Housing and FCs...

[NephthysVasudan]

Alright I'll throw a bone.....
You want to help alleviate the stress somewhat?
Revoke ownership of homes on accounts who have more than one that where grandfathered in.
Issue a notice - Give them 45 days. Force them to pick one - just one - return their goods as is in mechanics. - Give them their Gil back if need be.

But this does not in any shape form or fashion ignore the elephant in the room from most complaints I keep seeing.

Your on an overpopulated server.
There is a reason there is incentive to move off said server.

Your dealing with a limited resource on a server that is overpopulated. This does not mean the issue is on SE's side when the system is working rather well on other servers.

No its not perfect....and yeah there could be improvements. But don't wreck it for everyone else.

[LalaRu]

The housing limit of one per account was a godsend. Wish it was done from beginning, we hadn't had su much drama about it. Now housing no more an issue.

And Balmung is very well know it is full as an egg. Going there today, you know in advance everything there is taken.

[Vidu]

I just got to say it: The housing system in this game feels like it's making free companies far too rigid. Basically, let's say there is a healthy server and a bunch of free companies form. They all build up funds, get a house, do raids and community activities, etc. Then the wear and tear of time happens and the FCs lose a lot of members. However, the FC owners have a huge amount of time and gil invested in their houses.

On a healthy server, the housing situation actually isnt that bad - Balmung is not a healthy a server.

Besides that I'm not really sure what your concern here is?

Is it that there are only limited houses available and you're unhappy with "dead" FCs holding on to some of them?
In that case: If the FC is truely dead, if no one is using the house anymore, it will get thrown back on the market 45 days after the last time someone from that FC entered the house. Problem solved - as long as someone is till active, whats the problem?

If its the the whole "people are unwilling to merge their FCs because of houses"-thing, I'm not really sure what the problem is - and I'm also unsure how thats not a problem in other games?
Quite frankly: Even if housing wouldnt be limited I wouldnt want to give up our FC-house all that quickly. Just last weekend I spend about 12 hours, 4 million gil and 600k MGP to re-model parts of it when I bought the new GC-furniture. (And thats after previously spending countless hours over the past months - not just me but other members aswell. Not to mention things like workshop and sub/airship-progress)
Maybe other games dont offer that much options to decorate houses, but at least here I wouldnt want to see all that work go to waste.
I dare say that people would still clinge to their houses, even if the new FC also has one or if it would be easy enough to buy a priavte one - decoarting is so much work and can be quite a gil-sink, I wouldnt let that go easly either.
And what is the point or real benefit of merging, breaking or in a sense even joining FCs anyways? Communication works just aswell via LS - so two FCs that want to merge but dont want to give up their respective houses could just aswell form a LS (assuming they dont have more than 128 members together...) to use for communication, while still enjoying the benefits of their FC in their respective one.

Shell FCs might still exists, but they're a lot less of a problem now - you can only own one personal house and one FC-house on your account with the new changes. That means if you truely want to have two houses, you're prohibted from joining an FC with housing.

Again... quite ironic that you're talking about a "healthy" server there - because on our healthy servers housing isnt that much of an issue anymore and if you or your FC wants to buy a house, they can - if they look around a bit and are willing to settle for a small one in the Goblet for starters.

[illgot]

lots of smalls on my server, some mediums and largest too.

[Talraen]

I don't think anyone on this thread has actually addressed the point being made here yet. Which is too bad, because it's a very interesting point. And it doesn't only affect servers without available housing.

Do you have any suggestions on how to solve this problem? Because you're right, if your FC dies, you're probably going to stick with it so as not to lose the housing. It's going to be very difficult to convince two dead FCs with housing to merge into one. Maybe if there was a way to keep the stuff associated with the housing, not only furniture and such but things like FC workshop progress. I don't know how you'd merge FCs even in that case, though.

[BillyKaplan]

Maybe if there was a way to keep the stuff associated with the housing, not only furniture and such but things like FC workshop progress

Two things that would be amazing -
1. breaking workshops out of housing. FCs need to be affiliated with a certain GC, I'd like to see public, instanced workshops made available to FCs that hit a certain rank, instead of tying them to houses. Make the workshop log also tied to the FC rather than the house. Two things you get from this: a lot more FCs become viable as they no longer NEED a house, 2. you remove the incentive to owning a house from people who are in it just for the workshop.

2. FC merge. I can see why this doesn't exist as it's too much of a headache, but at the same time it can be very simplified and will give smaller FCs a chance to merge and grow without either FC losing things by virtue of abandoning their original FCs. And suddenly from needing two houses, you also need just the one.

[Talraen]

Two things that would be amazing -
1. breaking workshops out of housing. FCs need to be affiliated with a certain GC, I'd like to see public, instanced workshops made available to FCs that hit a certain rank, instead of tying them to houses. Make the workshop log also tied to the FC rather than the house. Two things you get from this: a lot more FCs become viable as they no longer NEED a house, 2. you remove the incentive to owning a house from people who are in it just for the workshop.

2. FC merge. I can see why this doesn't exist as it's too much of a headache, but at the same time it can be very simplified and will give smaller FCs a chance to merge and grow without either FC losing things by virtue of abandoning their original FCs. And suddenly from needing two houses, you also need just the one.

I agree with point 1, that you should be able to have a free company workshop without housing. I don't know if that addresses the issue the OP brought up, though. If the workshop is still tied to the FC, I'm still going to hesitate to leave my FC (and lose all that work) to merge with someone else's. So the FC merge you propose would need to take workshops into account. I'm not sure of a clean way to do that, but that's a problem that needs to be solved.

[BillyKaplan]

So the FC merge you propose would need to take workshops into account.

Some things are easier than others. For instance, the construction log, and areas discovered by submarines and airships. If one FC has it, the merged FC will, too. Other things will be trickier - do you have, combined, too many airships and submarines? Are your FC chests too full? Stuff like that. Which is why I said it can be very simple - you can't merge the FCs until you have few enough vehicles. This can be selected as late as the actual merge process. "You have 5 airships. A possible 4 are allowed per fc. Please select which is to be discarded" and it's up to the the players to decide together which airship to give up on, and to strip it for parts prior to doing so.
Ultimately there won't be a situation where nothing is lost, that would be unfair to people who don't merge FCs, and will make it prone to abuse. You leave an fc, you lose something. You want to merge FCs, the end result is still a single, regular FC, so despite all your hard work, it's just not fair for you to keep two FC's worth of anything.

[Colt47]

On a healthy server, the housing situation actually isnt that bad - Balmung is not a healthy a server.

Besides that I'm not really sure what your concern here is?

Is it that there are only limited houses available and you're unhappy with "dead" FCs holding on to some of them?
In that case: If the FC is truely dead, if no one is using the house anymore, it will get thrown back on the market 45 days after the last time someone from that FC entered the house. Problem solved - as long as someone is till active, whats the problem?

If its the the whole "people are unwilling to merge their FCs because of houses"-thing, I'm not really sure what the problem is - and I'm also unsure how thats not a problem in other games?

The concern is mostly with the flaw of the system, which is that it can't handle the negative case and can only work under ideal conditions. A good system should have ways to deal with the negative case, which was probably never looked at when they implemented the system to begin with.

There probably needs to be a way to elegantly move the time and financial commitment of one FC that is having it's swan song into a pool that is transferable. They are doing a lot to fix the issues of one person owning too many houses, but the core of the housing crisis is the lack of good liquidation. The current system encourages hoarding and there are people that just log on for a day or two a week keeping a sub just to make sure that housing commitment isn't put into default.

Right now I'm just hoping that the crowd coming in here going "Oh look, a balmunger is complaining about his server" don't flood out the actual message, which has nothing to do with personal grievances or with the server I'm residing on. I merely observed it on the server that is having the issues because the server I am on represents the negative case. a

[Penthea]

The concern is mostly with the flaw of the system, which is that it can't handle the negative case and can only work under ideal conditions. A good system should have ways to deal with the negative case, which was probably never looked at when they implemented the system to begin with.

I am not saying by any means that the housing system is perfect, but few things are designed to work even in poor conditions. They're designed to work in normal conditions...Balmung's population isn't a normal condition.