Will Housing ever be addressed in any meaningful manner by the XIV team?

[gbe931]

While I love this game, I absolutely hate the housing system in this game. The lack of meaningful solutions by the XIV team compounds this. Two issues I see that are most needing attention:

1) Artificial lack of availability
2) Multiple plots owned by a single account

Solutions to these are below:

1) Solution: Make more Wards. There needs to be at least 20-30 Wards (preferably 30) per residential area and open new Wards as old ones are completely populated as was done with apartments. While it may seem excessive to flood the market with housing plots, this will effectively kill the incentive for house flipping and curtail a black market that frankly should not have ever existed in the first place.


2) Solution: Enforce an account-wide limit of 1 Personal House and 1 FC House (if they are the FC Leader) per account. This way individual accounts are not hoarding houses between their multiple characters and fostering a real estate black market. Also See Solution #1

[Zied]

I really hope they come up with a solution because housing is all I care about tbh

[Elamys]

open new Wards as old ones are completely populated as was done with apartments

They said they'd implement this, but it hasn't been. Only FC houses have this functionality right now.

[MaikoRaines]

1) Solution: Make more Wards. There needs to be at least 20-30 Wards (preferably 30) per residential area and open new Wards as old ones are completely populated as was done with apartments. While it may seem excessive to flood the market with housing plots, this will effectively kill the incentive for house flipping and curtail a black market that frankly should not have ever existed in the first place.

2) Solution: Enforce an account-wide limit of 1 Personal House and 1 FC House (if they are the FC Leader) per account. This way individual accounts are not hoarding houses between their multiple characters and fostering a real estate black market. Also See Solution #1

I'm for both solutions. Of course, you'll get naysayers saying they shouldn't do that (for the 2nd option) but they're the minority and probably house hoarders/flippers.

Also, S-E hasn't made any mentions (AFAIK) about future housing options other than "lack of servers" and "not enough resources". The apartments were a band-aid solution as nice as they are, but they still lack a ton of functionality for those who wish to take advantage of them. The other side of the situation is I notice only community mods or devs will only address things like this if they have some kind of plan in place.

[Krotoan]

Just an FYI, for I am as annoyed with the lack of housing as you are: it's not artificial. Housing uses server resources which are limited (HD space, bandwidth). every server has to be capable of serving the data at a decent speed in the unlikely event that EVERYONE goes into their house at the same time and starts messing with things. More housing means more bandwidth and hard drive space. They need to balance current server needs with future situations i.e. in 7 months when the hype dies down , is that new multi-thousand dollar investment going to sit idle? At the end of the day even the Devs who are purely in this for the love of the FFXIV world need to answer to the all powerful bottom line.

aaand with that devils-advocate moment over, I hope they decide we're worth the investment cause I want a house in shirogane and last time a housing ward opened it was full in minutes on my server and I have a job and need to sleep and stuff.

[Marluxia]

If Square doesn't have the data infrastructure to open enough wards for all players, they should just make the housing instanced and do away with the neighbourhood thing.

Neighbourhoods aren't worth housing being cut off from 90% of the player base.

[Naunet]

At this point, as much as I rail against SE for their housing... I'm starting to think they've just plugged their fingers in their ears and chosen to be stubborn about it.

I'm for both solutions. Of course, you'll get naysayers saying they shouldn't do that (for the 2nd option) but they're the minority and probably house hoarders/flippers.

Uhm. Or people who like having differently decorated houses for their different characters??

The one true solution is instanced housing. WildStar has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is the superior option and does not result in a weaker community.

[Elamys]

If Square doesn't have the data infrastructure to open enough wards for all players, they should just make the housing instanced and do away with the neighbourhood thing.

Neighbourhoods aren't worth housing being cut off from 90% of the player base.

Especially when they're empty anyways. Might as well just have a section of the neighborhood with NPC houses as an instance. We already have instances for every house. It's not exactly a big deal to make them include the yard, maybe with the door no longer requiring you to teleport in and out.

[Galaktica]

Especially when they're empty anyways.

This is the big thing for me. When they were designing housing, it's abundantly clear they imagined everyone, their FCs, and all their friends spending all their time in and around their houses, walking down the road to your neighbors houses, having block parties, etc. The reality however is that the vast majority of wards on the vast majority of servers are almost always empty. Some people spend all their time in the wards and that's totally cool, but they're the exception.

Locking 99% of players out of a feature that hardly gets used by the 1% who have access to it is absurd.

[Strywin]

This is the big thing for me. When they were designing housing, it's abundantly clear they imagined everyone, their FCs, and all their friends spending all their time in and around their houses, walking down the road to your neighbors houses, having block parties, etc. The reality however is that the vast majority of wards on the vast majority of servers are almost always empty. Some people spend all their time in the wards and that's totally cool, but they're the exception.

Locking 99% of players out of a feature that hardly gets used by the 1% who have access to it is absurd.

Yep, I don't think anyone in my ward talks to each other UNLESS they need a few people for the 4 man workshop fun times. I'd rather the whole instance housing take over at this point because housing is so underwhelming when new wards take far too long to be added in for a large community that want housing for their friends & themselves.