Question about House Hoarding/Lack of Houses

[silverlunarfox]

snip some~
Solution: Limit home owning tied to account per server. When more wards are added, it can meet the demand of the increase of players easier without the worry of players hoarding/flip prices.
Thoughts and opinions? I think this might be a cheap, simpler fix that would make a great first step in the housing issue.

I didn't even know we had a FC house hoarding situation on Lamia. I found a house pretty easily so I'm a bit surprised. However I do agree limits need to be had. But SE chooses to not do that.

[Rymm]

I didn't even know we had a FC house hoarding situation on Lamia. I found a house pretty easily so I'm a bit surprised. However I do agree limits need to be had. But SE chooses to not do that.

Oh, yeah. As far as I am aware we are a middling pop server so it's not too hard to find housing, but if you pay attention to the wards you'll see a lot of houses bought up by alts with nearly the same names or FCs with only one member and identical tags. What really hurts is how many of them stand empty or only have a handful of seasonal furniture crammed in a corner.

I know exactly the FC that the OP is talking about with 9 houses, as they use it as a selling point when recruiting in /shout. Once I asked the person if they were aware of the housing shortage and they answered that they were and when I followed that up with why they bought so many in spite of said shortage, I was told that it was for no other reason than 'because they could.'

Until SE takes measures to counteract it, which I advocate for every time this subject comes up (which is a lot,) house hoarding is just one of the ugly facts of life that we are going to have to deal with.

[Galaktica]

The fact they're opening up Shirogane with zero changes to housing restrictions or anything of the sort shows just how little they really give a shit. It is, in short, infuriating looking at the way they've handled this. This is legit one of the things that's about to make quit this game for the forseeable future.

If they would just come out and say that they were looking into instanced housing or they were doubling, tripling, etc the number of wards in each area or just literally anything that showed they were listening to complaints, then I'd be totally okay. But they're doing none of that. "Hey, we're opening up a new housing zone, with the same 12 wards, use your alts to buy up all the houses whatever we don't care." Just...wtf?

Why am I going to keep paying them to develop massive features I literally cannot use? I've said it before and i'll say it again, housing is literally the only part of this game that you may never be able to participate in because SE and other players are literally preventing you from doing so. Savage, maps, EX primals, crafting, story, dungeons, minigames, logs, PVP, etc etc. Setting queues aside, literally every part of this game allows you to participate in at your leisure. Nothing is actively preventing you from you from crafting or raiding, for example. Yeah those mats may be hard to get and working together isn't always easy, but you can do those things whenever you want.

Once housing is gone, it's gone for good.

Think about it like this. What if only X number of mounts dropped from primals and then no more ever dropped again? What if after a certain enemy was killed enough times, it stopped respawning? What if other players harvesting/mining/fishing up nodes prevented you from doing the same? What if job trainers said, "oh, I'm sorry, I have enough pupils. I'm not teaching anymore." and then you couldn't play that job? That would be awful, right? Okay then, so whose bright idea was it to institute a major system that does not allow every or even half the total number of active players to actually use it? It just makes no sense from a design perspective. More than anything else, that's what drives me insane. Every other single part of this game is gated by how much you are willing to invest in it, but housing? Nope, no matter how much you put into the game, you may never get a house.

It's just so dumb and I can't wrap my head around how they can just continue on like nothing is wrong.

[LadyKairi]

I know the feels, OP. My friend and I strolled around the goblet to check out houses for design ideas the other night. The number of houses that were owned between 2 different FCs were really heart breaking. In just one ward even. What was even worse was most were either unfurnished or barely furnished with a handful of items. It was just sad, because we couldn't help but think, "wow, someone else would've loved to have this place and actually use it." Maybe we are just too big of decor fanatics, but seeing so many plots not getting enough attention to even be decorated... sigh.

[Maero]

I have said countless times but only the real solution would be instanced housing like other games out there..
I have played ESO for less then a year and got a house no problem, this game i have been playing a little over 3 years and have tried since housing was introduced and still no luck.
The reasoning that they do not want instanced as they want more of a community feel to wards is utter nonsense, sorry.
How active are wards?? Exactly...

[gbe931]

The only thing that SE has to do to fix the Housing issues they themselves have caused is to make more wards to meet the demand. It really is that simple. The fact that SE has been silent on this is and avoid actually solving the Housing dilemma is simply unacceptable. Like they are very fast to sell me Housing items on the cash shop. But guess what, most people don't have Housing to begin with so how do they intend on selling stuff for people who cannot use it? They rather spend time making a stupid "Perform" emote that no one asked for and making (Ultimate) content that is only accessible for the sub 1% rather than more wards that the vast majority of the paying player base with utilize. Its really infuriating and dumb that they have not addressed this after nearly 3 years.

[Strywin]

I have said countless times but only the real solution would be instanced housing like other games out there..
I have played ESO for less then a year and got a house no problem, this game i have been playing a little over 3 years and have tried since housing was introduced and still no luck.
The reasoning that they do not want instanced as they want more of a community feel to wards is utter nonsense, sorry.
How active are wards?? Exactly...

My ward where my FC house is located in is actually pretty lifeless & quiet. Nobody talks to each other in it, not even a emote thrown at each other or nothing lol. My house was surrounded by 3 personal houses though so that made it even all the more bare but one of them relocated or sold not to long ago, though I don't really care because like I said we didn't talk. I would love personal housing to be instanced though that isn't just apartments. I played ESO & still play it on occasion so I must say they did a damn good job their housing imo. The decorating is pretty neat, its very lore friendly and so many to choose from & can be traveled to by horseback, on foot or teleported to. I had heard other MMO' gave even better instanced housing, I have not tried any other but damn do I want instanced. I hope they address the housing situation sooner rather than later, that said I don't hate the wards though but I'd like the option of instanced housing with yards to decorate too.

[Sylfaein]

Honestly, the only thing we can do right now is use the reporting feature where we can. Nothing we can do about folks who are just sitting on the houses, but the flippers? Report the heck out of them.

Watch chat and PF, and report everyone you see flipping houses. Heck, I just saw a particularly brazen ad for multiple larges and mediums, in PF. Make it dangerous for these degenerates to operate; if it's not worth the risk, they should get out of the business.

[Milesian]

Or perhaps we could get more wards and houses in general....would fix the problem a lot easier to make things easily accessible to everyone. I agree with semi-instanced stuff or a number of other suggestions I mean honestly there's a lot of choices here and housing shouldn't have to be top tier difficult to obtain 1% commodity when everyone clearly wants it. Why limit it when clearly the game is doing well and we should just get more available to the playerbase...

The solution you're suggestion is going to fix very little because it's only a very very minor aspect of the problem - and even then the game is growing.

[Galaktica]

but I'd like the option of instanced housing

Yeah, if they're so hellbent on having wards, fine, but ffs at least give the rest of us an option. There's a couple out there that owns 28 F***ING PLOTS. Let me repeat myself.

TWENTY.
EIGHT.
F***ING.
PLOTS.

Like...I'm sitting here and I'm trying to wrap my head about the idea that anyone on the development team thinks that is okay. I pay my sub too. Where the shit is my house at, Yoshi? It feels unfair, there's just no other way to put it. I'm powerless in a situation where I shouldn't be through no fault of my own if that makes sense. Everyone should have access to housing. I honestly don't know what to say.

And like I said before, the fact they're opening up Shirogane without any new restrictions in place (e.g. alts on the same few accounts can buy up all the housing) really feels like they just don't give a shit. It should be common sense. They have a problem they need to fix...assuming they're even aware of this problem. If not, well, things are infinitely worse than I expected. But assuming they're aware, it stands to reason that they would do everything in their power to alleviate the problem...but they're not. Instead, we get this weird half-measure that puts a bandaid on a broken arm. except, in this case, the bandaid is old, dirty, and wet and doesn't really still like it should.

sigh.

I don't know what else to do at this point. Yoshi, community managers, anyone? Can any single one of you just say something? Anything? If you're not gonna fix the problem, then just say so so I can cancel my sub and move on.

Anywho, figure people here might find this to be an interesting read if they haven't read it already.