing. SE wins. Over the years I've gotten the feeling on more than one occasion that the FF dev team thought they were in a PvP match with their subscribers, but lately it just feels like they no longer care. If they no longer care... then I guess I don't care anymore, either.

[BunnyChain]

Just wondering, but how does that explain FC rooms? Each FC room can have up to 512 rooms, and each of those rooms are "saved". They're always saying things that contradict how things are, like "We can't give you more retainers because the servers can't handle it, but you can buy it off the Mogstation!". So I'm led to believe they're either lying, or their team is just incredibly incompetent (not too be too offensive but I'm just speaking from what they allow us to see, and that's incompetence).

It's simple; how many people do actually buy an FC room and how many extra retainers? By implementing a gate (gil or extra subscription cost) they ensure that not everybody gets to use more ressources.

I don't see you offering any constructive suggestions, however....

Burst away, Yoshida-san is living in his own daydream if he thinks that the current crappy system is even remotely less than a grand failure. I don't care what he says, while the housing covers less than 50% of the potential buyers it will continue to be seen as a failure by most. He can rule out instanced housing, just as he has ruled out other things that have in fact come to pass. Remember his categorical statement that housing would be available to all and be more affordable than FC housing? Yeah, that happened, right? Things change, and at the moment, the housing system is completely inadequate for the purpose.

I'm curious, where do you take those numbers?

To quote Yoshida's words;

During a previous Letter from the Producer LIVE, I mentioned that we would make it possible for players who don’t belong to a Free Company to have a house with a yard so they can garden and raise chocobos, and the current system is designed to do this. We will be doing our best to provide more land as soon as possible, so please bear with us a little longer.

That was October 2014, I think we have waited a little longer, and yet the housing system abjectly fails to deliver on these very words.

Maybe you quoted the wrong part but where exactly does it fail?

My "constructive suggestions" to the housing situation: add more wards, a new housing area, relinquish abandoned plots; pretty much what is already planned.

[MistyMew]

So many good suggestions, out of desperation for a home and/or its perks, which is 100% understandable after such a huge amount of time has passed that people have been waiting.

Solution: upgrade se...period and provide exactly what some of us have been "enjoying" for a long time now to the rest of the players.

Shouldn't have to think of anything new or a "makeship" idea.

This is SE job..fulfill the needs asap imo, no compromises and please no more excuses! tbh.

[Kosmos992k]

I'm curious, where do you take those numbers?

Which number? 50%? It's an opinion that's why I said I thought it would continue to be seen as a failure by most if the system failed to cover more than 50% of the potential buyers.

Maybe you quoted the wrong part but where exactly does it fail?

we would make it possible for players who don’t belong to a Free Company to have a house with a yard so they can garden and raise chocobos, and the current system is designed to do this. We will be doing our best to provide more land as soon as possible, so please bear with us a little longer.

The comment was made in the context of requests for instanced housing to make the system more inclusive for all players, and Yoshi stated the above in support of not implementing housing that way, and indicated that we should bear with them a little longer. That was nearly a year ago. Considering the ratio of available plots to active players on my server is 1:12, I would have to call that a failure. I don't think many people would say otherwise.

My "constructive suggestions" to the housing situation: add more wards, a new housing area, relinquish abandoned plots; pretty much what is already planned.

I don't consider that as a constructive suggestion to fix things because it doesn't even come close to meeting the demand on servers like mine. More of the same is not really a viable response when the original thing has failed.