Overpopulation/Housing Fix

[Elany]

It was just a suggestion, but I believe you're wrong. Implementing a transfer limit/not allowing anymore people to go to on Balmung would remedy it somewhat rather than keep adding salt to the wound.

[Penthea]

It was just a suggestion, but I believe you're wrong. Implementing a transfer limit/not allowing anymore people to go to on Balmung would remedy it somewhat rather than keep adding salt to the wound.

What about players who want to play with their friends on closed servers? Should we punish them because of a badly designed housing system? You're making a suggestion in the interest in fairness for housing, but it's creating unfairness elsewhere instead.

It would be better to offer free server transfers from overly congested servers to low population servers. This way a group of friends can move together without having to worry if someone can afford it or not. It's bad enough that servers are closed for character creation at regular intervals which can delay new players who want to play with their friends. Forcing people to play only on certain servers would be worse. Housing isn't important enough to do that to players.

[Elany]

So I say either SE imposes a transfer/character limit or lets people transfer out for free or something. A free transfer and a high chance at a home would be good incentive I think.

I did initially suggest that as well.

[Acilith]

If they let people bring their gil with them when they moved, Balmung might not be so overpopulated......

[Penthea]

I did initially suggest that as well.

Yes and that is a good idea. It won't solve the housing issue but it would alleviate major issues with overly congested servers. Even if housing wasn't in the game they should do that anyway. However the rest of your suggestion simply will not have enough of a positive effect to outweigh the downsides. It's always a bad idea to forcibly separate players. Housing won't mean much to players who are unable to play with their friends.

[Elany]

If they let people bring their gil with them when they moved, Balmung might not be so overpopulated......

Yeah I agree.

Although I do understand why they have a gil limit (to not crash the economy they're moving into etc) but it being only 1mil? Cmon...

[Kerwin]

Not just a Balmung thing. But people tend not to listen.

[Hasrat]

This wouldn't really help at all. Even if players were evenly distributed across all servers there still would be nowhere near enough plots for anyone.

There is a problem with this argument, true as it might be. That is, any "fix" or "overhaul" is really only a solution for a small handful of servers. I don't exactly have numbers to back it up, but I suspect that on a majority of servers, there's not much of a "housing crisis." So, is it worth dev resources for something that most of the servers currently don't need?

Counter-argument is, of course, number of players affected vs number of servers. And I couldn't really say where dev priorities lie. But I would think the best way to demonstrate that something needs to be done is to show there genuinely isn't enough housing, rather than raising complaints while many servers have homeowner shortages more than house shortages.

[Penthea]

I don't exactly have numbers to back it up, but I suspect that on a majority of servers, there's not much of a "housing crisis." So, is it worth dev resources for something that most of the servers currently don't need?

Counter-argument is, of course, number of players affected vs number of servers. And I couldn't really say where dev priorities lie. But I would think the best way to demonstrate that something needs to be done is to show there genuinely isn't enough housing, rather than raising complaints while many servers have homeowner shortages more than house shortages.

There are roughly 500k active players. There isn't enough housing for 30% of that. Never mind when you throw fcs in there further increasing the demand for housing. From this alone it is painfully obvious that there is nowhere near enough. The whole thing is so broken that very little can make it noticeably better without an enormous addition of wards or an overhaul.

I'd say this is not very high on the dev's to-do list. Housing is largely cosmetic. Not having a house doesn't stunt your progress in pve or pvp. But that doesn't mean it's not a high priority for players. I hope SE realise this.

[DamianFatale]

I tried a smaller server, and there just wasn't any appeal. It feels so empty, and void of all life.