Time on House removal/reclaming is way to short! (private houseing)

[Maddonious]

As many are crying out for a housing reclaiming due to the cheaters and hoarders of properties for their own gain it has finally be announced that housing will indeed have a system to take away houses that are no longer in use to give others the advantage to buy.

However I for one am not happy with the current time limit set up in the preview of the system. For all houses, be it FC or Private, you have 45 days to get a member(fc) or the owner (private) to set foot inside the house to reset the timer.

This sounds good for FCs with many members but for private housing I do not feel that it is being treated fairly. Those who work hard to acquire the luxury of a house or who saved up just enough to even buy a small one are now at risk of losing everything they work for in a fraction of the time it took to acquire (wait for open land/making money/handling RL).

Sure you may get 80% of your gold back from the land purchased but all the money you used on exotic pieces, primal trophies, rare raid mantles (which could be worth more then the land the house was built on) will now be taken from you with no way of getting them back after a short period of time. For someone who is legit these issues far outweigh the benefits of such a system. It would be like taking my time I put into the game and make it worthless.

With limited land that is of high value for multiple reasons it seems an automated system is not the best at determining how housing should be taken away. It would be best to have a member of a moderating team investigate those who are hoarding lands when reports are made to more quickly relinquish the land being hoarded instead of punishing those who furnish their houses with pride.

45 days is not enough for private housing. If I wanted to take a few months break to catch up on other games, military, RL stuff, SE will be forcing me to resub after a 1 month break just so I don't lose a vital part of my progress. That is shady as hell and it a dirty busniess tactic to make sure I have to pay them to keep what is mine, that is extortion in its current form! It is unfair and needs to be reevaluated to better protect its honest buyers.

Make the time required seperate for FC and Private. FC can stay 45 days but private should be at least 90 days so people will not lose what is theirs unfairy and have to pay $15 a month to make sure they keep it.

...... or just add more instances.

Edit: People, not everyone is a no lifer or a child. You have to understand this from an adult view point instead of just spouting your thoughts about how all this is fine. We have time restrictions, we have issues, we will lose a ton of gil as well as rare primal furniture that can't be reclaimed. 1 payment period missed and you lose the house you put work into. The layout planning, where items go, the gil spent and the time to get that gil will just be for nothing. This isnt just about getting it for the garden, some people love to show how awesome they decorated their house!

I hate this system down to its core but if they absolutely need it this way then 45 days is not enough of a window to make us feel safe. 90 minimal would be more manageable but still unfair.

A lot of you also don't see an issue with losing your house then having to reclaim those items after, what 35 days(?), and being able to hold onto them. Im packed right now since I don't want to spend $2 more currently for more retainers and if I had to reclaim all those housing items that means I would need to buy more retainers just to hold onto them till I could find a new place. I would have to spend more money just to reclaim my items back from the caretaker cause of the limited space!

This whole system screams "Give us more money!" no matter how you look at it. I'd rather have a report system to investigate empty, held houses instead of this automated BS.

[Velox]

To be honest, regardless of how much you're going to hate to read this, but SE is a company. A company's goal fist and foremost is to make money. If it doesn't make money, it ceases to be. That being said, the current system is far from perfect, but there are finite resources and current housing allows for almost limitless customization. Each house eats up a ton of space. You can't simply just make more wards unless you have the resources for it. SE could easily dumb down housing (remove building design, limit locations for furniture, limit rotations, etc.) like what Turbine did with LotRO and allow thousands of wards, but it would stifle creativity and the feeling of ownership.

[Niwashi]

Each house eats up a ton of space. You can't simply just make more wards unless you have the resources for it. SE could easily dumb down housing (remove building design, limit locations for furniture, limit rotations, etc.) like what Turbine did with LotRO and allow thousands of wards, but it would stifle creativity and the feeling of ownership.

Turbine went with hooks where you could place furnishings because of the client side graphics engine they were using to display those items. (Also because they were a lot pickier about avoiding clipping than SE is, so wanted to make sure you couldn't put things too close to each other. I'm not entirely sure why they were so picky about that when they have clipping issues elsewhere, though.)

As for the extra space free placement takes as compared to such a system, there's probably a couple bytes for each of the X,Y,Z coordinates and another byte for the orientation. That's seven bytes per item for positioning compared to one byte for which hook it's placed on in LOTRO. An extra six bytes per item, multiplied by the maximum 100, 150, or 200 items per estate, multiplied by the 20 small 7 medium and 3 large estates per ward, comes out to a free placement system costing (at most with every house filled to capacity) a little under 22 kilobytes extra per ward as compared to a hook system. That's certainly not what's stopping them from adding a thousand or so wards like LOTRO has.

And yes, there's some other customization that FFXIV's housing offers which LOTRO's doesn't, but LOTRO's housing offers item storage which FFXIV's doesn't, so if anything I'd bet on LOTRO's being the one to have a greater amount of data per estate than FFXIV.

[Velox]

For now this is the best system to free up space from inactive players.

To be honest, from a 100% business standpoint, you can't please everyone. Your goal is to make money, but in this case you must choose between customers.

Think of SE like a restaurant running low on steaks. 2 people walk in asking for steak. 1 comes in once or twice a week, the other only comes in every other month. There's only enough steak for one of them. SE is going to give it to the first customer. He frequents the restaurant more often, giving them more money, keeping them in business. In their eyes, he's a much more valuable customer. It would hurt them worse to lose him over customer 2, so they give him the last of the steak.

If you are someone who frequently unsubs from the game, you are a much LESS valuable customer than someone who subs every month nonstop. When resources are finite, you gotta pick and choose favorites. Don't be surprised of systems don't cater to you.

[Maddonious]

snip

OK I see what you're trying to say but that analogy doesn't make sense. In the end they would have the same amount of money from 1 steak no matter what customer bought it so therefore irrelevant. In that situation it would be first come first serve. but back on topic....

The thing is it's not inactive players who are choking the housing market, its multi home owners/bots who are, not that both arn't a problem.They are on and they will not stop subbing. This system will not work on weeding them and only to hurt those players who are legit. Instead they should have just had a reporting system or even both to allow freeing up space. I love the housing in this game for its customization so that's why it hurts even more if you put time and effort into it just to lose it due to military leave or some accident.

For co-owning the house is something to still be seen since 3.1 is a bit of a mystery still in some aspects but my topic was the time limit on all this. 45 days, weather you or a what if co-owner, has to step inside the house is ridiculous. What if you get back just to find out your co-owner also took a break from the game (just like a lot are doing now due to patch time) and you just lost everything you spent so much money on? After 6 months of working and saving up I could lose it all in just a month and a half? No, that's just BS.

Also those who are antisocial has nothing to do with it. Don't point at them and say deal with it, they would pry play more then anyone and therefore get hurt more then anyone if they needed to step out of the game due to issues.

[Syrehn]

The thing is it's not inactive players who are choking the housing market, its cheaters/bots who are..

I don't think you're right on this point.

I've know a lot of players that are part of friends/family FC's or "couple" FC's that have homes/personal homes and haven't logged in for months. At the same time I know players that use their alts for multiple personal homes as well as multiple FC's; they're active but use those additional properties mostly for dress up.

Think about this for a minute if every account can have 8 characters per server and all of those characters are an FC leader that also owns personal housing that's 16 houses per server that could potentially be tied up by 1 individual. Now, I'm sure that it would be a rare scenario to find an account with 16 houses on a single server, but as mentioned, there are individuals/fc's that utilize this to their advantage and do have multiple homes.

So it's really inactive players combined with the fact that SE hasn't implemented a 1 house per account per server rule that is choking the housing market, not the bots.

Edit:

Yeah those people who can buy multiple houses I declare "cheaters" (if they have medium and up) but I guess i'll rewrite to clarify what I ment.

Ah, well they might be "cheaters" in your eyes but to SE they technically aren't since they aren't circumventing any rules because those rules don't actually exist.

[Maddonious]

Snip

Yeah those people who can buy multiple houses I declare "cheaters" (if they have medium and up) but I guess i'll rewrite to clarify what I ment.

[Ayerinn]

So it's really inactive players combined with the fact that SE hasn't implemented a 1 house per account per server rule that is choking the housing market, not the bots.


Ah, well they might be "cheaters" in your eyes but to SE they technically aren't since they aren't circumventing any rules because those rules don't actually exist.

I have mixed feelings about alts owning houses - it is SE's fault for having such god awful relationships between characters on your own account. No shared bank space, can't mail alts, etc. Unless the share house feature is extended to your alts, I don't see it being fair to implement a one house per server/account rule.

[Malicewolf]

I have mixed feelings about alts owning houses - it is SE's fault for having such god awful relationships between characters on your own account. No shared bank space, can't mail alts, etc. Unless the share house feature is extended to your alts, I don't see it being fair to implement a one house per server/account rule.

See, but with this, I have a bit of a problem. So what I'm hearing is, you have multiple houses. If you made all 8 accounts available on a standard service, then you may have taken 8 houses away from people. And this is assuming you aren't taking one for FC's and that you are not in difference FC's on all the alts. So now, you have an abundance of characters, which you only play on some constantly, the other's are most likely (pls note, I'm saying most likely) just a pass time you log into every once and a while. I will agree, this problem could easily be solved if SE just allowed alt's to enter the same house this could be solved. (seriously, they should just add in a renting house/room system :P). But even still, I don't see the need for people to have personal houses on alts. Yea, it's nice that you can, but that just goes along with the whole "if you don't have the time to attend to it, then why not let others who will use it?".

[Niwashi]

I have mixed feelings about alts owning houses - it is SE's fault for having such god awful relationships between characters on your own account. No shared bank space, can't mail alts, etc. Unless the share house feature is extended to your alts, I don't see it being fair to implement a one house per server/account rule.

SE can either allow alts to have their own houses or allow alts to share a house with each other. I'd actually prefer the later, and think we should have a lot more interchange between our characters. But what would be totally wrong is adding a 1 house per account rule before fixing the nearly impenetrable wall between our alts. The question isn't why are alts allowed to each get their own house, it's why are alts required to each get their own house in order to have housing access.

There's talk of some sort of house sharing coming up but I haven't seen any finalized plans for it yet. Most speculation seems to be that it's going to be based on allowing certain Friends to share your house, though, and since you cannot Friend your own alts, they're likely to be locked out of it. If that's wrong, and sharing with our alts becomes a thing, well then maybe that 1 house per account rule could become viable.