Pushed to quit after 1,860 days subbed

[ko_]

The personal account topic I think is a legit one for half of the blame, I'm not goign to say SE is 100% at fault cause I still believe in this case there's alot of things he could've done to prevent this. Yeah SE ui is a bit of a mess, but that's where SE's fault ends. The person in this case had over 1860 days to learn search and accept the system alot of ways. Lodestone - as messy as it is- DID have patchnotes he could've read to get himself up to date- and google. So that's why I say it's 50/50. But that's my presonal opinion on THAT part of the topic. I'd put all the information about this stuff in a tab and force feed the player if I was SE to make sure there's no excuse to miss it.. and if you do that's on you 100%. SE can't count for lazy, or whatnot, but I think SE thinks too highly of people also. Cause the way they put that info from what I saw ingame means they believe people aren't as lazy and expect them to dig for the info. In this case SE is wrong cause people ARE that lazy. So SE make it moron proof.

[R-Pete-G]

I can't speak for what things were like 5 years ago but I know what they're like now. When SE makes a change that's going to impact how players use content already existing, they put an announcement in the launcher. It's not SE's fault if the player chooses not to click the announcement to read the information.

Except there are other possibilities beyond choosing not to click the announcement and reading the information. If you're not actively playing at the time, you can miss it. Relying on a player being active 100% of the time, so they are around to read every announcement to prepare them for a feature they may use 3 years later, is still not even remotely adequate.

Better to lose something in a game and learn from it if it means we've learned not to repeat similar mistakes in real life and lose things of real value.

Except in real life, as a society and as individuals, we normally respect one another enough to ensure that mistakes happen as infrequently as possible. We aim to help one another, and ourselves, learn without mistakes. It's why we teach people things, educate, have signs and information made clear in so many aspects of life.

Is housing in a game more trivial? Perhaps. But as we've highlighted time and time again, what we're arguing here is that Squenix has absolutely no problem warning us against losing in-game content far more trivial than housing or furnishings. Which leads onto your following point:

SE can add additional information to the Active Help windows all they want and players still won't read through it anymore than they currently do. SE can make the demo timer visible all the time and it still won't help because player will continue to ignore it just as they continue to ignore it when it does appear with 15 days left before demo. Players will still complain that SE didn't do enough to keep them from losing their house. So what would be the point of SE wasting developer time on making those changes if the net outcome will remain the game?

The existing Active Help windows (for pretty much everything else even remotely similar to this) set a precedent for players that they will continue to be warned in similar situations. It sets a level of expectation that something will be communicated to you. Would some players ignore them? Yes. Can you make it foolproof? No.

But, as we've seen just from players in this thread, those of us who do read the Active Help popups wouldn't have ignored them if they existed. That's a point, right there. There still seems to be this very black-and-white conversation about accountability. It's a lot harder for someone to be accountable if they're not aware of their accountability. And despite continued disbelief, we've already covered multiple well-presented, logically sound situations in which a player might currently miss this feature without being careless or lazy. Dismissing that possibility based on "I don't believe it"? That's a pretty lazy argument in itself.

Is it genuinely that difficult for players to take 2 minutes to walk into their house once every 3 to 4 weeks if they value their house ownership that much? If so, I have to wonder how they managed to level high enough to be eligible to own a house in the first place.

It's not really for you to make judgements or assumptions about how difficult it may well be for a player to do that, especially given all of the extenuating circumstances we've discussed in this thread, and even more so if that player doesn't realise it's necessary.

But it's good that you basically agree with most of the constructive points that most of us have been trying to make. I don't think anyone is trying to shirk accountability, rather that Squenix have a responsibility to inform us of our accountability better - most seem to agree - than they are.

We are also on page 38 of a thread where the main criticism seems to be that I didn't read enough, and yet we're still going back and forth on housing demolition when the main point was furnishing reclamation / deletion...

[ko_]

Except there are other possibilities beyond choosing not to click the announcement and reading the information. If you're not actively playing at the time, you can miss it. Relying on a player being active 100% of the time, so they are around to read every announcement to prepare them for a feature they may use 3 years later, is still not even remotely adequate.



Except in real life, as a society and as individuals, we normally respect one another enough to ensure that mistakes happen as infrequently as possible. We aim to help one another, and ourselves, learn without mistakes. It's why we teach people things, educate, have signs and information made clear in so many aspects of life.

Is housing in a game more trivial? Perhaps. But as we've highlighted time and time again, what we're arguing here is that Squenix has absolutely no problem warning us against losing in-game content far more trivial than housing or furnishings. Which leads onto your following point:



The existing Active Help windows (for pretty much everything else even remotely similar to this) set a precedent for players that they will continue to be warned in similar situations. It sets a level of expectation that something will be communicated to you. Would some players ignore them? Yes. Can you make it foolproof? No.

But, as we've seen just from players in this thread, those of us who do read the Active Help popups wouldn't have ignored them if they existed. That's a point, right there. There still seems to be this very black-and-white conversation about accountability. It's a lot harder for someone to be accountable if they're not aware of their accountability. And despite continued disbelief, we've already covered multiple well-presented, logically sound situations in which a player might currently miss this feature without being careless or lazy.

We are also on page 38 of a thread where the main criticism seems to be that I didn't read enough, and yet we're still going back and forth on housing demolition when the main point was furnishing reclamation / deletion...

It's your title sadly. When people see your time like that most people are going to ask the questions me and a few others all over the thread have asked. It sucks you can't change it but you're going to get replies like this as long as this thread is opened cause of your title and how widespread housing issues were in the past 3 years. It sucks but thats why it keeps coming back to that.

[Kuzulo]

The problem, with this thread, is that a lot of people are saying that the OP should have known they had to keep logging in, etc:

That is not the issue.

The issue is that there is no reason the OP, or anyone, should lose the house they worked for.

I'm amazed that housing in FFXIV is done this way, in 2018; In other modern MMORPGS, like ESO, a house is a "virtual space." So there is nothing in place to clear out a house/plot so that another person can then buy it.

Why would they do such a thing, if they want to retain subscribers?

Years ago, Wow and other MMORPGS learned that you don't mess with someone's account/characters because you want them to both REMAIN subscribed, as well as RETURN as a subscriber. There was talk (briefly, at one time), of deleting characters under level 10 (or something) after X amount of time had passed. As you might guess, many such characters in Wow would be "bank alts." So they wisely decided against doing this, since the space they'd save in character files would not be worth offending a possibly "returning" customer.

Not only am I amazed at this "feature", I'm amazed that people are not taking the original poster's side.

[R-Pete-G]

The issue is that there is no reason the OP, or anyone, should lose the house they worked for.

The thing is, I don't even strictly agree with that statement, for housing. We know that the system Squenix implemented is limited, creates scarcity of estates for players, and thus restricts everyone from having access to this feature. I support a system that tries to support this as fairly as possible. But I agree with the statement 100% for furnishings, because these have no scarcity whatsoever, and losing them does not have any net benefit for the wider community as a tradeoff.

Criticisms of how housing exists in FFXIV aside, as you rightly point out it's not the norm at all. It's a departure from how other modern MMOs implement instanced housing. Even requiring not just an active subscription, but a specific in-game action, will be unfamiliar to many MMO players. That continues to make the case for more in-game communication, clearer messaging at more relevant gameplay moments, etc.

Persistent housing with limited quantities is the housing system we've got, and I don't see that changing easily. In the interests of fairness, I think some kind of inactivity demolition needs to exist - but fairness is a test it doesn't currently seem to pass. In addition to the communication issues we've gone over, Squenix don't seem interested (AFAIK, though I am a bit out of the loop as we know) in trying to push players who have held onto multiple estates - from when this was possible on the same account - to be in line with the rest of us. There are a lot of estates to free up that way, I imagine.

[Penthea]

Squenix don't seem interested (AFAIK, though I am a bit out of the loop as we know) in trying to push players who have held onto multiple estates - from when this was possible on the same account - to be in line with the rest of us. There are a lot of estates to free up that way, I imagine.

I suspect that this is because they don't want to make characters become homeless. SE have said they will introduce a feature that lets all characters on the same sever have access to the same private home but there hasn't been a date set for it. Probably 5.0 at the earliest. Hopefully then SE will have enough backbone to remove excess houses from players who have more than the current limit. Of course they should also refund the gil for the plots taken away from them.

Sadly though this still won't be a fix. The only real fix is instanced housing as that would benefit every server equally. As it is now the housing situation can radically differ from server to server, and in some cases (Balmung) no amount of improving the ward system will ever be enough.

Demolition is a necessary evil and inconvenience. As long as there are a limited amount of plots, there needs to be a system to weed out those who do not use theirs. However item deletion is not necessary at all. I totally understand removing ownership of a plot, but deleting furniture does literally zero to improve the housing situation. A demolished plot can make a new home owner happy but deleting the previous owner's furniture doesn't affect them. All it does is create exasperation and disappointment to those who owned the furniture. There is no reason why SE can't hold furniture indefinitely. The system for storage unaffected by time already exists. They just need to extend it to item reclamation. This would only improve the current situation.