Please fix or remove housing!

[crc0427]

People can't simply make an alt and give them a house. You have to be a certain rank and level.

[MomomiMomi]

People can't simply make an alt and give them a house. You have to be a certain rank and level.

Eh, you can get around that with an FC. And making houses FC only wouldn't have stopped people from getting multiple house either because of that.

Don't you need to have up to a certain level and GC rank to buy a house? You have that many alts with access?

I have six. Alts with access, not houses. Only 3 houses.

[Abardaeg]

I feel your pain. I was on Excal and housing was something I really wanted. I also wanted airships and gardening! But, as those things are tied back to revenue streams for an FC, they're pretty well guarded and left to the upper echelons.

Before the new wards were added even getting a small plot on Excal was rough. Rather, it was impossible without many extra millions and a willingness to violate the EULA by buying it from another player. I also didn't have the patience to stalk the neighborhoods for a mere opportunity to find a house to buy. So, about a year ago I started looking around at other servers and noticed Mateus and Goblin had tons of plots just sitting there. Before the pricing adjustments a small, lower quality (4 / 5) plot, would run you just over 900k. So, I packed everything up, gave away a lot of gil to friends, and server transferred with my 1.2 mil (2 retainers) then bought myself a house in the Mist. It was a pretty awesome day! Once transferred I worked my way up to a large and also nabbed one for my FC.

All of that to say, it might be a strategy for SE's to keep player housing on populated servers limited in an effort to encourage migration to lesser populated server. That's pure speculation, of course. I imagine if every server had housing capped and players were willing to cancel their sub because of it we might see them heading down a different path. Mateus still has many, many (wouldn't surprise me if it were 100+) housing plots available! There are still a lot of players that just don't care about owning a house and prefer the apartments.

I'd guess that from a business perspective they'd need to invest in more resources (either development or hardware) to increase ward size and accommodate a very select group of subs. If the amount of subs they're losing (over not getting personal housing) isn't a large enough dent in net revenue to justify the expense of expanding the housing system why would SE do it? However, from a high level I can't imagine they see it the same way the player base on highly populated servers does. Just know, it frustrated the crap out of me too.

I agree with you, the OP, that housing should be available for everyone. It's a huge reason I log in as often as I do. Just know if you really want it, it's there. Sadly it'll mean a hefty sacrifice to get it right now. Should you have to? No, probably not. But there are good people on every server! Convince, coax, or otherwise coerce a core group of friends to transfer with you and take over a neighborhood while you still can!

p.s. Just think of how much easier getting to a hunt on time is when it's low pop... just don't expect to kill Odin at 1 AM on weeknight, about 6 people will show up now matter how much you shout

[Evol]

I feel your pain. I was on Excal and housing was something I really wanted. I also wanted airships and gardening! But, as those things are tied back to revenue streams for an FC, they're pretty well guarded and left to the upper echelons.

Before the new wards were added even getting a small plot on Excal was rough. Rather, it was impossible without many extra millions and a willingness to violate the EULA by buying it from another player. I also didn't have the patience to stalk the neighborhoods for a mere opportunity to find a house to buy. So, about a year ago I started looking around at other servers and noticed Mateus and Goblin had tons of plots just sitting there. Before the pricing adjustments a small, lower quality (4 / 5) plot, would run you just over 900k. So, I packed everything up, gave away a lot of gil to friends, and server transferred with my 1.2 mil (2 retainers) then bought myself a house in the Mist. It was a pretty awesome day! Once transferred I worked my way up to a large and also nabbed one for my FC.

All of that to say, it might be a strategy for SE's to keep player housing on populated servers limited in an effort to encourage migration to lesser populated server. That's pure speculation, of course. I imagine if every server had housing capped and players were willing to cancel their sub because of it we might see them heading down a different path. Mateus still has many, many (wouldn't surprise me if it were 100+) housing plots available! There are still a lot of players that just don't care about owning a house and prefer the apartments.

I'd guess that from a business perspective they'd need to invest in more resources (either development or hardware) to increase ward size and accommodate a very select group of subs. If the amount of subs they're losing (over not getting personal housing) isn't a large enough dent in net revenue to justify the expense of expanding the housing system why would SE do it? However, from a high level I can't imagine they see it the same way the player base on highly populated servers does. Just know, it frustrated the crap out of me too.

I agree with you, the OP, that housing should be available for everyone. It's a huge reason I log in as often as I do. Just know if you really want it, it's there. Sadly it'll mean a hefty sacrifice to get it right now. Should you have to? No, probably not. But there are good people on every server! Convince, coax, or otherwise coerce a core group of friends to transfer with you and take over a neighborhood while you still can!

p.s. Just think of how much easier getting to a hunt on time is when it's low pop... just don't expect to kill Odin at 1 AM on weeknight, about 6 people will show up now matter how much you shout

Thank you!

I definitely know what you mean - and can see it too - regarding SE and their willingness to re-implement housing in a more constructive fashion.

However! The beautiful scenes we see client-side are only client-side. Their server isn't rendering a picture and sending it to you, our client application is doing all that work.
All the graphical data is already on our machines. All those fancy websites with item databases; they hacked FFXIV's client data-files and extracted all that info. There's even an app you can download online to do the same yourself.

Server-Side this data is just a list, a compressed list, sorted and designed to take as little space as possible. It's handled by a service where its sole job is to read/write that data. The list simply notes who has access, and what it is they have access to, the client engine then does any rendering based off of - albeit much more than just - this information received from the servers. The Server is updated with positional data, user interaction (such as clicks/input); no different than the normal game itself. If one player is doing these things in a housing ward, they aren't doing these things outside of the housing ward. If you don't grasp my point: It takes no further processing from their server to handle interactions for a player in a housing ward or the same player not in one. The server is still handling the same number of players interactions. The ONLY limitation they could have here is storage. And who is going to believe SE can't afford to build a few more raid-arrays/NAS boxes?

I know additional instancing does consume server resources, as data for an instance has to be loaded into memory - consumes a server thread or process - etc., until the instance is over -> but this is also SE we're talking about here, and the number of plots is severely limited on servers where the player population is high. Plots are also in excess, however, on servers with low population. Not quite sure why there is any issue with limited resources at this time. Especially when you consider that each ward is actually an instance. Simply increase the number of plots in each one to something reasonable: There should be 20 tabs per ward, instead of 2. Especially if you want to allow individual players to own a private cottage. Especially when you consider the extra resources being spent on instancing apartments, and I see nothing but empty apartments on Sarg....all available resources.

I think if anything, on servers where plots run out, new tabs should be auto added with more plots. There's no reason to add 20 tabs per ward to worlds where there's nothing but open plots. In fact, remove the not needed wards/tabs from low-pop servers and give that resource to highly-populated ones. And if the low-pop servers become populated, then expand their housing wards in much the same fashion as that which I've just mentioned. (Just an example of an idea, however poorly constructed).

-

With regard to the way you had resolved the issue for yourself; If I could pay for all my FC members to transfer, and they all wanted to - that would possibly be viable for us. I chose Saronia as my home at the early-access of 1.0, and I was put into Sargatanas in 2.0. This is my home and I shouldn't have to pay to switch servers. Similarly, the case is the same with the friends and FC members I've gained over time. I am very sorry that you had to leave your server to enjoy a specific set of features. I really wish you would have never had to. In your case, I hope SE reads this and gives you back your 20 bucks!

And LOL @ 6 ppl showing up for Odin! That made me laugh pretty good, as we get that issue on Sarg - right times of the rare day/night when that FATE pops. Typically, however, its so packed everyone gets 5 mantles, if they don't DC that is. There's something, that the cross-world party finder should be able to fix - though I'm pretty sure FATES are one of the things you can't do with it.

[Evol]

Eh, you can get around that with an FC. And making houses FC only wouldn't have stopped people from getting multiple house either because of that.



I have six. Alts with access, not houses. Only 3 houses.

Firstly, I agree. RMT groups and greedy individuals - or even just individuals with a specific purpose, would just as easily have ranked up an FC on an alt to get extra houses. Even if they added a restriction to 1 house per FC, and only 1 personally owned FC per account; Someone would buy numerous accounts to get around this. But ya know what? A hell of a lot more plots would be available right now!

And with regards to your 6 alts and 3 houses: More power to ya, but you are only ever actually enjoying and present in one of those houses at a time. Even if you run multiple instances of the game, you are only ever sending input and interacting with one of those instances - and only one of those houses - at a time....

Meanwhile whole FCs and tons of other people don't even have one.

And you think that's fair? (Not expecting an answer, you obviously do - though too many people don't.)

[MomomiMomi]

And with regards to your 6 alts and 3 houses: More power to ya, but you are only ever actually enjoying and present in one of those houses at a time. Even if you run multiple instances of the game, you are only ever sending input and interacting with one of those instances - and only one of those houses - at a time....

Meanwhile whole FCs and tons of other people don't even have one.

And you think that's fair? (Not expecting an answer, you obviously do - though too many people don't.)

You used a pretty poor argument to try to say it's not fair. I'm not going to explain why, but suffice to say that it's clear it's coming from someone who doesn't actually participate in housing.

Yes, it's not fair. It's also not my problem. Ask Square Enix to provide more housing to you if you really want one. That's what you're paying them for, isn't it?

[Evol]

You used a pretty poor argument to try to say it's not fair. I'm not going to explain why, but suffice to say that it's clear it's coming from someone who doesn't actually participate in housing.

Well you are partially correct and partially not correct. Yes I do not currently participate in plot-based housing, though I have an apartment. I also was in an FC previously that had a medium and I got to do plenty with it. However, the leader of that FC and several of our members did not get along. So we moved into our own FC and lost the housing. That was an exception too, because I've been in several FCs with housing where I was not allowed any part of it other than to donate gil and purchase private chambers.

My argument is absolutely perfect - you have a hold on 3 houses. 3 of them. There are plenty of people and FCs who do not have one at all. Are you the reason for this? No, of course not. However, its still not fair. And regardless of any reason why you think you should get to have 3 houses all to yourself, whether it be gil farming (by using missions and gardening in all three houses), putting on plays for the community, whatever - there is nothing someone who get's to experience housing in its entirety can say, to validate what you just said. There is nothing about housing that makes it ok for you to have 3, while others have none. There is nothing you know about housing that I do not.

While your garden plots are maturing at all 3 houses, you're not even there. If you are, you are only at 1 of them at one time. This applies to any mechanic that comes with housing. Even if 3 individual players are all having a party at each of your 3 houses... YOU are only in one of them at a time.

So please, do explain it. Because those of us that do not understand that which you refuse to explain, are exactly the ones that are voicing our opinions and our concerns in this thread.

Yes, it's not fair. It's also not my problem. Ask Square Enix to provide more housing to you if you really want one. That's what you're paying them for, isn't it?

Though you voiced yourself in this thread, which was - believe it or not - explicitly created so that SE would hear us! So you're not telling me to do anything that I'm not already doing.

Maybe you don't like being pointed out for having 3 houses, but then again you're the one that decided to say so in a thread explicitly created to voice concerns about the unfair housing system.

It shouldn't surprise you at all.

[MomomiMomi]

While your garden plots are maturing at all 3 houses, you're not even there. If you are, you are only at 1 of them at one time. This applies to any mechanic that comes with housing. Even if 3 individual players are all having a party at each of your 3 houses... YOU are only in one of them at a time.

See, you're saying it's not fair because I can only be at one house at a time. But that implies that it's not fair for me to have a house if I choose not to be at it at all. That's ridiculous. It's totally fair for me to not be at my house, and most people who have houses are, indeed, not at their house.

[Evol]

See, you're saying it's not fair because I can only be at one house at a time. But that implies that it's not fair for me to have a house if I choose not to be at it at all. That's ridiculous. It's totally fair for me to not be at my house, and most people who have houses are, indeed, not at their house.

No, its not ridiculous. You see, the head-butt between our opinions right now, is that you are taking what I said personally. I did not imply that you shouldn't have a house if you choose not to be at it at all (though if you are never there, why DO you have one? That'd be inactive, and SE will eventually demolish your house for that. Obviously you won't sit in it all day...). I'm actually saying nothing of the sort.

I'm not saying you did anything wrong, either. Though it isn't fair, and you even said so yourself.

This thread isn't a complaint to you, its a complaint to SE - you are just the perfect example. You have 3 houses, you can't even enjoy all 3 in their entirety at the same time. Yet there are thousands - if not more - who don't get to experience, or even choose to not be at a house - at all.

See SE? See? Fix this, please!