Quote Originally Posted by Penthea View Post
That's fine, I get that. But with the situation that server is in, it seems you can't all eat your cake and have it too. Most of you will have to choose between the rp community and having realistic chances of getting a house.
Which is understandable, but what's starting to bother me more at this point is the absolutely unrestrained bashing going on on Balmung players, which is really nothing new because "ew ERP", but it's getting out of hand. Again, nobody who plays on Balmung has or is doing anything wrong by choosing to stay on the server. All we want to say is that the system is flawed, and it still is. Was this patch a step in the right direction? Yes, definitely. But it didn't resolve everything. Other servers are full already, and more will be soon enough, and then we'll be right back where we started, with damn near every server sold out of housing.

Here's what I ACTUALLY see concerning housing on Balmung: not a lot. I guess the impression people get of Balmung is that we're full of melodramatic people who do nothing but cry all day about housing but actually everyone's moved on. The night housing was launched there was a lot of hopeful chatter, the day after that when people were camping the placards there was some grumbling but mostly everyone had accepted it and was prepared to be disappointed, and now I don't hear anything about it at all. I'm tired of people who don't know a single thing about the server acting like they know everything about it. The fact is that there's like less than 10 frequent posters from Balmung on the housing subforums here, including myself. You're gonna judge the entire server based on that?

There's no reason to defend a system that will never work properly in the long term and what most Balmung players are actually asking for is not more wards, but for apartments to be improved upon, which is the most reasonable solution by far. This is the consensus I have seen not only on the forums, but also in game, while chatting in my linkshells and free company. Most of the players I know aren't that invested in a yard, they just want a reasonably sized space to call their own and the ability to garden. There are a few people who want Balmung alone to get more wards, but the majority appear to disagree with them. But the trend here appears to be snap judgments when you read the World listed under someone's name. It's absolutely exhausting. If you heard day in and day out how players from Moogle were whiny drama queens who suck at the game and have a culture of entitlement when it's not even true, you'd get tired too.

Players who choose to remain on Balmung for whatever reason aren't suddenly disallowed to point out the problems with the housing system. The sudden white knighting for SE, after years of agreeing the housing system was massively flawed, is exhausting. There are numerous valid reasons for someone to choose to stay on the server, and I swear to god, if I see one more person suggest that I ask my friends to come with me, I'm going to lose it. Because sure, I can ask my friends to come with, but then they have to ask theirs, and everyone involved in that network has to decide what is more important to them. I'm not vain enough to think that their world revolves around me and the idea is frankly quite ridiculous. I played on a smaller server before and I like a big server a lot more. I like that I see other people out and about in the world, people I can do FATEs, maps, and other bits of content with that you can't do via Party Finder. I like seeing the cities alive with more than one or two crafters sitting by the market board. I like that if I get tired of doing actual game content, I'm almost guaranteed to find some sort of tavern or other RP event I can go to and relax (I'm not actually a super activer RPer, whoops). I like that there are people to talk to in my linkshells and in shout, that the market board isn't a barren wasteland of overpriced goods, and that I'm not getting bombarded with RMT whispers every minute.

And all those things to me ultimately outweighed leaving the server, which I considered seriously when the incentives were announced. But I remembered playing on Malboro and how quiet it was and I decided I'd rather stay on my big, weird server. I instead chose to wait patiently for my house, and I was rewarded for that patience, and this may shock people, but pretty much everyone here on Balmung is fully aware of the housing situation, everyone, including myself, advises people to be prepared for disappointment on this server when it comes to housing, and those people who truly cared more about housing than everything else have already left. Those who remain have other priorities, but they still want housing, and here's another thing, I haven't encountered a single person, not a SINGLE one, who says they NEED housing for RP; everyone has either an apartment or FC room, sometimes both.