Company Housing VS Personal Housing

[Gilraen]

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

And with the consoles right there still supported at the same time.

[Aushi]

Im in Ultros in a "private" FC. Few irl friends only. We are aaaalways in our house. Specially my BF and I. We are in the mist. Its literally dead. All the time. I only ever see maybe one or two people on MB or summoning bells, say hi and never get a response. /sh has more social people than wards honestly. I dont think anything anyone does will change it. People talk among their own FCs. Thats it sadly lol Not allowing people to not buy their own wont change that. Plus, some people like me enjoy decorating outside too! Condos wont have that option.

[thunderbreak]

Im in Ultros in a "private" FC. Few irl friends only. We are aaaalways in our house. Specially my BF and I. We are in the mist. Its literally dead. All the time. I only ever see maybe one or two people on MB or summoning bells, say hi and never get a response. /sh has more social people than wards honestly. I dont think anything anyone does will change it. People talk among their own FCs. Thats it sadly lol Not allowing people to not buy their own wont change that. Plus, some people like me enjoy decorating outside too! Condos wont have that option.

Exactly. Anyways on the subject of outdoor furnishing, I think they can definitely experiment with the roof/balcony idea if they are considering it. I mean asking for a roof/balcony the size of a small plot yard size is not really out of question IMO (instanced of course). Besides, I'm not sure if the original personal housing was suppose to even include a yard since they never gave any details.

[Laerad3993]

If they want to grandfather people in, by all means. Otherwise absolutely not. So what if some people have 5-10 players. I have 7, and it's all family. Only 3 of us actually play frequently, and low numbers aren't indicative of suspicious behavior or conniving attitudes.

I spent over 60m on airships, probably 15m on housing glam, 10 on furnishings, and built my FC with my sparse family. Just because some stupid people decided to ruin your experience doesn't give anyone a right to ruin mine.

[Ashkendor]

I feel FC housing turning into personal housing is a band-aid fix,

I honestly feel it's where they went terribly wrong and broke the housing system, ending up with the mess we have now.

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

5-10 members isn't a "personal" FC, though. My own FC is a good example. Myself and several friends broke off from a previous FC and formed our own due to not getting along with a couple of members. With only 5 members when we founded it, we ground up the FC points to reach rank 6 and we got the money together for a Medium house. I really see no need for a membership requirement just for house ownership. Add to that the fact that a house is a huge selling point for recruitment. With so many FC's out there that already have houses and all the benefits that go with them, it'd be quite silly to expect people to stay for long in one that doesn't.

Show me a big FC and I'll show you an FC that was small at one point. Everyone starts somewhere. Over time we've picked up more members and now have around 30. It may not seem like much, but I personally don't believe in standing in town inviting random sprouts or shouting my head off every 2 minutes just to achieve some arbitrary number. I'd rather stick with our tight-knit core of good friends and the wonderful new people we've met along the way that join us by choice. I put up a PF once in awhile and leave recruitment open and that's about it. I get that you want to discourage single-person FC's from house ownership, but there's got to be a better way to do that than to completely bar small but 100% legitimate groups of people from it.

[MihaelB]

5-10 members isn't a "personal" FC, though. My own FC is a good example. Myself and several friends broke off from a previous FC and formed our own due to not getting along with a couple of members. With only 5 members when we founded it, we ground up the FC points to reach rank 6 and we got the money together for a Medium house. I really see no need for a membership requirement just for house ownership. Add to that the fact that a house is a huge selling point for recruitment. With so many FC's out there that already have houses and all the benefits that go with them, it'd be quite silly to expect people to stay for long in one that doesn't.

Show me a big FC and I'll show you an FC that was small at one point. Everyone starts somewhere. Over time we've picked up more members and now have around 30. It may not seem like much, but I personally don't believe in standing in town inviting random sprouts or shouting my head off every 2 minutes just to achieve some arbitrary number. I'd rather stick with our tight-knit core of good friends and the wonderful new people we've met along the way that join us by choice. I put up a PF once in awhile and leave recruitment open and that's about it. I get that you want to discourage single-person FC's from house ownership, but there's got to be a better way to do that than to completely bar small but 100% legitimate groups of people from it.

It's about occupancy and changing the system, not sentimental reasoning. If you're not going to add a member limit or login requirement then it is a useless idea in the first place and more selfish reasoning to add more wards/ housing.

The current system is 1 personal house + 1 FC house per account. 6 alts can be used to hold a FC house each with no level requirement, this will essentially do nothing if the system does get changed to FC housing only and has absolutely no impact. People can still buy up whole wards with alts + personal FCs, nothing gets changed, people will still have no housing and no way to deter the current problem.

Same with 1 account per service account, people will buy housing with $5 codes, it's not difficult to get access.

[Ashkendor]

It's about occupancy and changing the system, not sentimental reasoning. If you're not going to add a member limit or login requirement then it is a useless idea in the first place and more selfish reasoning to add more wards/ housing.

With 5 members we'd be able to make enough lame sprout alts to bypass the arbitrary number, so it achieves nothing anyway.

People shouldn't have to be forced into big FC's just to get the benefit of FC housing.

The current system is 1 personal house + 1 FC house per account. 6 alts can be used to hold a FC house each with no level requirement, this will essentially do nothing if the system does get changed to FC housing only and has absolutely no impact. People can still buy up whole wards with alts + personal FCs, nothing gets changed, people will still have no housing and no way to deter the current problem.

Part of the current problem is that you aren't limited to 1 personal house and 1 FC house per account, but I honestly think it should be. Right now it's on a per character basis but there's no real reason to have several alts with houses. It'd be better if they set it up so that all of your alts could share the same house and only allowed one of each type per account, period.

Same with 1 account per service account, people will buy housing with $5 codes, it's not difficult to get access.

Can trial accounts or accounts in their first 30 days actually buy housing? I wouldn't think they'd be able to.

You should at least have to pay a sub to purchase housing.

[MihaelB]

With 5 members we'd be able to make enough lame sprout alts to bypass the arbitrary number, so it achieves nothing anyway.

People shouldn't have to be forced into big FC's just to get the benefit of FC housing.

That's the problem in a nutshell isn't it? We have housing for enough people on most servers (I wouldn't know about high popularity ones like Gilgamesh) but people want their OWN housing for their OWN group of friends. People come and go in their small friendship groups but still demand a house for their period of game time.

It's the same as the problem in real life, we want our own needs and our own desired fulfilled whilst stepping on everyone else around us as long as we're satisfied and feeling entitled.

There are so many houses on my server with individual FCs/ private housing and the wards are essentially dead leaving it only to be used as a silent crafting area.

[Ashkendor]

That's the problem in a nutshell isn't it? We have housing for enough people on most servers (I wouldn't know about high popularity ones like Gilgamesh) but people want their OWN housing for their OWN group of friends. People come and go in their small friendship groups but still demand a house for their period of game time.

Even with your arbitrary limitation in place, there still wouldn't be enough housing to go around on my server and several others. You talk about people "coming and going" with small friendship groups, but my small FC has been active nonstop since it was founded in May 2014. We were able to get housing when it was plentiful and have gotten tons of use out of it in the year and a half since then. I say this as someone that owns both an FC house and a personal house - the single biggest problem with housing right now is personal housing being combined with FC housing. That's where SE went wrong. Having to have a rank 6 FC at least provided some kind of gating. What we need now is a limit on how many houses any one person can own per account.

It's the same as the problem in real life, we want our own needs and our own desired fulfilled whilst stepping on everyone else around us as long as we're satisfied and feeling entitled.

There are so many houses on my server with individual FCs/ private housing and the wards are essentially dead leaving it only to be used as a silent crafting area.

No, I just think that there's got to be better ways of going about it than having an arbitrary membership requirement for FC's.

[Reinha]

I absolutely hate the idea, that a person who doesn't yet have a personal house would never be able to get the same enjoyment as I'm currently getting from mine. Not everyone's fc has a house. Not everyone has furnishing rights to their fc house. Not everyone wants to debate with their fc members who gets to garden this week and who furnishes what corner. Not everyone is going to be satisfied by a fc room / mansion room. It simply wouldn't be fair to deny future and current players the opportunity for artistic expression and customization which only a lucky few have been able to obtain. Active private house owners are a thousand times better than the solo fc's created for house trading and dead fc's IMO, and therefore fc's shouldn't have priority. Activity should be the determining factor, and that has already been addressed by adding a demolish timer.

A lot of people want their personal house and yard because it offers a huge play time sink limited only by one's creativity. However, there are also people who only want housing because of convenience, chocobo raising and gardening. If those three points can be solved by mansion rooms, then that alone will lessen the demand for actual houses by a huge amount. Make the flats cheap and don't give them a demolish timer, and they are even more desirable. I don't believe the mansion rooms are going to be a magical cure for the housing problem but if they are done right they will help. Regular housing should still remain an option though, because locking it to fc's only would do nothing to help the issue seeing as people can simply make or buy a solo fc. It would only needlessly punish players who have dreamed of their own cottage since the beginning but want to remain in their current fc.

I think the biggest factor is going to be the total amount of houses and flats compared to the amount of active players. Hopefully the devs add a decent amount of new wards and mansion-hotels instead of a measly handful. The house flipping market would eventually die off when the re-sellers run out of money or alts to monopolize the market. Surely if they can afford an EU data center they can afford some server hardware, right?

(Edit: I should probably clarify that I don't hate your suggestion, OP, only one of the effects it would have. It would probably have some positive effects too.)