Some Final Thoughts on the 2017 Shirogane Housing Release Fiasco

[Sieben79]

Opening post

Thank you.
Hyomin Park, Cactuar Server

Thank you! Your text reflects my thoughts and feelings

[Paladinleeds]

To give some perspective, from what I heard on Lousioix, a NEW WORLD, all plots in Shirogane and all areas sold out within 10 minutes. That's... 10 minutes, and apparently within 2 minutes PFs were already up selling large plots for like 500m. So yeah, moving to a lower pop server isn't the answer, Louisoix is the lowest pop server in the European datacentre and even it sold out in no time flat. Thankfully, I already had my cozy little cottage in The Lavender Beds, so had no plans to move.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

To give some perspective, from what I heard on Lousioix, a NEW WORLD, all plots in Shirogane and all areas sold out within 10 minutes. That's... 10 minutes, and apparently within 2 minutes PFs were already up selling large plots for like 500m. So yeah, moving to a lower pop server isn't the answer, Louisoix is the lowest pop server in the European datacentre and even it sold out in no time flat. Thankfully, I already had my cozy little cottage in The Lavender Beds, so had no plans to move.

Unfortunately, every world sold out within ten minutes. People have been reporting Midgardsormr, Siren and Jenova were all gone despite being listed preferred worlds. If you scour through the housing sub-reddit, you'll see plenty charging obscenely high prices. SE's whole "we'll ban re-sellers if you report them!" once again shows how shortsighted they are. People just stop advertising in-game. They didn't stop trying to flip houses.

[Ametrine]

Good post OP.

My suggestions would be a deep reevaluation and expansion of the apartment system to add many of the features currently missing from it. It allowed me much of the vanity side and acts as my personal home base, but it's no where near as deep or convenient as a small house. The limitations from an actual house are simply too tight.

On the othet hand, I had suggested in another thread adding a second form of instanced housing. City-states all have areas with housing that we players have no access to (a good example is the high-class district in Grid that we are gated out of). A series of quests could open that up as a method of introducing a seperate form of properly instanced housing. Add a limit of one per player to limit server strain.

That would leave the current homes alone and offer an appealing alternative to personal housing. Having a gate to enter in certain zones would make visiting friends easier than the current ward system we have now, too.

[Keridwyn]

Well worded OP, you hit the nail on the head. I'm not upset because I didn't get a plot, I'm upset that I never had a chance because technical issues forced me to log in five minutes late.

Honestly the only way to fix housing that wouldn't require a total rework of the system would be something along the lines of dynamic wards. All the wards are full? A new ward pops in to existence. When it fills, another new ward pops in to existence. With this system you have flexibility because rather than implementing a set number of wards that may be more than enough for one server and not enough for another, your server dictates how many wards they need. If you go a step further and then somehow tie the house to the account so that all of the characters (main or alt) on an account could use it then you start to get a good picture of how to be flexible enough to keep folks reasonably content.

I still think that ultimately giving players instanced player housing that they can upgrade and customize depending on how much gil they want to sink into it is a better option, both as a gil sink and as housing itself. Apartments are too constrained and lack access to features. FC rooms are better but require that your FC was lucky enough to own a house. However, this would require a ground up rework of the system and I just don't think that the Dev team is ever going to have this kind of time or money to sink into it.

Ultimately I'm not a programmer. I'm not familiar with the resources that SE gives the FFXIV team to work with. I'm not even familiar with the types of servers we use or what their actual limitations are. The solution of dynamic wards seems solid to me though as it allows for the continued growth of the game and yes, it even allows for when the game goes into the twilight years and needs to downsize by being able to shrink and give up all the extra space it took as people leave and plots go unused.

[Cyreil]

I guess I better listen to all the people who have been saying I need to transfer to a preferred world now and get away from the overpopulated servers if I want a house.

Oh wait a minute. It's not a Balmung/Gilgamesh thing anymore, now is it? Huh.

Lobby errors aside, I hate that this entire system feels like a competition, no matter the server you are on. I went to sleep that night knowing full well that this was what was going to happen.

"Ten Million players worldwide!" You all remember that? Well do we even have close to 10 million houses? It was a simple 2 + 2 for me.

[Nihility]

it's my understanding that the game is actually internally designed with the ability to expand wards up to 32 per housing district
and the ffxiv servers run by third party companies just had them all open right out of the gate

why that didn't occur in the S-E run servers is probably the real question.
for many servers that would probably actually be way too much, even if it was just a bi-weekly couple new wards housing rush until not every house gets bought up for a day or two just to hit the right balance.

putting out a rule towards 1 fc ownership and 1 private estate per account and giving some time to remedy it before taking them all would go a long way too. The amount of people i know that have 8+ houses just because they can and don't do anything with them outside a monthly login is a bit staggering x.x

[Ayerinn]

it's my understanding that the game is actually internally designed with the ability to expand wards up to 32 per housing district
and the ffxiv servers run by third party companies just had them all open right out of the gate

why that didn't occur in the S-E run servers is probably the real question.
for many servers that would probably actually be way too much, even if it was just a bi-weekly couple new wards housing rush until not every house gets bought up for a day or two just to hit the right balance.

putting out a rule towards 1 fc ownership and 1 private estate per account and giving some time to remedy it before taking them all would go a long way too. The amount of people i know that have 8+ houses just because they can and don't do anything with them outside a monthly login is a bit staggering x.x

32 wards per area (!) would be amazing...the housing item crafting market would be insane!

[Miscreant]

Personally I think a good solution would be to restrict housing wards to Free Companies only and then make personal housing instanced.

I like the sense of community that you get in the wards but lets face it, personal housing adds nothing to that community feeling, Wards are their most active when you have active Free Companies messing around at market boards etc. I'm not saying that personal housing isn't something the community should have, it's nice to have a place where I can fail my rotation on a dummy in peace. It's just that I would happily have my personal house in its own instance if it meant that the wards were actually put to good use. I was also one of the lucky ones and I got the small plot I wanted in Shirogane (please don't hate me), so my point of view isn't because I'm angry, it's more that I think there is a lot more potential for the housing than how it currently stands. I've played the game since Beta and remember when housing was first added, wards used to have a greater sense of community when it was only Free Companies, maybe I was really lucky, but I used to run Ex Primals with at least four or five neighbouring FC's, they were good times.

[Ghanbaatar]

Well put, housing is content in this game we all play. Much content in this game has some sort of gate before it. Like the MSQ to get to new areas and unlock dungeons/trials. Even the highest end raiding has the gate of gear and getting better at playing your class of choice. It really sucks that there is simply no way through this gate for housing besides luck. If the gate was simply in game Gil that would be one thing but it isn't. I came here from(most recently) Wildstar and seeing how housing is handled here blows my mind. I agree, the idea of having neighbors and a community is really cool, I've even met a few of the people living near my FC's house which was nice. Still, no matter what we can locked to this small plot for nearly 50 people to share. We have it better then many who have nothing but it still is aggravating that nothing seems to be done to improve something countless people seem to want. They change class balance to address one issue in the game each patch, why not this then as well? Is this not also an aspect of the game people should be able to at least TRY and be able to enjoy? Sorry if this was rambling, just adding my voice to choir mostly.