Land Taxes

[StouterTaru]

If you want to stop flipping, it's as simple as making the reverse auction work the way it was originally intended; start with prices so high that houses don't get snatched up immediately. If a small house starts at 50M, nobody is going to flip it, and they end up selling for the price that the player base values them at.

[Penthea]

This would hurt rule abiding players more than house flippers. It would certainly force a lot of players to do content they may not necessarily be interested in or even like just to keep up with the tax.

If SE are serious about stamping down on house flippers the first thing they need to do is make it as easy to report as RMT activity. The next thing is to bring in positive features that discourage or devalue house flipping, such as more wards, more tenancy slots and introduce tenancy for apartments. More restrictions hurts everyone.

[-BlueGreen-]

Interesting, I had been given the impression from others and from reading various sources that there were cases of entire wards being completely owned by a few individuals with most houses sitting completely empty and such.

If houses aren't being simply held by potential house flippers, then yes, a land tax would do little to help the situation.

Maybe with the datacenter move SE will have the resources to actually expand wards, but I have my doubts that approach would be scale-able enough giving the extreme difference in server populations.

For instance, the number of wards on Coeurl seems to be just about right. I recently watched a large get demolished by the auto timer and sit for around 3 days before someone finally bought it. Mediums come up frequently enough and smalls sometimes sit around enough to bottom out in pricing.

With SB, I expect the increase in active players to cause a short-term crunch on housing, but in the long run, the entire extra housing area with all of its wards and sub divisions will add an incredible amount of housing to a server which already doesn't 100% sell out on a regular basis.

I don't know if their infrastructure is set up in such a way to work like this, but instead of adding more wards to servers like Coeurl, they could just give those to the bigger servers and smaller servers probably wouldn't hurt for it.

Granted, that's already been suggested several times, so probably not much point in discussing this topic any further unless someone wants to come in and say that empty, unused houses actually are a problem.

[HyoMinPark]

Just because someone has a house, doesn't mean they have all that cash to spare. To spend months saving up for a house, only to lose it purely because you can't meet the monthly cost would be horrible.

This. I'm working my butt off to get a mansion in Shirogane. Unlike some of my friends, I don't make several mil a day; I'm lucky if I make 500k a day just from gathering in-demand mats, crafting easy-to-make/cheap leveling gear, and competing with the undercutters. Usually I only manage to make 250k or less, and during the weekends when the undercutting is even more rampant, I barely make 100k. To fight house flippers, players should be more proactive in reporting them. Implementing a tax system wouldn't really stop them anyways; I doubt they hold onto plots of land for a month or longer. Housing is so in-demand in this game, I doubt they'd be holding plots for longer than a week unless they're asking for an incredibly unreasonable amount.

I already pay plenty of taxes in real life; I'd much rather that not filter over into a game I play for fun.


I'm sure there are plenty of unused houses on every server. I know of quite a few large plots on my server that the owners (based on their Lodestones) only log in to keep their house, but don't really play the game. (There's a mansion owner in The Beds that is still wearing gear from 3 patches ago, yet their house is still standing, and another solo FC mansion featuring a level 1 conjurer that is completely unfurnished inside and out, yet it has been there for months now.) There are also plenty of players that own multiple plots with their alts. One individual brags in his estate info about having 5 different houses between him, his FC, his alts and their FCs. I don't have issues with solo/small FCs owning homes, but really?? 3 solo FCs, 2 personal houses, all on different alts? How do you even have the time to maintain those estates, much less use them that much?

Make housing shareable among alts on the same server. As an alt-o-holic myself, I would absolutely love that. Maybe that would at least solve the problem of these people that have 5 alts, each owning their own estate. As for unused houses...there just has to be other methods with regards to fixing that in this game without resorting to hefty land taxes.

[KiraCifer]

they ever add in land taxes to keep a house you already paid out your butt for the day I know I would quit this game and wouldn't be back till the took it back out and then demand my house back that I would of lost all because of them

[Sylfaein]

~Snip~

I'm with ya, and good luck getting your house! I don't have a steady gil flow either, so it took months and some lucky drops in Aquapolis to save up enough for my mansion, and weeks of stalking the wards for a reclaimed plot. I would be irate if I were to suddenly be expected to pay a tax on it.

We DO need to be able to share houses with alts. Granted, it wouldn't stop greedy people from snagging all the houses they can get their slimy mitts on, but it would help for those who are just seeking the utility of a house for their multiple characters.

[Ayerinn]

I'd settle for a land tax (or some equivalent land lease thing) if it meant scrapping the current reclaim system.

Least that way if I wanted to unsub for a patch or 2 I could just pay 3-6 months tax (or equivelant) up front and be safe from demolition

Would be much better than what we have now imo

exactly - the only way I would be ok with a land tax is a) being able to pay at least 6mo+ in advance and b) removal of the auto demo system replaced with a failure to pay taxes warning/removal. I took a break from the game for a bit over a year and just came back recently for the expansion - paying in game silver for my homes over having to resub for $$$ every ~75 days would be fine with me.

[Acidblood]

Besides, it even opens the opportunity to make the auto-demolition a bit more friendly. Instead of a straight 45-day auto-demolition, house owners might get an escrow account with their house in which they can deposit up to 6x the 30-day tax.

This is the main thing I would like to see, as currently, going on holiday (or some other away from home / the internet activity) for more than about a month at a time makes it hard to keep a house up... being able to pay in advance for an extended period would be very useful.

I also like the idea of a land tax in general, and while the amounts may have to be tuned, it is a good way of making people think twice about buying a house just because it's there (and may not be later) vs. buying a house because they actually want to use it.

[Yuumei]

I disagree with OP.

We house owners already pay tax in RL dollars to SE.
We must maintain our sub even if we wish to take a short break from the game or are unable to log in due to issues like hospitalization, military conscription (stuck in barracks or deployed overseas), busy with work or burnout.

Personally i did not log into the game for over 30days but my sub remains paid in 6 mth blocks continuously. This is so i have a home to return to in Eorzea when i wish to adventure again.

The tax is nothing but an annoyance to rich players but please stop with ideas aimed at punishing house owners in general due to actions of a few.

It has already been suggested before: restrict house ownership to 1 per account (per server) and all alts on said account share access to the house (if on same server). If folks want to go multi-account to flip houses then let them pay for it in RL sub dollars.

Thank you.

[Acilith]

We pay more than enough in subs, cash shop, and more. I don't see why they can't give us the appropriate amount of houses.