How the heck can I get a damn house in this game??

[Celef]

- what is true is that SE has to remove unfair advantages: I'm talking about players with 2+ FC per account and with an house per FC. they have a fleet, while right now there are new FC restrictions per account.

We don't need more of a system that does not work. We need a revamp system with, finally, a real instanced system, like EQ2's for example !

[LaylaTsarra]

Neither one makes any sense. Why should somebody standing in the yard stop either a purchase or the house being built? It's not as though they can stand where the house will go - that area isn't accessible.

I would suspect most people standing in the yard don't have a clue that it would prevent anyone from purchasing that plot. Anyone getting into trouble for that is being unfairly singled out. It's not like there is a warning pop up that says hey you can't stand here or you'll prevent someone else from buying this plot.

This appears to be something that needs to be fixed and I would think it shouldn't be that hard to do.

[Mr_Gyactus]

We don't need more of a system that does not work. We need a revamp system with, finally, a real instanced system, like EQ2's for example !

The actual system could work IF they add more plots and more wards, more and more and more. This way the house will costs exactly the plot price, not 1billion for a large in shirogane.
The housing in ff14- reddit is a financial investment, not a feature --> this leads to financial speculations and RMT and an unjustified greed, where people buy plots for reselling.

btw I need what I need, not what you think -we- need. (not we, but I, ok?).

[Maero]

I had no idea if someone stood in front it prevents others from buying, lol
That is rather silly

[Jijifli]

In fact, I'm not sure why the random timer exists. You simply buy a small as a placeholder and the system doesn't apply to you.

Because House selling was against the ToS if you sold it higher than you paid for the plot. Players attempting to avoid this, just went to third party house selling sites.

Square knew of that, and got kinda mad, because we clearly couldn't behave. So they placed the lock to have house selling be such a pain and RNG that you have to be crazy to take the risks. Moving your house isn't effected because you don't sell your plot doing that.

[Claviusnex]

Move to a server that isn't overcrowded. I'm on Adamantoise, and there are dozens of plots available in the Goblet, and a handful in each of the other housing areas - there were even a few smalls in Shirogane when I checked last week. The apartment complex in my ward(Goblet 13) also has literally only a single apartment taken up.

FFXIV doesn't have a housing crisis, it has a population crisis specific to certain servers.

More than a handful in LB. I have 10 open plots in my ward alone and that is an increase from a few of weeks ago when I did a full census of all housing areas. Again just for my current ward nine of the plots have been available since they turned auto-demolition back on.

People are quick to blame the housing area design as the cause of not being able to purchase a personal house.

However housing originally was designed as a FC feature. They opened the housing later for personal use due to large amounts of residential areas being sparsely populated or empty because at the time buying a house was a huge thing even for an FC. Though I think part of it was most wanted the large or medium plots. When it was opened for personal use the small plots all disappeared rather quickly.

As it is now I don't think its too much about the playerbase size increase. Its an increase of players that know how to actually make gil in this game and as such can actually afford a house paired with a lack of cash sinks that players can spend gil on reducing the amount of gil in circulation.

I think you are correct on some of the causes for higher housing demand. The issue still goes back to the design not being able to handle dynamics in demand. Wards are a static implementation. This results in a large imbalance of system resources across servers with the high population not having enough housing and medium and small having an excess of housing. This will never be resolved with the existing housing system. While it is possible that the system could be made to better handle dynamic demand I suspect it would be more work than developing a parallel fully instanced system based around a common market entrance area.

The random timer was intended to hinder resellers and to even the chances of players competing to make a new purchase of a specific plot.

The problem is that as long as the relocation bypass exists, neither is really accomplished. As long as there's another plot available for direct purchase (or the buyer already owns a house), the resellers can still sell what they own to other players without the timer interfering.

Players with a lot of gil have a distinct advantage over players who have barely enough gil to purchase a plot and the estate permit since they can just buy the cheapest small available then instantly relocate. They're only hindered if there are no other plots available.

Reselling only works with FC sales now and that won't allow for the reseller to relocate so they have to play the waiting game like everyone else. Even if they do relocated reselling won't work after the variable timer as there is no way for the purchaser to be able to know when they have to be online to buy the house. For all practical purposes reselling has been killed in the personal home market.

[Elamys]

FFXIV doesn't have a housing crisis, it has a population crisis specific to certain servers.

Mateus is far from being a huge overcrowded server, though it is refreshing to see people yell at a server that isn't Balmung over this for once.

[Niwashi]

The issue still goes back to the design not being able to handle dynamics in demand. Wards are a static implementation. This results in a large imbalance of system resources across servers with the high population not having enough housing and medium and small having an excess of housing. This will never be resolved with the existing housing system.

I agree the root problem with our housing system is it's lack of dynamics. It's not even a matter of whether housing is in shared wards or individual instances, as SE has displayed the same problem in both.

For a shared ward example, LOTRO has a very similar style of shared wards (called neighborhoods in that game's terminology). It works there far better than here not only because they support a lot more wards than FFXIV does, but also because it's server-specific, with automated dynamic allocation. When all houses of a given size in a given location are taken (across all neighborhoods at that location), a new neighborhood is spawned with its whole collection of houses for players to fill. (It hasn't been completely without problems, since there's a maximum number of neighborhoods that system can create, and their highest population server reached its initial maximum, and was stuck there for a while until the developers raised the max. But that was nowhere near the problems FFXIV has had with a fixed —and very limited— number of wards on every server, regardless of population.)

Even when SE added individually instanced apartments, they still didn't make it dynamic. They put in apartment buildings that should support I think it was 255 apartments each, but with initially 90 of them unlocked for use. This was supposedly just to get people to spread out across different wards, with the other apartments to be unlocked as they were needed. But "as needed" turned out not, after all, to mean as that particular server needed them. Balmung ran out of apartments while most other servers still had only a tiny proportion of them taken, and apparently SE was unable to unlock more of the (already created) apartments on Balmung unless they unlocked them on all servers, most of which didn't need any more.

If SE can't even manage unlocking available apartment instances on a per-server basis, I'm not sure anymore what's going to fix their system. High population servers need more housing than low population servers, and as long as SE insists on it being the same amount everywhere, the only possibilities are high-pop housing shortages and/or low-pop under-utilization. As they also seem to be (probably correctly) viewing under-utilization as wasted resources and money, they're consistently leaning towards housing shortages instead. Until SE figures out how to make server specific dynamic allocation work, we're going to be stuck with these issues.

[Claviusnex]

I agree the root problem with our housing system is it's lack of dynamics. It's not even a matter of whether housing is in shared wards or individual instances, as SE has displayed the same problem in both.

For a shared ward example, LOTRO has a very similar style of shared wards (called neighborhoods in that game's terminology). It works there far better than here not only because they support a lot more wards than FFXIV does, but also because it's server-specific, with automated dynamic allocation. When all houses of a given size in a given location are taken (across all neighborhoods at that location), a new neighborhood is spawned with its whole collection of houses for players to fill. (It hasn't been completely without problems, since there's a maximum number of neighborhoods that system can create, and their highest population server reached its initial maximum, and was stuck there for a while until the developers raised the max. But that was nowhere near the problems FFXIV has had with a fixed —and very limited— number of wards on every server, regardless of population.)

Even when SE added individually instanced apartments, they still didn't make it dynamic. They put in apartment buildings that should support I think it was 255 apartments each, but with initially 90 of them unlocked for use. This was supposedly just to get people to spread out across different wards, with the other apartments to be unlocked as they were needed. But "as needed" turned out not, after all, to mean as that particular server needed them. Balmung ran out of apartments while most other servers still had only a tiny proportion of them taken, and apparently SE was unable to unlock more of the (already created) apartments on Balmung unless they unlocked them on all servers, most of which didn't need any more.

If SE can't even manage unlocking available apartment instances on a per-server basis, I'm not sure anymore what's going to fix their system. High population servers need more housing than low population servers, and as long as SE insists on it being the same amount everywhere, the only possibilities are high-pop housing shortages and/or low-pop under-utilization. As they also seem to be (probably correctly) viewing under-utilization as wasted resources and money, they're consistently leaning towards housing shortages instead. Until SE figures out how to make server specific dynamic allocation work, we're going to be stuck with these issues.

Their best bet is to build a fully instanced parallel housing system that has yards included with the interior. Add a well designed common area similar to the capital city market areas as the entrance or put the entrance in the cities and they will feel more alive than most wards do today.

[Toffa]

There's a couple of people in the mateus NN that relay an open plot in the NN, if you don't have mentor i'd consider getting it and lurking.