Hoarding Houses - Sometimes a Depressing Sight (a rant)

[Penthea]

Grandfathered houses are houses which, once lost, may not be repurchased by their original owners since the rules no longer allow those purchases. Therefore, the number of grandfathered houses can only ever go down. While the owners of these homes are almost certainly very active and attentive toward our demo timers, one by one, we will quit, make mistakes in our login rituals, fall prey to bugs, or have RL interventions that will reclaim the land.

You're not entirely correct. While the number of grandfathered houses can never increase this does not mean they can only decrease. Yes people do make mistakes, life can get in the way, the game has bugs and people do quit, but this doesn't mean that all grandfathered players will eventually be careless, unfortunate, or will quit the game before the servers shut down forever. It is possible we will hit a point in which their number of plots will completely stop dropping before they're all gone.

Certainly I expect that pair on Mateus, who own an entire ward, intend to keep it right up until FFXIV shuts down forever. They put in far too much time and effort to let easily remedied carelessness take away any of their houses. If they remain diligent with resetting timers then only bugs, very unfortunate life circumstances or direct intervention by SE can remove their houses.

I would hope any player for whom housing is so big a draw that it's their primary reason for considering a server switch would plan ahead. They should make an alt, stake out the wards, and find a couple of open plots they're interested in. They should form their FC ahead of time to push it to rank 6 with a few like-minded friends to prevent the weeks-later housing crunch that happened on Mateus; leveling some alts through the MSQ on a preferred server doesn't take long and nets a silly amount of FC leveling credit. And of course, they should be in money-making mode now if they don't already have the funds.

I completely agree that anyone even just thinking about leaving their current server should already be doing as much research and preparation as possible.

But sadly all the prep and research won't make someone immune to bad luck. You could unknowingly go to a server where a large amount of players also went to. You could get denied access to the game because of login queues, dcs, lobby errors, or just waiting for your character to be transferred. Or you could be defeated by the simple fact that you do not have a SSD, so your slower load times allow others to get ahead.