Housing restrictions not fair for individuals.

[Tridus]

I'm not sure they can 'fix' it at this point.
The apartments are supposed to be the alternative to wards for individual players.

And, they can't force that issue without permanently restricting individual players from purchasing FC houses.
And I get the feeling that doing that would really rile up the playerbase.
(Especially considering some of the comments in this thread about the temporary restrictions)


The devs backed themselves into a corner.
And I don't think they can get out of that corner without pissing some people off.

If apartments had functional equivalence to housing, people would be more interested in them. If SE offered me a three room condo with a big balcony that can do gardening and place outdoor furnishings, I'd take that and effectively be out of the housing market. That wouldn't cover all the demand, but it would give functional gameplay feature equivalence (as it could do everything a house can do), which would help a lot. Right now, apartments simply can't do all the things even a small house can.

Change that, and you'll at least be giving people a reasonable alternative even if you can't give everyone a plot.

[Tridus]

How are you more qualified to judge what the servers can and cant do than the actual people working with them?

Anybody who does this stuff for a living is qualified to give an opinion on the technical end of it. How do you know that the reason why they can't is technical ("we can't"), rather than managerial ("we don't want to because it'd cost money")? You don't, that's how. You're assuming it's technical when scaling servers out is dirt easy with current infrastructure. This stuff was hard in 1998. It's not hard in 2018. Making it easy is literally the business pitch behind cloud infrastructure.

I get that it might work on other games, but they were probably set up differently - I dont know to much about the technic-issues here, which actually leaves me little choice but to trust the devs. If you're saying "No, they're wrong on that!" you're basically saying they're lying - and I dont see why they should?

The obvious reason is that telling people "we don't want to invest your subscription money in providing the amount of capacity required to give you all a house" is bad PR. You think the devs are just allowed to say whatever they want without management and PR being involved? That's not how a big company works. If they say "we can't" without saying why, that's an entirely true statement on their part, because the unsaid part is "we can't because management won't give us the budget". Which is not the same as it being technically impossible.

Dont you believe the devs would like to have a better solution aswell?

If they want me to believe that, they could articulate what they're going to do about it over the long term. Silence is not confidence inspiring.

Because if you do believe that you'd also have to believe that they just dont have the ressources for that - its not only time invested in that, if I recall correctly they also had issues with not having enough staff-members to begin with a while back.

If they don't have the resources, whose fault is that? Oh, right... Square-Enix. Their own management is who allocates the resources, and we're customers of that company. If we're getting subpar service because of management decisions, we have every right to be unhappy about it. It doesn't have to be the fault of YoshiP to be the fault of the company we're paying, after all.

And if you dont believe that... what do you believe then? That the devs created this shortage of housing for their own amusment? That Yoshi-P sat in his office at 4.1 release, with streams of different housing areas on the walls, giggeling over people trying to snatch houses?

I believe in Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence."

Of course, in this case, I also think there's some Dilbert-esque PHB involved being stingy with the purse strings.

The housing system is far from ideal, granted - but the solution isnt "Just open more wards!"
Because they cant. What might work elsewhere obviously doesnt work here.
...unless ofc the devs actually do want nothing but an angry playerbase, bad press and the housing-shortage. I doubt that. And thats why I dont doubt that "just opening more wards" doesnt work with their servers.

They just did, so clearly they can. Amazing how an angry backslash in 4.1 suddenly made them able to open more wards... almost as if the problem was solvable when senior management was suitably motivated. You know what that sounds like? A budget problem, not a technical one.

[HoloKraft]

SE basically has 1 option at this point. Refine the apartment system.

[HoloKraft]

Amazing how an angry backslash suddenly made them able to open more wards..

This statement right here is what crushes the "We Cant" argument, we've seen them do it when the community gets worked up about it. This exact reason is why we have to keep fighting for it, YoshiP obviously needs a good enough reason to pitch to SE they need to spend TIME on the housing system, which might cost them a little money.

Also based on the quality and stability of the rest of the game I highly doubt the code for housing is "Spaghetti Code", Honestly if the community would cut Yoshi some slack and not be in an uproar over waiting a few more weeks for content then we might actually get what we want.

Somehow I feel like people just want to be pissed off anyway though. :/

[Rymm]

SE basically has 1 option at this point. Refine the apartment system.

I can dig up posts of myself and a multitude of other people making posts saying exactly this from back in 2016 when they were first released. It's now 2018 and we've only been given vague "we're working on it" responses. In short- while you aren't wrong, I'm not going to hold my breath.

[TaranTatsuuchi]

SE basically has 1 option at this point. Refine the apartment system.

I can dig up posts of myself and a multitude of other people making posts saying exactly this from back in 2016 when they were first released. It's now 2018 and we've only been given vague "we're working on it" responses. In short- while you aren't wrong, I'm not going to hold my breath.

I am inclined to believe that had the apartments been implemented as the original version of individual player housing, rather than just let individual players purchase fc houses, we wouldn't be in as bad of a situation with housing as we are now...

There would have been years to iterate on the apartments.
Demand for ward housing would be lower.
Perhaps even some of the restrictions and limitations would never have had to be implemented. (Auto demolition, a system the devs have gone on record saying it's a system type they never wanted, but due to their design had to implement.)

I think the majority of the problems with housing stemmed from that one decision.
The quick and easy implementation of just letting individual players purchase ward housing rather than implement what they had promised.
An individual housing system, different and cheaper than the ward housing.

[HoloKraft]

An individual housing system, different and cheaper than the ward housing.

And here is where I fundamentally disagree with you here, Having FCs and Individuals coexist in the wards are part of what make it such an awesome place. The freedom to do whatever you want in your little space, apartments would do a lot to sate a lot of people's nesting urge but not everyone.

There is something special to be had with owning a house in this game, and choosing to seperate FCs and individuals would be unnecessary and would be adding another layer of division that doesn't need to be there.

At the end of the day, refine the apartment system so that most of the population will be happy and add a few more wards for the FCs and individuals who want homes still. Problem (Almost) solved.

[Tridus]

I am inclined to believe that had the apartments been implemented as the original version of individual player housing, rather than just let individual players purchase fc houses, we wouldn't be in as bad of a situation with housing as we are now...

Yep. Apartments are just standalone instances, you can scale up capacity for those massively. By now they'd have had all kinds of time to make them functionally equivalent to houses, too.

I think the majority of the problems with housing stemmed from that one decision.
The quick and easy implementation of just letting individual players purchase ward housing rather than implement what they had promised.
An individual housing system, different and cheaper than the ward housing.

Yep. Shortcuts in software development often come back to bite you later.

[DioK]

There is no solution to the housing problem. No matter what rules or system you set up, there will always be those that seek, with full intent, a way to circumvent that system and rules for unfair advantage and gain for the purpose of trolling simply cause they can. There will also be those who feel entitled that their particular special-case desires should preempt the desires of all others, and that the entire Universe should bend over backwards to satisfy their particular case and their case alone, regardless of the affect on others. The problem isn’t the system or rules; the problem is the behavior and mindset of the people playing the game.

As the saying goes, you can please some people some of the time, but you'll never please all the people all the time.

[HoloKraft]

As the saying goes, you can please some people some of the time, but you'll never please all the people all the time.

What about when nobody is happy except a small fraction of the community? Just because someone owns the house they want, doesn't mean that they're happy with the system and don't complain about it. House or not ill keep saying something until its fair for everyone.

I think people tend to forget that Final Fantasy is a game, there is nothing wrong with wanting to have the things you have worked for. For a lot of people games are a way to escape real life for a little bit, this housing crisis is too eerily close to how things work IRL. Few get everything they want and everyone else is shafted.

It's almost worse in FF because someone who worked their ass off to get the things they want are LITERALLY being locked out of it.