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.

[Alien_Gamer]

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.

Removing things from players is simply something no company should ever do. It is not a potential slippery slope, it IS a slippery slope and one which completely breaks the faith of the players in the company. Once a company does it, there is no reversing the fact that SE can and WILL purposefully remove something you worked hard for and in some cases paid real money for if they so chose. How can any player maintain trust in SE that anything they earn from that point forward will remain theirs? There is simply no upside to such a decision. Its easy to remove houses from grandfathered players but how would you feel if SE removed something of yours? How did Legacy players feel when something of theirs was removed and given to the larger playerbase?


Discussion of removing houses should be a non-starter for everyone. The conversation should be on how to add housing in a way thats fair for everyone.

There is also no question that Shirogane housing was a mess from the beginning. SE also showed they learned from it and with the next housing release put heavy restrictions in place which did allow many others to gain houses. Further, given that most worlds have empty plots, thats an indication that there' isn't a global housing shortage anymore; its just a few worlds that have the issue. Instead the problem is not enough "preferred" housing...but there will never be enough of that.

Players owning several houses was an oversight by SE.

I don't believe thats the case. SE designed characters on an account to be completely separate entities and thus each would be able to participate in everything equally, including housing. I think the error was in SE thinking there wouldn't be a high demand for housing.

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.

If you actually want everyone to keep what they own, don't advocate for removing houses from grandfathered players. You're contradicting yourself. SE is not far more likely to do this than fix housing, unfortunately for us SE's fix is additional rewards which isn't as helpful as some people want. There is hope for a fix in that there is hope for additional wards. If you don't like additional wards, advocate for something else...something that doesn't take away from other players.

[Themarvin]

I still say they should give instanced housing. I also strongly disagree that they should ever, at any point, remove houses from people grandfathered in. It is never good PR for a company to punish people for following the rules, even worse if they were to do it after giving those people a pass. If SE wanted the system to work differently, then they should have planned and codded things to fit that. They didn't, and they are the only ones that should be getting grief for it.

Personally, if a house is being used, maintained, decorated, etc, then I don't care who owns it, or how many other houses they own. What bothers me is seeing the same houses sit for over a year, with literally nothing changing in them. Not a single new item. Nothing ever placed in the gardens. They just sit, collecting dust. They just feel like trophy items. I get it, we can't tell people how to use their houses once they have them, but at the end of the day, what is worse? Someone having more than one house, and spending hours upon hours decorating them, loving them, and using them, like housing is their end game content? Or someone that has a house and only goes to it once a month to reset timer(made worse when the people that do this do in fact have more than one house)?

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? When does "this person has too much, take some away" stop? Does it just stop with people with more than 1 personal house? Or would it just move on to "no one should have a personal mansion", or "an FC needs this house more, take away the personal housing". I have seen those sorts of statements before. Once you open the door to things being removed, you can't close it. Also take for example people that have more than one house because they have more than one service account. Should they lose their houses to? They are 100% within the rules, but people will argue that they should still drop to just one. Rather than fighting to take away other people's toys, why not fight harder for SE to provide enough for all of us to play with evenly?

Mostly refering to to the bad PR part, how would be it any different than removing stoneskin from the base game as an example or should pre-SB people be grandfathered with the skill in the normal game thus being more valueable for heavy group content like savage raids/ex trials? it is the same analogy, if rules change it is for all, and yes if I would be one of the guys hit by having multiple houses I would not run here and complain about or whatever but accept it as it is, most likely as they can update the ToS even further and make it so you have to accept that to be able to login into the game, we do not even own our accounts whenever it get to it.

[Penthea]

Removing things from players is simply something no company should ever do. It is not a potential slippery slope, it IS a slippery slope and one which completely breaks the faith of the players in the company. Once a company does it, there is no reversing the fact that SE can and WILL purposefully remove something you worked hard for and in some cases paid real money for if they so chose. How can any player maintain trust in SE that anything they earn from that point forward will remain theirs? There is simply no upside to such a decision.

The difference between the majority of things that players own and housing is that houses are a very limited resource. Furthermore players who own several houses are definitely aware of what they are doing. They know very well that hoarding houses deprives others of houses. You speak of trust in SE, well trust should go both ways and well these hoarders knowingly abused a system and for doing this they are rewarded with being exempt from the new rules. Is this is somehow supposed to make the still homeless players trust SE? Or does the trust of a very greedy minority matter more?

By the way it seems you have forgotten SE already did remove things from players. The demolition system didn't always exist. The first demolition removed a great deal of houses because a lot of players were completely unaware that SE made something that was once under undisputed permanent ownership to be permanent under only certain conditions. Players don't tend to read patch notes when they're on a break. Some got a nasty surprise when they came back to the game. And even though removing player's items is usually a big fat no-no, this particular kind of removal has been mostly well received. Hmm.

How did Legacy players feel when something of theirs was removed and given to the larger playerbase?

That was a bad move but it has little to do with housing. That was all because SE didn't change the name of the new earrings. Newer players having earrings didn't remove the older earrings. No items were removed. The problem lay in the fact that they appeared identical in every way, even in name. Not that the newer player base had access to them. This is an entirely different issue to housing. However it is definitely another example of SE lacking foresight.

If you actually want everyone to keep what they own, don't advocate for removing houses from grandfathered players. You're contradicting yourself.

No it's more that I know that the chances of SE giving us a proper housing system are microscopically small, but the chances of them changing the current system are actually possible. I would prefer no one have anything of theirs removed, but my disgust at the greed of people knowingly hoarding a very limited resource overshadows this. Sorry but I don't have much empathy for people who don't care that they're possibly ruining someone else's fun.

It's all fine and well to preach to me and say I should advocate for a solution that equally benefits all, but I doubt you can give me an example of SE being invested in truly improving the housing system as everything so far has been band-aid after band-aid. I know better than to hope that they will improve housing enough that one person's activity won't affect anyone else's. Every time they did a major "fix" on the housing system it was a result of massive community backlash which was the result of years of waiting for fixes. And these fixes while good are not great and one of the features (the demo email system) has been bugged for several months with no sign of SE addressing it. It's ridiculous.

So please forgive me for thinking it's more likely for SE to remove the perks of being grandfathered, than to actually introduce a solid housing system. If you can give me a spark of hope that SE will actually steer housing in a legitimately better direction...then please do. I don't really enjoy being so bitter about this.

[Jojoya]

They made the mistake of thinking everyone would be decent and have houses on only one character.

More likely they underestimated the demand housing would have once it was opened to personal purchases instead of free companies only as originally implemented. If they had genuinely wanted it limited to one character per account, they would have added that restriction in at the time personal housing was added.

They probably also didn't consider how a static ward system that is identical for each server wouldn't be effective when server populations differ greatly.

They did say as recently as May that they were discussing more ways to address the issues with the housing system. Since any major changes would likely be implemented with an expansion's launch or shortly after, it would make more sense for any related announcements to occur at one of the Fan Festivals. Let's hope for positive news this weekend.

[Penthea]

They did say as recently as May that they were discussing more ways to address the issues with the housing system. Since any major changes would likely be implemented with an expansion's launch or shortly after, it would make more sense for any related announcements to occur at one of the Fan Festivals. Let's hope for positive news this weekend.

I'm hoping for good things but expecting minor improvements at best. I do want my cynicism about all this to be proven wrong. I just want everyone to have the best chance they can get of having a house but I sadly don't expect SE to do it in any other way than tweaking the current system given their history with housing so far. Well, we'll see what the fanfest brings.

[AriesMouse]

Mostly refering to to the bad PR part, how would be it any different than removing stoneskin from the base game as an example or should pre-SB people be grandfathered with the skill in the normal game thus being more valueable for heavy group content like savage raids/ex trials? it is the same analogy, if rules change it is for all, and yes if I would be one of the guys hit by having multiple houses I would not run here and complain about or whatever but accept it as it is, most likely as they can update the ToS even further and make it so you have to accept that to be able to login into the game, we do not even own our accounts whenever it get to it.

That is possibly the worst possible analogy you could have used. Housing is not at all the same, or even close to the same, as class spells. A better comparison would be people having, or not having, access to certain raid content/instances. Still not helpful to the conversation, but it's at least in the ballpark.

And it still would be extremely poor PR. Job tweaking is something every game does, and everyone that plays an mmo knows it comes with the territory. Housing is a whole other beast. Housing is something people have/do spend real life money on, as well as hours of their time. You can't just prune that out as a balancing act like with class spells, or anything else. And again, people were well within the rules to utilize housing in the ways they have, and thus they were grandfathered in, as they should have been. With the rules now changed, I can see them taking action against people acquiring houses through sketchy means after the rule change, but those that obtained their houses before that shouldn't be touched.

Just as Alien_Gamer said above, it's a matter of trust between company and player, and SE is very smart not to risk damaging that. They have already taken steps to try to improve things, what we need to do now is to push them to improve them further with instanced housing, that is the only workable solution.

EDIT:

No it's more that I know that the chances of SE giving us a proper housing system are microscopically small, but the chances of them changing the current system are actually possible. .

The chances of SE giving us a proper housing system will only increase when people start putting the squeeze on them to give us a better system, rather than infighting among ourselves and demanding daddy SE take away other people's toys. Focus less on 'hoarders', and more on just getting instanced housing.

[Caitlinzulu]

I am genuinly curious how many houses where grandfathered in when housing rules changed. I think taking those away wouldnt free up many houses while majorly upsetting their owners.
I wouldnt be happy at all if i have to give up either my medium or my mansion, both of which where lovingly decorated spending lots of time and gil on them.

I do hope housing will get improvements to them, letting more people enjoy them.

[MaybeOliverB]

Answer: barely any in comparison to how many have been added over the years on top of auto-demolition.

[Harmonea]

A better comparison would be people having, or not having, access to certain raid content/instances. Still not helpful to the conversation, but it's at least in the ballpark.

To add to this analogy criticism (Stoneskin? Really?) - For the dozens (if not hundreds) of hours spent decorating some of these homes, it would be more akin to SE issuing a decree that you can only have one Ultimate-difficulty battle reward per account because people who don't have any are upset that there are people who have them on mains and alts, and deleting all but the most recent reward you claimed.

It's still an imperfect analogy in that there isn't a limited number of Ultimate rewards per server, but this is more in line with the time commitment put into leveling, earning gil, purchasing, and decorating when an alt is solely created for the purpose of a cared-for house.

I do understand that OP is concerned with houses that sit empty, locked, and barren, contributing nothing to the "neighborhood feel" of a ward, and I agree that those are depressing no matter who owns them and whether they own one home or many. But there's simply no rule change you can make that will remove those without also taking away *many* things that people have poured their hearts and souls into, and frankly, it's just as likely the new player who purchases those vacated plots does just as little with them.

The solution truly is to provide instanced housing for those who want them. If we can have 200 pieces of data for a glamour chest, we should be able to have 200 pieces of data *tied to the character* for furnishings in a personal home. There are a lot of kinks to work out, such as how to visit another player's home when everyone's plot of in the same place, but other games have done work on such problems, and I have confidence FFXIV's devs could work out a good solution.