Company Housing VS Personal Housing

[thunderbreak]

Now that demolishing is here, and condos are just around the corner. Maybe SE can take this opportunity and make FC housing and personal housing the way they were meant to be.

Once condos are introduced, FC (Personal) houses are no longer available for individual players to be purchased. People who already have a house will be able to keep them of course, but that will be grandfathered. Once you lose your house due to demolishing, or if you demolish it and give up the land rights, you'll never be able to purchase FC house as a personal house again.

And most of the housing efforts in the future should be focused on condo (personal housing). Since everything is instanced, give player an instanced chocobo stable like a parking spot in condos. And for gardening, have an instanced roof or belcony like some of the modern condo/appartment concepts. Eventually as PS3 gets phased out, and hardware/software limitations gets upgraded, start introducing room upgrades where players can spend gil and add rooms to their house, or make existing rooms bigger.

I feel FC housing turning into personal housing is a band-aid fix, especially consider an FC needs to be rank 6 before FC housing is available, and a player can potentially be level 1, pay RMT money, and go buy a house right away. And speaking from personal experience FC bank don't have nearly as much funds compare to a dedicated player who spend most of their time making money. So technically it takes more time to earn the rights to buy a house as a FC, it takes more effort to collect the money to buy a house as a FC. So clearly the original design of FC housing is not meant to be personal housing.

I hope this time the Mansion (condo) Yoshi P mentioned is exactly what he say it is, because there is some good potential where it can go.

[MihaelB]

I agree on this idea and also perhaps add a member minimum requirement on FC housing, e.g 30 members+

Personal FCs with 5-10 members should not be incorporated into the equation in my personal opinion as housing is so 'limited' and a burden on server limitations, you might as well limit it to 'active' FCs to attempt a community in the current housing areas. Having 500+ FCs on a server with the majoral being small and individually owned FCs does not help alleviate the housing problem if you're incorporating small FCs into the equation.

Private housing with perhaps 10-20+ tenants as a formed party/alliance purchase feature should be an option for people who don't want to be a guild but want a house together, perhaps link shell housing to finally be a realisation?

[ServerCollaps]

I agree on this idea and also perhaps add a member minimum requirement on FC housing, e.g 30 members+

Personal FCs with 5-10 members should not be incorporated into the equation in my personal opinion as housing is so 'limited' and a burden on server limitations, you might as well limit it to 'active' FCs to attempt a community in the current housing areas.

Private housing with perhaps 10-20+ tenants as a party/alliance feature should be an option for people who don't want to be a guild but want a house together, perhaps link shell housing to finally be a realisation?

that wont work, people would just invite tons of twinks and alts then and the situation would remain the same

once there are apartements and new wards there wont be anything like that needed anyway

[Jinxie]

plus it's hard to recruit members sometimes, and I'd feel even worse for the low pop realms. There'd be no way for them to differentiate between private personal FCs and not. An FC is an FC. Membership shouldn't be a determining factor on an FC's value. You're alienating the smaller FCs when you do that.

[MihaelB]

that wont work, people would just invite tons of twinks and alts then and the situation would remain the same
once there are apartements and new wards there wont be anything like that needed anyway

At least then it'll reduce the amount of alts holding houses & require more time/resources to people to create/invite alts, limiting their account house holding capability.

plus it's hard to recruit members sometimes, and I'd feel even worse for the low pop realms. There'd be no way for them to differentiate between private personal FCs and not. An FC is an FC. Membership shouldn't be a determining factor on an FC's value. You're alienating the smaller FCs when you do that.

Alienation is the purpose for the change. You're alienating personal house owners who don't want to be part of a FC with this change in which case, apartment housing is available.

There's no purpose to change if people can just easily circumvent it with a method that takes very little time. (Creating a personal FC)

I'd rather an active ward in a small server personally than several dead plots/wards in the server which is the case on Lamia.

[Jinxie]

Well hows about I create a few trial accounts, and pop a few dozen members into a tiny FC and falsely bloat the numbers? This change you're proposing isn't viable, even if it was an option. They have no way to detect which FC is private and which is not, and even if they did they cannot penalize the FC for having droves of inactive members.

[Gilraen]

The notion of room sizes getting bigger as consoles are dropped isn't going to happen because of one little thing. They did make houses bigger by adding basements, all with the consoles right there still supported. They added whole new housing wards, all with the consoles right there still supported. It's not the consoles keeping houses the size they are, it's the server space they've dedicated to it. It's why they are foreclosing on homes instead of adding yet more housing wards. So that housing doesn't use up more server space while attempting to provide players with homes. They can't help if the 'housing mafia' swooped in and started squatting.

[AlexiIvaniskavich]

I am not sure this idea would fully work on a small server, but would be of much greater benefit to a large one. Of course I am on a small server and I live in the Goblet, so there isn’t as much foot traffic in the neighborhood as I would like. Adding FC houses to my area would make it lively, but we still have plots available, even in the tier 1 areas (yes I know, it is still the Goblet). With the future (3.3?) bringing wards, a new zone and new condos - aka Yoship Towers – completely removing the ability to buy an individual estate (present housing zones) may leave some areas on some servers barren. Plus I would like to someday upgrade from my medium house on the water to a mansion elsewhere, or maybe a medium in a more visually appealing zone.

[thunderbreak]

I have been on the higher population servers, specifically: Diabolos, Ultros, Leviathan, and Balmung. From my experience, and it may just be the hours I'm on. But the wards are pretty empty anyways. Balmung have some foot traffic in the wards, but people never say hi. It's literally no different than any capital city. As a matter of fact I see more player to player interaction on capital cities than home wards.

Besides if SE is going to focus more on condos that's obviously where most of the foot traffic is, as a matter of fact condos will probably bring more foot traffic than any FC houses ever will.

[Felis]

Don't forget that we get around 3.3 mansions with enough rooms for 500 players in each