Quote Originally Posted by Paladinleeds View Post
I believe the fix is to make an area of instanced housing. Where it generates a plot of land by itself. Make it upgradeable too. Use some lore reason of you're being teleported into a safe area of the Ascian world or something and the Ascian realm is able to bend space like that. That is the only fix in my opinion. Any other fix would just upset a lot of people if you ask me. No neighbours etc, but it would mean housing for all.
This is a terrible idea. I've seen it in another game. All it does is become a way for players to just play a FFXIV dressed "farmville". Forget ever using the market again for minerals, plants, or fish, just grow your own. Though in this other game, you can't actually go inside the "farmhouse" you can only do stuff with the land. This BTW was an upgrade to the actual "farm plots" they had, because the bots and clever players learned you could just make mountains of money in the game by doing it, and since the farm plots were extremely limited and time-limited everyone just monopolized them any way they could (eg by AFK'ing.)

People forget FFXIV has apartments too.

Not everyone needs a house, and you don't get any communities popping up if you instance absolutely every oversubscribed feature. As it is, if you go around the housing areas, you're lucky to even see maybe 4 people, and that is owing entirely to the fact that the housing areas are also instanced to begin with.

The reason you want instancing for some things is simply to reduce congestion or travel time. One of FFXIV V1.0's worst complaints was the market stalls, where you literately had to go through dozens of identical looking market areas with shoulder-to-shoulder retainers manually looking at each retainer for things. This was horribly tedious. If you had to do the same thing with the housing area, it would again have that problem. People would simply not go through the housing area, they would just teleport to their own house, and that's that. If you instance the housing so that each house+land is it's own instance, (basically apartments with all the features of a house, but no neighbors) there is no point in having a "housing area" at all.

In some respects that creates an even worse problem, where there are all these "walled off" parts of a world that nobody ever sees.

As it is, SE should never have made it possible to "lock the front door" of a house while the owner is offline. Part of the fun of being able to decorate is knowing who stopped by to look at things.

The cost of an apartment in the game is only 40% more than the cost of a room in a FC's house. So the instanced living spaces exist in two forms already. We don't need another one.