When will you really address the housing availability problem?

[SonKevin]

If they stop people from buying gil, they would stop people from buying houses so quickly. I just can't believe a person with no crafting or gathering classes having enough money to buy a house is a believable thing.

[Ryel]

If they stop people from buying gil, they would stop people from buying houses so quickly. I just can't believe a person with no crafting or gathering classes having enough money to buy a house is a believable thing.

There are plenty of ways to make gil without a crafter / gatherer

Ex primal mats
Coil mats
Treasure maps
Content sales
Daily/Weekly challenges
Retainer Ventures
Law/Red Scrip mat sales
Playing the marketboard
Spiritbonding / Materia sales
Diadem Materia Sales

I mean the list goes on

Stopping RMT wont put a dent in the number of available players who legitimately have made their gil and are still waiting for open plots.

[SonKevin]

SNIP

Ex primal mats - Required a team.
Coil mats - Required a team.
Treasure maps - Need a gather to get the maps unless you're spending money to buy them which in some cases you would just lose more money than you got.
Content sales - Usually supplemented by RMTs also required a team.
Daily/Weekly challenges - That's not a lot gil and especially not enough for the millions you need.
Retainer Ventures - You'd have to get super freaking lucky to consistently find mats that would get you the millions you need instead of the standard fish they bring back.
Playing the marketboard - Maybe, but without a good supply I can't see how you can play the marketboard without your own injections.
Spiritbonding / Materia sales - You'd have to keep buying the gear to spiritbond with and hope that the money you spent on the gear was less than the materia you got.

I took out the others because they didn't exist prior to our current problem so I can't comment on them today. These were the only way to get money before Heavensward when all the houses became sold out.

[Colorful]

Ex primal mats - Required a team.
Coil mats - Required a team.
Treasure maps - Need a gather to get the maps unless you're spending money to buy them which in some cases you would just lose more money than you got.
Content sales - Usually supplemented by RMTs also required a team.
Daily/Weekly challenges - That's not a lot gil and especially not enough for the millions you need.
Retainer Ventures - You'd have to get super freaking lucky to consistently find mats that would get you the millions you need instead of the standard fish they bring back.
Playing the marketboard - Maybe, but without a good supply I can't see how you can play the marketboard without your own injections.
Spiritbonding / Materia sales - You'd have to keep buying the gear to spiritbond with and hope that the money you spent on the gear was less than the materia you got.

I took out the others because they didn't exist prior to our current problem so I can't comment on them today. These were the only way to get money before Heavensward when all the houses became sold out.

What's your point with content requiring a team? Did you post not state any method with a crafter or gatherer class? But it does depend on the house size, for a small, unless you're the most unbelievably lazy player there is, 6 million gil in easy to make, even without crafters or gatherers. I've made just about 1.6 million through Diadem since release, and I do it maybe once or twice every 2-3 days and sell the mats. Now, I've heard on other servers the mats go for 100k-200k+ while on Tonberry it's a rather small 30-70k, so if you're on another server you could double, or even triple that number. Near the release of Heavensward I farmed the dragon materials, dragon skins, dragon blood, etc. In an hour I was making 150+ depending on how much RNG decided to love/hate me.

If you did it casually, you could easily afford the money to buy a small house, no questions asked. Now a medium+? Well, unless you have a raid group selling clears or are a very dedicated grinder, it's going to be tough.

Edit: looks like I forgot to read your last point, but toadskins are still a viable beginner way to make gil, and I'd have to assume that pre-HW they were far more valuable along with other materials.

[Vandril]

Playing the marketboard - Maybe, but without a good supply I can't see how you can play the marketboard without your own injections.

I literally solo-funded my FC's entire large house, permit, walls & paints and such, and some furnishing - some 55 million or so gil in total - from selling vendor gear on the markets. Yes, I have crafting, but I didn't even need to use it to make this huge profit. And it took me only a little under a month. Granted, that was right after expansion release, and I was selling HW vendor stuff to people who didn't yet have HW (or who didn't do their vendor research), so it's not always so easy to get that kind of fortune so quickly...

But the point is that it is doable. Non-crafters just need to look for opportunities. Playing the market is a lot more than just manipulating the market. Playing the market is finding opportunities and making them your gain. Market opportunities appear naturally due to the nature of supply, demand, and disparity of item knowledge.

Just wanted to clear that up.

[Ryel]

Ex primal mats - Required a team.
Coil mats - Required a team.
Treasure maps - Need a gather to get the maps unless you're spending money to buy them which in some cases you would just lose more money than you got.
Content sales - Usually supplemented by RMTs also required a team.

It doesn't matter if the content needs a team or not, prior to 3.1 Kingly whiskers on my server were going for 15mil each split by 8 is still a profit that doesn't require a crafter or gatherer. Additionally there are many content buyers who have legitimately made their gil via crafting or gathering, you don't get to just blanket it with "Supplemented by RMT" and ignore it as a viable source of income for those capable. Especially when that income can very well rack up hundreds of millions in gil over time.

Also if you play the odds on treasure maps you more often come out ahead over multiple maps even if you have poor drops due to the selling of crafting mats and the occasional high price items. when 3.0 hit Thav silks were going for 7mil+ on my server and selling consistently we had a map party going and had people drop multiples of them over time which is easily enough to cover the cost of the maps with a healthy profit.

Before Heavensward we had more than a few bluebirds and nutkins drop to cover multiple maps and profit for people.

RNG? Sure but income is income.

Daily/Weekly challenges - That's not a lot gil and especially not enough for the millions you need.
Retainer Ventures - You'd have to get super freaking lucky to consistently find mats that would get you the millions you need instead of the standard fish they bring back.

Free income is still income whether it's through luck or not, if you only look at income in terms of large gains your wallet isn't going to fill very quickly, and it's not as if I've suggest these as a SOLE source of revenue, the idea is that you are acquiring gil through multiple avenues so that it adds up over time.

Playing the marketboard - Maybe, but without a good supply I can't see how you can play the marketboard without your own injections.
Spiritbonding / Materia sales - You'd have to keep buying the gear to spiritbond with and hope that the money you spent on the gear was less than the materia you got.

I took out the others because they didn't exist prior to our current problem so I can't comment on them today. These were the only way to get money before Heavensward when all the houses became sold out.

Another poster broke down the marketboard bit so i'll skip that.

Spiritbonding was actually a huge money maker for a large number of players in my FC without crafting classes, they actually went out and FOUND other crafters to make the gear for them at near cost of mats and a percentage cut of the materia profits, this was more than enough during the relic boom for players to hit 10 to 20 mil in a few weeks of doing brayflox (hard) casually with bonus gil if they got a Baby Opo-opo to drop since those were selling for 2mil at the time.

Nobody is saying any of this is easy, but it's more than possible for the casual player.

[Gyson]

It doesn't matter if the content needs a team or not, prior to 3.1 Kingly whiskers on my server were going for 15mil each split by 8 is still a profit that doesn't require a crafter or gatherer.

At the risk of further inflaming the debate on how money is made, I think it's important to point out that while people may be making gil "legitimately", a big part of why they're able to sell items for so much gil in the first place is because someone, somewhere down the line *is* buying gil from RMTs. It just keeps changing hands as people marvel over the fact that they can get away with (to use your example) charging 15 million gil for a Kingly Whisker. I mean.. do you really think all the money moving around in the economy is from non RMT sources?

Anyway, that's a different topic entirely.

The data for those zones requires hardly any storage, imagine 50+ or even 100+ just small houses crammed into a zone and the sheer amount of stored data it takes. If it wasnt much, SE would have created larger instances with much more houses already. No one knows the numbers but server populations are numbers we CAN look at. If you think it will be possible on a legacy server without transfers away from... not very likely at all. Thats just considering one server.

That's speculation. Of course, we're all just speculating until SE gets completely honest with us and starts addressing this topic without the PR spin. There was a time when the the developers were very open and honest with the players (i.e. back when they were trying to save this game), but now we seem to be slipping back to that kind of dialogue exchange where we get strung along with just enough information and empty promises to keep us interested. That's very unfortunate (and annoying).

I will say this - Lord of the Rings Online has a very similar housing system: 4 regions with 30 houses per neighborhood. There's a 250 neighborhood limit per region. That's *30,000* homes compared to FFXIV's 1,440.. and LotRO is free-to-play and going on 7 years old now. Like I said.. when there's a will there's a way, and for SE the will just doesn't seem to be there on this matter. Why is that?

[Catwho]

If they stop people from buying gil, they would stop people from buying houses so quickly. I just can't believe a person with no crafting or gathering classes having enough money to buy a house is a believable thing.

A friend of mine did it with no crafts or gatherer jobs leveled. I loaned her 3.5 million gil out of my own stash so she could afford the relinquish fee and purchase cost from the server. She paid me back over the course of a month in 500K chunks by farming wyvern skins and wings when HW first came out. They were selling for 2-5K each at the time. A few hours farming to a stack of 99 would get her a "mortgage payment."

I paid for my own house outright on a server purchase - I got it from sheer dumb luck because the last member of a FC transferred to another server or deleted his character or something. Boom, house destroyed. 4 million gil raw from the server. But I had all 50 crafts at the time.