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

[gbe931]

Lets talk about those resources we provide:

1) Cash shop was designed for them to be able to get money for glamour items that they would reinvest into the game. Last year they generated nearly $1M just from sales of glamour, server transfers and name changes.

2) We pay a subscription which even on the low-end would generate nearly $1.2M a month.

What content have we seen in turn that is taking up "precious" resources

1) Diadem: A twice-failed instanced F.A.T.E. zone that is pretty much abandoned.
2) Lord of Verminion: An April Fools joke that no one asked to be implemented in the game and that no one seriously does.
3) SB zones that cannot hold past 250 players without crashing the servers (Ixion)

[gbe931]

How much money, resources and dev time went to designing, testing and implementing these pieces of failed content that no one uses or wanted?
How much better spent would the same resources be reallocated to provide more wards that the vast majority of the player base will actually use?
What year are the servers from that NTT is hosting this game from? 2005?

[gbe931]

I can guarantee you that 99% of the player base would not even blink at the XIV team completely scrapping LoV, Diadem or both if it meant reallocating those "limited" resources to create more housing wards so that the player base can actually buy housing. Also Housing serves the dual purpose of a gil sink to help take some currency out of the game and it definitely would be in their interest to have housing available to serve this purpose.

[gbe931]

On my server, housing will disappear in less than 5 minutes and the majority of people who are fighting to log on and not get 90K or another login error will miss out because SE won't invest in more wards. They will stick with 12 wards with only 720 houses total and will perpetuate the black market of house flipping because instead will give us something else that will be a complete waste of resources.

[Aldotsk]

If option 2 isn't implemented, even option 1 will not work since congested and normal populated server will require 100 wards at most. It should have been unlimited wards to begin with and have plenty of large and medium and small spots in 1 ward. 3 large and 6 medium are not enough anymore.

[Aldotsk]

If anything, they should have FC purchase a big ward and have FC members purchase plots in that ward as if it was instance based and work from there too. I mean, that works too. I don't see why it shouldn't work. FC housing and personal housing was supposed to be a separate thing before 2.1 and 2.3 announcement. Make FC ward charged lot of gil. Have FC house be in center of ward with most furnishing and leave all same layout for plots. But as FC increases members , the ward increases too. 512 members with 512 plots. Pretty simple. Also allow some plots to be upgradeable as bigger interior or even exterior.

[MaikoRaines]

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

Vanity doesn't have to be in the name of almost 30 houses. Glamour sure. Mounts sure. Houses? Coupled with egotistical attitudes just makes you an unlikable d-bag. Not -YOU- exactly, Naunet, but you know what I mean.

If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck...

[Ashiee]

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.

Something tells me SE is not willing to add a bunch more wards to do this.

2) Solution: Enforce an account-wide limit of 1 Personal House

I agree that they should do this, but along with this they need to allow you to share your Personal House among your accounts characters.

1 FC House (if they are the FC Leader) per account.

1 FC House if your an FC leader would be really hard to do, you would have to rework the FC system a lot. With how leadership is passed down to people in an FC after 40 days of not logging in, leadership could be passed to a person who has has another character that is an FC leader.

Honestly they should scrap the whole personal housing system, leave wards to FCs, and add in a new instanced housing system for personal houses.

[MistyMew]

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.

Been saying this since day 1 of housing release.

Is not a complete fix but a good start.

Rift housing is far superior to ffxiv in engagement, freedom to actually create , # of dimensions one player can own etc.. being instanced is the first of many steps needed to not only improve availability but also majorly step up the fun and creativity of it as well.

[Krotoan]

Lets talk about those resources we provide:

1) Cash shop *snip*

2) We pay a subscription *snip*

Most of which pay for the thousands of man hours that go into programming, voicing, testing , hosting , composing , marketing, maintaining, housing, and the rest that goes into keeping our world live and interesting.
I won't deny there's a profit there. BUT, I think you overestimate how much money they have to spread around.

it's hard to say what will work and what won't before you implement it. I know a lot of people who were psyched as heck for Lord of Verminion personally. It just didn't do very well with everyone.
I'm betting a lot of that stuff DID get downgraded or de-prioritized once they realized it wasn't popular.
I'm not white knighting SE here.they made a bad choice with the housing, I agree. But it's already been done and they're not likely to scrap the whole thing , especially with people paying for multiple accounts just to keep housing.