Reclamation of Inactive Housing announced

[Geesus]

So, is it now better to just leave your house be if you want to get rid of it, because you get the gil back? Or are they going to make it so that you get the same amount of gil back if you demolish it anyway?

EDIT: And relinquish the land and all that jazz.

You can sell it. I bought an FC house, small but a start, from someone looking to dump an FC no one was in for 5 mil. It's going to go to an Alt and my kids for now until all this happens and houses start being demolished and I'll buy what I really wanted. Hopefully. And then I can sell the current house I'm in to someone else. Move the kids and the alt and everyone can be happy.

[GamusStormhaven]

If you're not active, you don't need a damn house.

[Geesus]

I think SE should add an option to just sell their house for 80% out right for those who just want to get rid of the house without waiting.

You can sell it now if you want. No one said you can't lol. I bought one for 5 mil. A small house in Lavender Beds. I want a medium if not a mansion but hey, ... I took what I could get since this info at the time was not released. And it STILL doesn't guarantee being able to buy a plot. but it's a start.

[worldofneil]

Very happy with this, thank you SE!

Background info: We have a FC with a small house. I don't have a personal house (mainly because there isn't one available!).

Very excited about the possibility that we might be able to at some point get a bigger house for the FC and perhaps a small house for myself!

45 days is perfectly fine to me. If people aren't playing the game, they don't deserve to take up the finite resources! Please don't change this, 45 is great!

[StrejdaTom]

I think SE should add an option to just sell their house for 80% out right for those who just want to get rid of the house without waiting.

This is a nice suggestion, it would be wise to make it as a separate thread a few days later when all this gets settled down.
It will get lost and forgotten in here in my opinion.

[karateorangutang]

Anything that is in your house or yard that is bound to the property. Example. All the fancy garden stuff from primal fights etc such as Savage Arc Of Triumph. Inside. Ceiling lights. Things such as Armoire or Cooking stove, Smithing Bench. They all tell you when you place them that they cannot be retrieved. If you want a list, you will have to do a little work but you can at least FIND what you have and see if it is retrievable but, head here. http://en.ff14housing.com/ Or, just go in your house and try to take something out of it. if it let's you, you will if not, it'll tell you it will be lost AND it will tell you then ask you to confirm.

Thanks, your awesome

[Kerii]

Very happy with this, thank you SE!

Background info: We have a FC with a small house. I don't have a personal house (mainly because there isn't one available!).

Very excited about the possibility that we might be able to at some point get a bigger house for the FC and perhaps a small house for myself!

45 days is perfectly fine to me. If people aren't playing the game, they don't deserve to take up the finite resources! Please don't change this, 45 is great!

I have a small house in the lavender beds you can have if you like? It would be nice if I could pay my friend back for it, but I decided I'd rather share my girlfriend's house with her for a personal one.

[Neira]

They aren't being naive, they're being receptive of an implementation that directly affects them, good for them. Some of the people that have been clamoring for housing will get their chance at it. They'll be competing against droves of other players to get a house the moment it's demolished, and those who have set their alarm clocks for 45 days after the server reset of 3.1 (I don't doubt this will happen, if you think getting a house after this will be easy, you haven't prepared enough aside from amassing gil) will finally get their house. The housing problem persists, but they've joined the few. It's no more than a step forward, but at the very least, abandoned plots will be refreshed. As long as housing fails to encompass 100% of the player base, it hasn't been properly implemented.

Except there is still the very real possibility that not one single home out of 92,160 will go up for sale at 45 days after 3.1 launches. I think the majority of people talking about "abandoned" houses are making assumptions without any basis for proof. Since not a single person here can sit in-game and spam "player search" for 24hrs a day, for 45 days, the assumption that some of these plots will be demolished seems premature.

Even as the proponents for this system tell people that all they need to do is log in for X amount of time(five minutes or less so far) just to walk in their front door to refresh their home decay timer, they're pretending that these "abandoned" houses will become available soon. Are they actually thinking about what they are saying? Forty-five days multiplied by twenty-four hours is one thousand eighty hours, which is in turn sixty-four thousand eight hundred minutes. To assume that a house is abandoned because you didn't physically see someone log in for five out of sixty-four thousand eight hundred minutes(5/64800, 0.007% of that 45 day period) is indeed naive.

I still don't expect this to make that big of an impact, if any impact at all. I'd also expect that people who have the shiny and expensive items(that can't be retrieved) in their homes, but know they're planning to take a break, would rather sell their home to someone for an inflated price to recuperate some of their investment than lose the majority of it to this decay timer

I may be wrong, this may be a huge boon, and we will see half of the ward open up magically. I just highly doubt it, and I think given the number of people here who seem to be new enough to MMOs to not realize how broken our housing system is, are equally new enough to not understand that most long-time MMO players have numerous games they cycle through, often times without ever unsubscribing. The moment many of these people get an email saying their house will be lost, they will log in a few minutes, refresh the timer, and not touch the game again for 35 days when another email hits

And in the end, the housing system will still be broken, people here will still want homes, and SE will continue to rake in the most money for the least effort.

[Voldemort]

This will help small population servers, and perhaps some medium sized ones too.

Large population servers like Hyperion will open up maybe a couple hundred plots if we are generous with the numbers. There will be a chocobo foot race to the nearest housing ward, and all the opened plots will be bought up within the hour of release.
... leaving us back to square one, that even a recollection system could never relinquish enough housing for such a large population that the game currently has. With server populations reaching in the 30Ks, a 1400 house-system could never possibly accommodate everyone reasonably (it could technically happen, but would result in mass exodus of current free companies for ones with houses. So no, not reasonably)


Square Enix probably had the best chance over the last few weeks to try to bring in better server architecture with the Chaos Data Center transfer. Since their response is usually "server strain" for any and all housing problems, this would have been the best chance to experiment to see if upgrading the servers in terms of more housing wards would pay off in the long run.
Or have one dedicated server contain the housing wards for everyone. Latency issues wouldnt matter at all since there is no pressing content within a housing ward anyways.



Hopefully this reclamation system is just one step to ultimately fixing the problem. But chances are, we won't be seeing another big fix like this until next october or longer.

[Yshnal]

What I have to say about this:

- 80% gil back is a good compromise.
- Non retrievable items being lost upon a forced demolish is bad. I think that it would be better if those were saved too, in this situation, especially when it's saved just temporarily.
- 45 days for FCs are more than enough. If no one visits the plot in 45 days, that FC is dead and doesn't need a house.
- 45 days for personal housing is not enough. There's just one owner, so if for whatever reason you need to take a month and half away from the game once, you're screwed and will lose something that might have taken you (and maybe someone else, if you share it) quite some effort to achieve. A three month window would be much better, and would be more reasonable, for personal housing. Or better, just let them keep it as long as there's an active subscription, and use the 45 days rule only if there's no sub. Keep in mind that we can't give someone else our account so that they log in with it in that situation, as it's against the ToS, so you would be SOL.

This is just my opinion.