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

[Galaktica]

It sucks that not everyone can have a plot of land but it's for actual reasons rather than the devs just wanting to cause players grief.

I mean, I get that. It's just - and I'm probably going to repeat myself a lot here - the fact housing made it into the game in the way it did just odd. In a game like Eve Online, for example, limited availability makes perfect sense. If you want to mine a certain mineral or occupy a sector of space, you better hope no one gets in your way. If they do? Oh, well. The game doesn't care. it has a very "sucks for you, but you better find some way to deal with it" philosophy.

FFXIV, on the other hand, again, at no point tries to actively prevent and/or provide other players the tools to prevent any other player from interacting with any part of it. It's a game seemingly built upon the philosophy - one which it seems to constantly reinforce - that you can see, hear, and do everything it has to offer.

Except for housing.

I understand the technical reasoning. That's not really my issue. It's more so that they introduced a feature that on a philosophical level seems to contradict everything they're tried to instill into the player up unto that point. And it's not even because of lack of skill or anything of the sort. You're locked out of it literally because you took too long and other players beat you to the punch. And unlike Hunts, housing doesn't magically respawn every few days. There may very well never be any room for a large number of players.

[ColorOfSakura]

I still agree that if nothing else - SE *needs* to implement limitations on how many houses a player account can own per server. 1 Personal House and 1 FC house seems perfectly reasonable to me. The only thing I think they should implement is the ability to share your house with all the characters on your service account that share that server. (i.e. if you have 5 characters on Jenova, then all 5 characters will be considered the "Owners" of your personal house, but whichever one purchased it initially will be the name that shows up on the Placard and Ward List.)

The fact that its been shown that several players are buying up multiple plots just for the sake of ownership when the resource is incredibly limited as is, means that SE should find a way to address this. It isn't cool for one player to own six houses while five Free Companies sit around without access to FC Workshops.

And that's my main issue of contention here - the Dev Team has created content that players literally CANNOT take part in unless their Free Company owns a home (FC Crafting, Airship Ventures) or they own their own home/apartment (gardening, chocobo stables). Many Free Companies that want them do not have access to a house due to the limitations. This can and does cause many FCs to wither and die or remain small because they cannot offer the same amenities as others can. I don't like that as a crafter I can be held to the whims of the market because I can't crossbreed things like Bloodpeppers or Glazenuts since apartment gardening doesn't allow intercrossing. Or the fact that I have to be subject to the prices on the marketboard (which are usually incredibly high) when attempting to purchase materials for certain crafts (Fine Alumen, Potter's Stone, etc.) Not to mention the fact that my Free Company can't even take advantage of the Aetherial Wheel system and the Level III buffs because we don't have a house.

It gives certain Companies and players unfair advantage, especially when it comes to crafting.

[Naunet]

The other thing that frustrates me about not having instanced housing is that the housing we do have is so incredibly limited by virtue of being in shared wards. The decor item limits we have are pathetically small. I can't remember the exact number, but I know in Rift you can place thousands of items in your dimension. In WildStar, you can place 2500 "outside" and 2500 "inside". Instanced housing also allows for more refined placement controls - XYZ axes, full rotation, resizing. These controls let people build what the WildStar community calls "cobbled" creations - that is, taking a combination of potentially unrelated structures and manipulating them to create something completely different. The level of creativity we could unlock with instanced housing would be incredible.

(I also think that obtaining decor is far too expensive a process currently, but that's a separate issue...)

[Alleo]

I had high hopes that the new housing district in 4.0 would be completely instanced housing yet the fanfest put me back down to reality..After all these years, after so many complains I am still not sure why they still stick to a system that is not only so limited but also hinders them in the future, if they ever need to merge servers. (They have limited feature but are producing more and more housing items..does not make sense to me)

How would my dream housing system be?

Have wards for FC only, and restrict this to account wide per person so people cant create more FCs with their Alts. Also make is so that you need certain numbers to buy a certain size. Like 1-10 member FC could only buy a small one, and so on. With that more FCs should have their houses. This could still be abused but at least you need a FC to get it. (Maybe you can restrict it, so that your FC needs to exist 3-4 months before they can buy a house)

Make personal houses completely instanced. Either have a instanced zone in the FC housing wards so that people can still meet in the wards or make it something completely new. If you take it away from wards you could even create a NPC village around a personal house. Since its instanced it will only exist if someone is in there so less stress for the servers. People will be able to get a small house in a city state of their choice (one could even make this a MSQ reward for all of what we did for Eorzea). You can buy more rooms (like a FC can) but you can also upgrade your house and buy more instanced houses in other city states. I would even put this behind some daily quests.

For example if you want to upgrade your house you need a certain permission from an NPC (and Gil). You get this permission with points which you get by doing stuff for the NPCs. Have fighting, gathering and crafting quests so that people can do whatever they want and make it unlimited so people can go at it on their own pace. That way it feels like there is some work done to upgrade to a M and later to a L house and people can use this to level up their jobs. But its not only about the permission. You will be able to buy housing items for points too and they would be limited to oneself. If you are ranked up enough you are able to do a quest where you can decide the second house you want. There you can do the same again and this goes on for all city states.

So if you love housing this will give you the chance to have lots of houses yourself in each city state and you are able to buy rooms in the houses too. Giving us a really big space to decorate. On top of that you can still level up other jobs while doing something for your houses. (Or they could simply give us the choice: Throw lots of Gil in it to get it now or work your way through it by doing the quests) Anyway this would give everyone the chance to have housing, makes all the event items not useless for all the ones that dont own one. And FC still have the advantage of true wards and workshop.

This would be my dream housing situation. I know that this is not possible ingame but I still keep my hope that one day we will get instanced housing with the possibility to buy more rooms.

[gbe931]

1) Shirogane: 720 new houses and 1980 new apartments. I think this covers your new wards request.

Unfortunately 720 new total plots is nowhere near enough supply to satisfy the very real demand for housing on mid/high-pop servers. Drawing from unofficial census data because we'll never get official active subscriber numbers (https://ffxivcensus.com/) there are about 9,500 active players on my server. Once Housing (Shirogane Savage) is released in the 4.1 patch cycle there will be a total of 2,880 plots to be split between FC's and individuals. This means that 70% (2880/9500)of the active subscribers on my server cannot own a house not because of gil, but because of the artificial scarcity. On Balmung, 85% of active subscribers are not able to own housing, again not because of gil but because of artificial scarcity. If its an issue of resources, then scrap Diadem as it is effectively dead content that takes up server space and no one uses.

[Risu0042]

I honestly like the idea of districts. instance biased housing is good and all but i just didn't do it because it's a piece of content you really can't show off. when you run around in that snazzy glamour you get people stopping and taking notice. if your house is locked in an instance only you and a couple of people head to, it takes that "show" aspect out of it. I think the good start will be to create 1 plot per server per account. it won't solve the problem 100% but make it substantially harder for people to own entire wards as plots are limited now.

[Naunet]

instance biased housing is good and all but i just didn't do it because it's a piece of content you really can't show off.

WildStar housing is instanced and yet the community still manages to be extremely open and everyone who wants to show off their house gets plenty of opportunities - be it announcing their build in housing zone chat, posting a thread on the forums, inviting people directly, leaving it Public access so anyone can wander in, etc. The idea that instanced housing means losing the community aspect and the ability to share your homes with people is simply false.

[Ayerinn]

The idea that instanced housing means losing the community aspect and the ability to share your homes with people is simply false.

With all the instance issues they already have...I don't want instanced housing for that reason alone. I mean technically each ward/subdivision is already an instance and the inside of a house is a custom instance. I wish they would just raise the subscription price from $11.99/14.99 per month to ~ $14.99/17.99 per month and add dedicated housing servers for each world so that could could open up nearly infinite wards per server (so it would be the same as now, just you would be transferred to the housing server when you zoned into a housing area.)

[Naunet]

With all the instance issues they already have...I don't want instanced housing for that reason alone. I mean technically each ward/subdivision is already an instance and the inside of a house is a custom instance. I wish they would just raise the subscription price from $11.99/14.99 per month to ~ $14.99/17.99 per month and add dedicated housing servers for each world so that could could open up nearly infinite wards per server (so it would be the same as now, just you would be transferred to the housing server when you zoned into a housing area.)

We shouldn't have to pay more for what other MMOs of equal and even lesser budget offer at face.

[vakarianne]

I'd be curious to see a per-ward heat map showing actual player activity outside of their own plots of land, something that illustrated exactly how many people are spending time utilizing the neighborhood.

Player presence would, I think, be better off concentrated into apartment-like lobbies. Use the marketplace or a newly-created hangout-friendly area in each housing zone as your socialization center and get rid of wards altogether. Have a gate that accesses houses and lets you pick where you want to go (your plot, others' open plots). Players could move very organically from hanging out in the "lobby" area to the instanced houses -- it could be just a short walk away. With notes and at-home indicators, you could always know where the party was. I think it'd beef up general housing zone use and player interaction.

Yes, it'd suck for homes to lose their visibility but I think it'd be an acceptable trade off to reintroduce socialization and the neighborhood feel.