1 account buying 14 houses in 1 ward.

[SendohJin]

I read the tumblr post and there attitude is what annoys me the most. As i said in my post if they even where considering giving up plots for the new player base. Then fine but there not and then get upset when they receive hate.

You're actually hating on people for not giving their stuff away for free. You realize that right?

[Penthea]

You're actually hating on people for not giving their stuff away for free. You realize that right?

It's a crappy situation but the fact that these players bought the land fair and square cannot be disputed. They had the resources and they were available to purchase. The land belongs to them and no one has the right to guilt them into letting it go just because someone else wants it. If they start house flipping that's another thing altogether. It still doesn't negate their right to ownership if they bought it from the game with gil.

The hate should be directed at SE for having a system so broken that the actions of a minority can have massive negative impact.

[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.

[Elamys]

Thank you, Valenth. It's been obvious to me from the first that it wasn't the intention for people to own so many houses alone, but I had forgotten he actually clearly stated that in a post.