1 account buying 14 houses in 1 ward.

[Venjamin]

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Or... and hear me out... the design is set up to have one house per character/ fc. And it's working as intended. You're calling for them to lose a shitton of hard work and saying people should be nicer? Only niceness when it benefits you, I suppose.

Ethics aren't in play, here. No one needs a house - like you said, in the end, it's all a videogame.

[Aldotsk]

And it's working as intended.

Could have fooled me considering Square Enix doesn't undestand how adding more wards work for each housing zone. If people look at the interface for teleporting to specific ward, you'll notice that it was originally planned and built to skip to next ward page once it gets past like 50 Ward. So instead of blaming players, it's really this company's terrible management from increasing more wards every patch. It's been 3 years and they haven't really gone past 12 wards which is quite a shameful display.

[Valenth]

Or... and hear me out... the design is set up to have one house per character/ fc. And it's working as intended. You're calling for them to lose a shitton of hard work and saying people should be nicer? Only niceness when it benefits you, I suppose.

Ethics aren't in play, here. No one needs a house - like you said, in the end, it's all a videogame.

The nicer part referred more to the fact people apparently sent the couple death threads and such, as well as some strong language posted here on the forums itself. Yes, they've worked hard for it, which is why I expect them to be fully reimbursed, maybe with something extra on top of it as well. You could be right about the design, but I find it more likely to be a design oversight because I would imagine Yoshi-P himself would probably prefer more people having a house, right? Or do you really think, knowing him, he would rather have a few people posses a multitude of houses?

Ethics don't exclusively apply to needs, they very much apply to wants as well. Whenever you're dealing with humans ethics definitely, though not exclusively, apply no matter the medium. As an example, surely you don't think it's okay for the couple to get swarmed with all the vileness they've been? You even mentioned you don't find it fair they would lose all their hours of work. That is your ethics speaking right there, and a kind thing to say for them in their defense

[Venjamin]

Snip

The trick to divining intent is that it's really hard, if not impossible. But given what we have: If Yoshi-P wanted everyone to have housing, they would have gone the route of instanced housing. So clearly he isn't interested in everyone having housing, or that would have been the right of it. I think, knowing him, that he would rather have people work ( for lack of a better term ) for what they have.

You're not wrong - those are my ethics. But if we look at it from that perspective, ethics themselves ( along with morals ) are purely subjective, and therefore shouldn't really be considered in the grand scheme of the conversation, no?

[Valenth]

The trick to divining intent is that it's really hard, if not impossible. But given what we have: If Yoshi-P wanted everyone to have housing, they would have gone the route of instanced housing. So clearly he isn't interested in everyone having housing, or that would have been the right of it. I think, knowing him, that he would rather have people work ( for lack of a better term ) for what they have.

You're not wrong - those are my ethics. But if we look at it from that perspective, ethics themselves ( along with morals ) are purely subjective, and therefore shouldn't really be considered in the grand scheme of the conversation, no?

Because you brought up a good point, that of it being hard to divine intent, I did some digging around to see if I could find any written proof of intention regarding Yoshi-P's idea of housing. I immediately though of that famous quote of him that said how "personal housing would be, naturally, far more affordable" and looked it up. Reading the rest of the post that quote was taken from I found exactly what we're looking for. Even though it's an older post from 2013, he makes a very clear statement in it's text which should put any doubt aside.

...Fundamental Pricing Stance

Our fundamental stance toward housing prices was that we wanted to ensure that plots would be evenly distributed, avoiding a situation in which the wealthiest players could easily buy up all available plots of land. Please understand that while we will be adding servers and expanding housing areas as soon as we can, it is simply physically impossible for us to accomplish this easily, in a matter of one or two weeks.

If the initial price of land was easily within the means of wealthy players, one can envision all available plots of land being snatched up immediately, leaving other players—even those possessing the necessary gil—unable to purchase land for an extended period of time. Seeking to avoid this, we made the difficult decision to go forward with the pricing scheme we presented, aware that many players would be unable to afford housing for a while.

So it seems they didn't want people to posses multiple housings but rather have it evenly distributed amongst players. Their initial way of preventing that from happening was the huge pricing they put on the houses. It's very clear though that Yoshi-P wanted to prevent one (very rich) player from owning multiple houses. I hope this sheds some light on things for this debate.

Now about what you say about ethics not to be considered because they're subjective... then why do we all have this conversation at all? Isn't the point of this entire forum post (and all other discussions on the various other media) to talk about what is "fair"? Sure, what is fair is also subjective, but it's entirely defined by what people's ethics on what is fair and thus you can't rule out of the equation. It's a part of human life, emotion, having an idea on what is right and wrong. The later is exactly what is being discussed in this thread.

We can't live or decide anything without our ethics guiding us. To further illustrate the necessity of ethics - all our countries have a judicial system in place to help us decide with is "fair". For example - it's not fair to murder or steal. Isn't that also subjective? What weighs more? The fairness to the individual or the many? Should we just disregard them purely because they're subjective? I know this is going quite far, but I am just wanting to show how this entire post wouldn't be here if it wasn't for ethics, how you and me, and everybody probably wouldn't have responded the many times in this thread if it wasn't for ethics. It's probably also the reason this debate is getting so heated, because our ethics are on the line, our entire construction of making our existence work. Any danger to that might as well be the same as holding a dagger to one's throat, if you'll forgive me the exaggeration there.

(addendum) Anyway, I hope this clears up the discussion about intent the dev-team had when implementing house. I think we can also agree they picked a bad way of incorporating housing AND in their chosen method of trying to prevent the thing that has actually happened now from happening (people buying multiple houses). Hopefully we can now see that SE's inaction has caused the situation to escalate as it has and that the couple probably will be fully reimbursed + extra.