Pushed to quit after 1,860 days subbed

[EdgeFayth]

...

This, just this... Thanks for this very useful comment. As OP, I lost my house (and my FC house) because I didn't received the emails. I lost like 1 year of game this day, very frustrating. This pop up window would have saved me...

[ko_]

Question.

I guess.... I still don't see how porting to something you -cared -about didn't make a list. It still sounds like you didn't but I'm not in your head so I'm not going to keep saying it. It still looks off to me but nothing I can do about it. Sadly that does still paint my opinion and saying this was perventable. And while you maynot have said it's SE's fault posting it here and even pointing at them says you believe they are at fault. Giving a post with the questline yes they did fuck up badly.. but so did you. Long as you know you aren't innocnent in this then we're kool. It just sucks seeing people asking for SE to do EVERYTHING and get mad when they fuck up. Thats my opinion and it's hardly changing. Moving on Hoping this will be a lesson to SE tho that they REALLY fucking need to update and fix their housing system.

I say putting a housing tab in the main menu and have it pop up in your face when you enter, buy, and log in your house. That way if someone does what you did and refuse to read then we can safey say. -IT'S YOUR OWN FAULT-. Instead of going back and fouth cause SE didn't think enough to put the timers somewhere easier to find. Cause that post by Shivvy proves it's a massive oversight for them. I think they - SE- should aslo make it so you HAVE to visit the lodestone at least once. THAT way you'll have no excuse missing any updates to whatever, cause the link is in the chatbox upon login in all the tabs. And I have 4 tabs so I see the link in ALL of them. They should make that a thing so everyone is informed of whatever so things like this don't happen, and if they do it's on the user.

I wanna add to the fixes SE can do cause I'm serious. Tho I have a question about everyone's chatbox. Do you guys get that link when you login in all of the tabs you have about whatever? And what do you think about the game forcing you to go to the lodestone at least once so you know what it is and where? I think it'll yes be kindof blunt but I think the lodestone needs to be highlighted more. I also think the timers need to be as in your face as all the pop up crap that happens when you first make a character. ALL OF THOSE POPS force you to see that they exisit. The same needs to happen with the timers. Again Shivvy proved it needs work. You can't debate screenshots like that.

[Niwashi]

I have a question about everyone's chatbox. Do you guys get that link when you login in all of the tabs you have about whatever?

I get messages about things going on, but no links. The messages that are always there at login are "Welcome to Coeurl!" and "Welcome to FINAL FANTASY XIV!" Then sometimes there's more messages about things currently going on, like currently there's a message there warning us about an error causing items placed up for sale just prior to the 4.4 patch not showing up on the MB until we summon the retainer who's selling them. When we have seasonal or crossover events going on, those will get a notice there, too.

[ko_]

I get messages about things going on, but no links. The messages that are always there at login are "Welcome to Coeurl!" and "Welcome to FINAL FANTASY XIV!" Then sometimes there's more messages about things currently going on, like currently there's a message there warning us about an error causing items placed up for sale just prior to the 4.4 patch not showing up on the MB until we summon the retainer who's selling them. When we have seasonal or crossover events going on, those will get a notice there, too.

Ah, Didn't they used to put links to the lodestone in there? I'm on PS4 so it just looks like junk whenb I get links. But I remember them putting l;inks to the lodestone in there. you're right right now it's just whats going on and what not. Hmm So if not therer's another area SE can improve I feel. You agree?

[Kirsten_Rev]

Do you guys get that link when you login in all of the tabs you have about whatever?

I will occasionally see links (none currently), and they do appear in all tabs, but they aren't able to be selected from within the game interface. This means for a PC player, it's inconvenient, and for a console player, it's borderline unusable. I suspect this is why the Lodestone isn't very heavily emphasized.

And while you maynot have said it's SE's fault posting it here and even pointing at them says you believe they are at fault.

I'd argue they are at fault here. Generally speaking, I believe that games should be self-contained: everything you need to enjoy the game should be within the game. With FFXIV, SE is typically very good at this: from combat to game systems, early game to late, SE has done a tremendous job of putting information in the hands of players. External resources exist, of course, but only to enhance the game: they aren't required reading or viewing. With Housing demolition, they simply dropped the ball. They barely mention the system in-game; their primary notification mechanism is external to the game; their timer is horribly designed and literally invisible most of the time.

That's not to say, of course, that we as players are powerless. We can research, and we can fill in the holes. But I don't agree with the notion that the burden should fall upon them to do so. SE is responsible for the system that is causing the problems. The root issue isn't human ignorance or inattention - something has always existed, and will always exist - but rather, that a critical system in FFXIV does so little to inform and empower people who may be ignorant or inattentive. There's no scenario in which that root issue doesn't cause grief.

The recent credit card siphoning code on Newegg offers us a good IRL example, incidentally. Say that six months from now, someone gets screwed over by credit card information being stolen. When assigning blame, who do you point the finger at? Could the person have seen the news, or watched their credit card statement more closely, or used PayPal instead of entering their credit card? Sure. Would such choices have protected them? Yeah, probably. But ultimately, if there's any blame to assign, it's on Newegg: they're the ones responsible for maintaining a secure site for customers.

[Niwashi]

I had time to kill, so I thought I'd run a new character out to the housing area to see what information you receive. Keep in mind, this is a level 1 alt. I think someone mentioned that there is an early quest that also takes you out to the wards, so this information is not regarding that quest.

Upon first arrival into the ward, you are greeted by:


Being the dutiful player that I am, I opened up the housing "Active Help" to get more information:





Doesn't really say much, and definitely doesn't mention the timers.

But my journey is not done yet! Using the information obtained in the Active Help, I wander down to the Resident Caretaker for more information! Takes some patience to navigate as there are menus galore (in the SE way), and many options to sift through.
1st menu screen:
2nd menu screen:
3rd menu screen:

AHA! There it is! Phew! "What happens if I abandon my estate". Now, with as straightforward (massive eyeroll) as the above steps were to navigate, pardon while I nitpick a tiny bit. Simply asking "What happens if I abandon my estate" doesn't really convey the importance that there is a demolition timer looming over your head as a homeowner. Someone could easy interpret this as "Hey, what happens when I no longer want it" - which would make it seem like it's based on the player's time frame, and not some in-game timer which is extremely buried and a pain to find.


So, with my adventure now done, I am very much still in the camp of "SE needs to add more notifications in-game to make this more visible as they are currently doing a poor job of it". Several good ideas have been shared already in this thread:

1) Send a mogmail message (in-game mail)
2) Add a pop-up that shows upon login
3) Add a pop-up message right after you purchase a house
4) Update the "estate timer" to display this information / show an active timer

These are all relatively minor changes that come at no cost to the player, but would instead be a huge boon. Clear communication is never a bad thing. Especially when it involves the only item in a game that you can lose permanently when not keeping tabs on it.

One other place, pertaining specifically to the furnishings: When you place items, you get this warning about it:



While it does mention demolition of an estate as something that can make you lose furnishing items, it still (for lack of notification to the contrary) looks to me like that's referring to if you (or your FC's officers) decide to demolish the estate.

[ko_]

I will occasionally see links (none currently), and they do appear in all tabs, but they aren't able to be selected from within the game interface. This means for a PC player, it's inconvenient, and for a console player, it's borderline unusable. I suspect this is why the Lodestone isn't very heavily emphasized.


I'd argue they are at fault here. Generally speaking, I believe that games should be self-contained: everything you need to enjoy the game should be within the game. With FFXIV, SE is typically very good at this: from combat to game systems, early game to late, SE has done a tremendous job of putting information in the hands of players. External resources exist, of course, but only to enhance the game: they aren't required reading or viewing. With Housing demolition, they simply dropped the ball. They barely mention the system in-game; their primary notification mechanism is external to the game; their timer is horribly designed and literally invisible most of the time.

That's not to say, of course, that we as players are powerless. We can research, and we can fill in the holes. But I don't agree with the notion that the burden should fall upon them to do so. SE is responsible for the system that is causing the problems. The root issue isn't human ignorance or inattention - something has always existed, and will always exist - but rather, that a critical system in FFXIV does so little to inform and empower people who may be ignorant or inattentive. There's no scenario in which that root issue doesn't cause grief.

The recent credit card siphoning code on Newegg offers us a good IRL example, incidentally. Say that six months from now, someone gets screwed over by credit card information being stolen. When assigning blame, who do you point the finger at? Could the person have seen the news, or watched their credit card statement more closely, or used PayPal instead of entering their credit card? Sure. Would such choices have protected them? Yeah, probably. But ultimately, if there's any blame to assign, it's on Newegg: they're the ones responsible for maintaining a secure site for customers.

Ah so it did provide links,, I thought it did. It's good to know they did but I question why they didn't work. It's like they had the thought there but didn't follow thur with it completely which messes them up. If I was SE I'd make it so that it's pretty much moron proof and IF the the chance someone did mess up. I'll be safe cause I'd have provided all the tools to not get sued. This is why products have those stupid warnings on everything cause people are pretty stupid. SE should be making sure everything is moron proof so when things go wrong they can say - We provided everything we can- And even then atleast have a system to help people after the fact. I dunno why they don't have a recovery log for items lost but they should look into that.

[Penthea]

If I was SE I'd make it so that it's pretty much moron proof and IF the the chance someone did mess up. I'll be safe cause I'd have provided all the tools to not get sued. This is why products have those stupid warnings on everything cause people are pretty stupid. SE should be making sure everything is moron proof so when things go wrong they can say - We provided everything we can- And even then atleast have a system to help people after the fact. I dunno why they don't have a recovery log for items lost but they should look into that.

The thing is due to how law works with games, we technically don't own our accounts. SE do. We only own access to them. Because of this SE can't get sued for actions or lack of information the way most other companies can. They usually can only get into trouble for things relating to real money transactions, such as overcharging for a subscription for example. Other companies put obvious warnings like "may contain nuts" on a fruit and nut bar because they can get sued if there is no allergy warning, but in SE's case the terms of use every player agrees to when they make their account covers them for most things. In short this means SE have more freedom to legally provide less information to their players, while other companies in other industries are forced to be "moron proof".

That isn't to say SE wouldn't gain anything from improving the housing system. Every GM ticket costs SE money. I think we can safely assume that most of the time when a player loses their house and doesn't know why, they make a ticket because they think the game bugged. It does look like a bug if something you own is suddenly not there. Additionally players make tickets to inform SE that they didn't receive email warnings about demolition, or that they were sent at the wrong times. Many players probably contact GMs several times if they lost their house, hoping that some persistence will give them something. And of course SE also lose money if a person quits the game due to a housing issue.

Then there is reputation. It's been a long time since 1.0 but the gaming community still hasn't forgotten what a train wreck that was. Every time the ui behaves weirdly or SE vaguely refer to a limitation preventing them from doing something, most of the time people assume it's due to 1.0 code still lurking in the game. People still talk about 1.0, it's a really common subject in the community. SE have come a long way since then and the game in its current state is solid. However the poorly thought out ui for housing information in the game has been pretty often compared to 1.0's bad ui.

This isn't good because it makes it look like SE is slipping in a place where they could easily do far better. It's clear that no limitation in the game's code is preventing them from improving it, it's just them choosing not to. And that sort of attitude was exactly why 1.0 was terrible in the first place. SE didn't listen to feedback and launched the game in a horrendous state.

I know you have been pretty merciless to OP regarding his housing situation, and that I have given you some harsh words about it, but I just want to say I am glad to see that despite that you can now see that SE have done an awful job of informing players anything relating to demolition in the game and that it's far below their usual standard for in-game information.

[ko_]

The thing is due to how law works with games, we technically don't own our accounts. SE do. We only own access to them. Because of this SE can't get sued for actions or lack of information the way most other companies can. They usually can only get into trouble for things relating to real money transactions, such as overcharging for a subscription for example. Other companies put obvious warnings like "may contain nuts" on a fruit and nut bar because they can get sued if there is no allergy warning, but in SE's case the terms of use every player agrees to when they make their account covers them for most things. In short this means SE have more freedom to legally provide less information to their players, while other companies in other industries are forced to be "moron proof".

It's like I said. My opinion hasn't changed, I know the system needs improvement I just think in this case it's not all SE's fault. Being fair it's 50/50 cause both sides needed improvement. I just felt like people pick to blame SE cause it's easier and with all the stuff goign on now with how people are mad about everything else it gets old. So it's not that I -now- see it. I always seen the issues with housing. I was there in the 4.0 series watching people kill each other in chat when Shrio came out. I was on the forums when people were trying to stop house flippers, I watched all that crap and more happen in real time. I watched and even commented on that couple who stole a ward in mateus half a year ago. Oh believe me... housing in XIV needs ALOT of work. I wish they didn't grandfathered people and actually grew some nuts and took those extra houses away from people, making it 1 house for 1 account only. I want them to be more harsh on this issue cause it makes no sense that we should be having this many issues on this for this long. But I also wished people did more research even if it means going off game so things like this doesn't happen. It takes two to tangle, we ALL can improve from this.. we as players and SE as a company providing a service.

The screenshots really show how limiting the info ingame is. It's also why if they are going to put all the info on the lodestone it needs to be highlighted more for players so they can get all the info. That's why I think making it force you on the site is one way to do it. Have the lodestone literally load up on startt up or when you buy a plot. That way you get that info right there as you're doing the action. I can't think of other ways honestly, everything I can think of is blunt and would likely piss people off. But then noone could say it's not there.

[Penthea]

Oh believe me... housing in XIV needs ALOT of work. I wish they didn't grandfathered people and actually grew some nuts and took those extra houses away from people, making it 1 house for 1 account only.

I think the reason why they didn't take away houses from those players is because they didn't want to make characters suddenly have no home. What they should have done is make all characters on the same account on the same server have access to the same private home when they introduced the limitation on how many houses a player can have. If they did then they could have taken away excess housing from players without making characters homeless. I totally agree SE should have more backbone when dealing with players who obviously are abusing the system, but in this case, while I don't like it, I can see why they didn't do that.

SE have said they plan to make all characters on the same server have access to the same private home. I hope that when they do that they also remove excess housing from those players. No one needs several fc and private homes on the same server.

The screenshots really show how limiting the info ingame is. It's also why if they are going to put all the info on the lodestone it needs to be highlighted more for players so they can get all the info.

The problem is that the Lodestone isn't even clear that housing is a thing people need to know about. I just went there and this is what I saw:

The play guide makes no mention of housing.



The sidebar has no mention of housing.



If I scroll all the way to the bottom, which is a lot of scrolling, I finally find something about housing.



After browsing the housing link above the only mention of demolition is here. Nothing about how it works.



If you go to "Game Features" in the Play Guide from the first screenshot, you go to a page with a long list of huge bar icons for various content but for some reason the only one related to housing has a small bar with no image...were they trying to make it easy to miss?



Putting in a search doesn't work well either. If you search for "house" or "housing" you just get a really long list of player blog posts, characters and linkshells with related names and then finally a super long News & Topics list that rarely have the word "house" or similar in their titles. Searching for demolition yields similar and a bit less results. While the News & Topics can eventually lead you to the information you need, the problem is you first have to do a crazy amount of scrolling through irrelevant info, and then you have to dig through so many links in that section to only MAYBE find out what you need.

The more I find out about how SE present their information about housing, the more I'm convinced that it was a deliberate decision to be unclear about the existence of demolition.