Hoarding Houses - Sometimes a Depressing Sight (a rant)

[Penthea]

At the end of the day, there is a slippery slope here, when it comes to saying something needs to be removed from players. Where do you draw the line?

While I agree that removing houses from players is a potential slippery slope and can be bad for PR, doing nothing has also proven to be a slippery slope and bad for PR. The Shirogane launch was a disaster because of house hoarders and house flippers. SE chose to do nothing about problems they were very aware of for a long time, and it resulted in one of the most anticipated additions becoming one of the most controversial things this game has seen in several years. SE would have saved themselves so much trouble and bad publicity had they been vaguely proactive with the glaring problems housing has had over the years.

It is never good PR for a company to punish people for following the rules

Not breaking the rules isn't the same as following them. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should or that the devs intended for you to be able to. Rules and limitations are frequently changed because of people who find loopholes.

Players owning several houses was an oversight by SE. If they thought this would happen there either would have been far more wards from the beginning or there wouldn't have been a ward system at all. They made the mistake of thinking everyone would be decent and have houses on only one character. But sadly it takes only a few wealthy douches to mess things up for a lot of people.

I want everyone to keep everything they own, and I want everyone to have a fair shot at getting anything the game has to offer. But SE appear disinclined to alter the housing system to facilitate this...so here I am ranting about hoarders with plots that have been empty for potentially several years, because frankly it's far more likely for SE to tackle that than it is for them to give us a legitimately solid housing system. I don't particularly like advocating for removing anything from anyone, but it's not as if SE are giving us hope of another option. They seem to only want to tweak the current system and not much beyond.