How to fix the housing crisis!

[MPNZ]

It would just be easier to add more apartment complexes and paint the one in the Lavender Beds, and add instanced rural or FC only housing. Balmung is just way overpopulated.

[Casanters]

Booting FCs to elsewhere and limiting it to one house per account would do a lot to solve it. Just adding a useful number of wards would also do wonders. I do not like the idea of instanced housing. It's a boring, lonely world. Why even bother?

[Masekase_Hurricane]

Now we won't have PS3 limitations, all personal houses should be removed from wards and given their own private instance. But all FC houses and apartments stay on wards.

This wouldn't fix anything. We would now just have more solo people owning FC's. They need to change it so the size of the house is locked behind the size of your FC. Small house 1-100 medium 101-300 large 301-512 members.

[Spiroglyph]

I would not mind personal houses being removed, if they implemented something similar to the house reclamation system, and return to the players their furniture and a portion of the gil spent on their plot... this is already something happening with reclamation of unused houses, so I do like this idea.

IMHO I'd like for plots in wards to be reserved for FC housing. :/

EDIT: inb4 someone crashes down on me for being pro removal of private houses in wards because I don't understant the effort put into owning a house in the current system - I DO have my own S house, that I waited for for a long time and that I had to pay for.

[Alleo]

You know instanced housing is something that I had hoped for a long time and is also the only real solution so that every person can have their own house. But I think that just relocating the houses now would be not good and might cause a lot of backlash.

My small solution:

- There is a new ward coming. Make this an instanced personal homes only ward. This way nobody gets their current house relocated. Since this is instanced thus unlimited, anyone should be able to buy a house, even if they already have one. Also there should be some kind of mechanic to increase the house size. People would all start with a 3 Million Gil Small house and with quests, gil or something else they can increase their size until its as big as mansion. And on top of that they can buy additional rooms too. This would be some kind of gil sink, everyone gets a house in the size they want and it would create a very good market for housing items.

- Lock all the other wards for FC only. This does not mean that any privat person loses their house, no it means that in the future any new houses can only be bought by a FC. This would keep the wards alive, anyone that wants neighbors can have them with this housing situation and without the competition from solo players there might be more houses for FCs.

- The apartments should also stay as the cheapest version to get a small room, since not everyone wants a whole house.

[Small off topic question: I read in a post that Balmung does not have any apartment left. Is this true and did SE increase the number of apartments to the maximum amount? Since they kinda said that they would do that if there is a need for this and having all apartments sold kinda sound like a need..if they did not do it than they kinda went back on their words..]

[Big_Panda]

Since apartments are instanced (in a sense), why can they not simply increase the size of apartments?

My small house is the size of two apartment rooms. If they further allow gardening with cross-breeding in a deluxe apartment, it should greatly reduce the need for housing.

[worldofneil]

I would not mind personal houses being removed, if they implemented something similar to the house reclamation system, and return to the players their furniture and a portion of the gil spent on their plot... this is already something happening with reclamation of unused houses, so I do like this idea.

The money you get from reclamation is compensation because you lost your house. Admittedly a lot of people are now waiting for demolition to get that money back, but it was designed to compensate for someone losing a house.

If someone were to forcibly have their house removed and there was nothing they could do to stop it, they would need to be recompensated 100% which is impossible to do. They could refund back 100% of the property and maybe even the cost of the housing permit (otherwise they'd be left with an item they paid for, but can no longer use, marketboard might be an option, but unlikely to make some money back), but what about the items that can't be picked up/destroyed on pickup? There are still some of those.

Even if they fixed it so that in this case you'd also get those back, what about the custom exterior walls? Those don't have any price associated to them and right now you don't even get those back. If they did give it back the person wouldn't be able to use it any more, selling it (if it was even unbinded) wouldn't be much help either as if all personal houses were demolished there would be more exterior walls for sale than people actually want to buy so the prices would crash. And there's no compensation for the time/effort that went into making them (some of the larger ones are an absolute nightmare!).

Considering that housing now requires players to keep an active subscription (or they lose the house), I can't really see SE doing something like this and annoying active players. It's just not in their interest. Yes other people want houses for FCs etc, but unless there is evidence they'll stop playing because of a house, they're going to choose the safer option and not upset the players who might leave.

New wards could have new rules, or maybe change rules on existing wards for new purchases, but they can't really change existing houses, there are just way too many issues.

[OliviaJ]

^^ pretty much all of what Neil said. Also, does anyone remember when it was just FC housing? Wards upon wards of empty lots! Do you really want that back again? Sure that' probably isn't a problem on the overpop servers but on medium to low pop servers there just aren't that many FC's. Combine that with the other suggestion of the size of the house being based on FC size and we'll definitely have a vast number of empty plots. I wouldn't want to see this.

[Celef]

CHange it into instanced houses like....almost everyone did it in the industry ? Problem solved

[Casanters]

CHange it into instanced houses like....almost everyone did it in the industry ? Problem solved

Just makes it a dull, empty world. Pass.