Personal Housing Too Nice to Have: How Many Houses in Shirogane Are Personal Balmung

[Gotsugo]

Before getting to numbers, I will brief on what the most to least critical reason for the housing shortage:

1) Personal Housing: Numbers below explain it all.
2) Set Prices Across All Servers: Popular servers like Balmung have more currency around and easily 4/5 players who play routinely have 7 million gold.
3) Relocation: It's now less risk for people to get new houses. It doesn't mitigate the odds someone will get a house on their alt ether. All it does is make older wards' plots more likely to be available.
4) How Much Gil the Stormblood MSQ Gives: It easily gave me at least 1.3 million just playing through, more than a third of what you need for a small plot.

SUMMARY
88% of Houses in Shirogane are personal plots.
The plot with the most personal houses is Ward 2 with 51/60
The plot with the least personal houses is Ward 8 with 41/60
The mean average is 12/60 houses belong to free companies.

[Gotsugo]

Opinion
Personal housing should've never been implemented because of high population servers like Balmung. It's simply too nice to have with the scale of some servers and when the possibility of a personal house is denied a larger % of the community have a weakened experience whether you agree they should or not.

People feeling undercut from not having a personal house was a non-issue before it became a feature.

Solution
Get rid of personal housing and refund players with plots. Implementing houses to be FC only encourages more tightly knit communities with users joining one or starting one, and ends the blood bath of the great housing races. Everyone will get over it eventually. FC houses also house infinitely more players and will put at least another hurtle of work required to get a an alt's home.

[Vahlnir]

Look, just because you (or an FC) didn't get a house doesn't mean people should be punished for your misfortune. The current situation sucks, I get it, but...come on now. You are coming across as nothing more than salty.

[Nuna]

Nope. They should have enough plots so that if ppl have the money they can get one and not have to take one or buy one from someone else. Everyone should have the size they want.

[Penthea]

Get rid of personal housing and refund players with plots.

Players would just get personal housing through shell fcs instead. Many are already doing that to have full control over two houses on one character.

[Gotsugo]

Look, just because you (or an FC) didn't get a house doesn't mean people should be punished for your misfortune. The current situation sucks, I get it, but...come on now. You are coming across as nothing more than salty.

I've actually been well settled into an FC that's had a plot since 2.1, I'm just being objective. Personal housing is too nice of a feature for the sheer scale the community has reached. It just leaves many people feeling undercut when housing races were a non-issue before personal housing was a feature.

Edit: Enabling personal housing objectively created more issues than leaving players wanting personal houses.

[Vahlnir]

I've actually been well settled into an FC that's had a plot since 2.1, I'm just being objective. Personal housing is too nice of a feature for the sheer scale the community has reached. It just leaves many people feeling undercut when housing races were a non-issue before personal housing was a feature.

Well, even if they did do this, there's a million and one FCs now so it'd still be a race regardless of whether there were individual players or not. Solo players can also make their own (which they do) to get another house even if they already have one, so...yeah. Gotta factor them into the mix too, they're basically solo players getting private plots. This is inaccurate...now. Maybe not 4 years ago, but definitely now. Your "system" just wouldn't work, and it would anger more people than the recent fiasco did.

[Gotsugo]

FC only houses at the very least make another hurdle of effort it takes for people to get alt homes or take a plot in general, and many people who're tied or defined by their resident FC's might not leave to start their own. Even early on in Balmung and Gilgamesh there were plots available in the most congested servers, and personal housing put an end to any plot being available for more than ten minutes.

Additionally I believe between the large scale promotions and the constant enabling of housing this should've been a concern that SE would properly prepare for and addressed in live letters.

Perhaps there should be a system unique to what SE refers as a congested server specifically, but I think it's an unspoken opinion that personal housing should've never been a feature in the first place. Now any solution SE will feature is either not enough, or goes way too far. People would complain still if there were new policies on specifically congested servers.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Personal housing was added because most servers had an abundance of empty plots since implementation when it was FC only.

Changing it back to FC only isn't a solution. Now we have an abundance of FC's that are 5 or less people. Many just 1 person. It will be the same situation, just with different people

We have a number of old FC's still holding plots because the creator placed an alt as the owner of the FC just so they could log in to prevent the demolition timer.

Other factors are people that made alts just to buy more housing plots. IMO I think this needs to be addressed before trying to change anything else.

Housing situations also vary by world. And overpopulated world will likely have a majority of its housing bought as private homes. An underpopulated one not so much.

[Gotsugo]

Personal housing was added because most servers had an abundance of empty plots since implementation when it was FC only.

Other factors are people that made alts just to buy more housing plots. IMO I think this needs to be addressed before trying to change anything else.

We have a number of old FC's still holding plots because the creator placed an alt as the owner of the FC just so they could log in t

1) True, but as the subscriber base reached 10 million those plots would've filled up eventually.
2) That was an issue before demolition which some people think FC plot demolitions should have a more intricate process.
3) I think a one house per account (FC owner or personal possibly) is a decent start.