Honestly, I'm not sure the housing system can be adequately fixed

[Edax]

Some people just want to have it all...

Especially Mew

[Big_Bap]

Especially Mew

I should have specified, we actually do what has to be done to get where we are. Others don't. Glad to see you're still unable to reply to a whole post

[Besame]

Compelling?

Some people just want to have it all...

Just looks at you and chuckles...

[Besame]

My little apt is pretty cute and cozy. It's in the Mist and I only have the wind chimes track set so I can hear the waves crashing in the background.

[Shurrikhan]

Compelling?

They are permanent.
They cost 16-20x less than a small house on your server when housing was released. If you were not around for that, small houses didn't even have a basement.

Some people just want to have it all...

Except, what about when the price has nothing at all to do with whether or not they are compelling? What about when people want more than a re-titled FC Room, or, even worse, want some sense of community that comes from neighboring houses (and even arguably different rooms in the same FC) but not from apartments?

Edit/Further: I bought an apartment so I could easily teleport to a friends' FC house. I've scarcely been inside or decorated it because it provides none of the things I'd actually look for in purchasing a space. As a mere room, I like the Kugane or Gridania inns at least as much as anything I could make for myself.

So, why didn't I just buy a house instead? Because there were none left. Why not an FC Room? Because I was in a different FC at the time, and this version of a FC room wouldn't self-destruct upon departure.

[KayRadley]

Then what about at least making Apartments compelling?

Compared to the alternative I faced, which was a big fat load of "nothing" in terms of housing, that sounds fairly compelling to me.

[Enla]

I still don't get why they don't allow us to upgrade apartments. It'd provide a stable gil-sink to a game that desperately needs it, and would allow people to actually have a shot at owning something larger than a dinky little room. Plus I can't imagine apartments would be more stressful on the servers than adding new wards to meet demand, since you don't have to keep the instance active unless someone is using it. We don't even need like mansion sized rooms either. You can make something about the size of a medium, maybe give it it's own layout that's slightly smaller to still entice people to buy a proper plot, and people would be happier than clams just to have the extra space.

As for all the amenities that housing provides like gardening and so on, why not just make access to instances like a communal gardening plot part of said gil-sink? For like 200k you get full access to a roof-top communal area where you can plant in a 3x3 plot. Or, SE could actually give us 3x1 window-sill planters so people without yards at least have a shot at crossbreeding?

I don't know there's literally a solution staring SE right in the face that requires fairly minimal resources compared to many of the alternatives - barring the 'do nothing' alternative they've been going with for years, and yet they still refuse to take it. I know they're really enamored with the idea of wards but I honestly can't think of a single ward I've housed/been with a guild in that wasn't deader than a doorknob. The /one/ time I was in a fairly active ward was when an old FC I was with had the good fortune to be housed next to another active FC that stood by the marketboard enough for us to interact. But I'd hardly call that an 'active ward' so much as an active /part/ of the ward. The rest was dead. Maybe things are different on the JP servers?

[MrThinker]

I still don't get why they don't allow us to upgrade apartments.

They said its in the pipeline. We just don't know WHERE and WHEN in the pipeline it is.

[Big_Bap]

Except, what about when the price has nothing at all to do with whether or not they are compelling? What about when people want more than a re-titled FC Room, or, even worse, want some sense of community that comes from neighboring houses (and even arguably different rooms in the same FC) but not from apartments?

Edit/Further: I bought an apartment so I could easily teleport to a friends' FC house. I've scarcely been inside or decorated it because it provides none of the things I'd actually look for in purchasing a space. As a mere room, I like the Kugane or Gridania inns at least as much as anything I could make for myself.

So, why didn't I just buy a house instead? Because there were none left. Why not an FC Room? Because I was in a different FC at the time, and this version of a FC room wouldn't self-destruct upon departure.

If houses still had their original price tags, they wouldn't be as compelling as they are today. It's quite simple to understand the correlation so I don't know why you're struggling with the concept.

Apartments are not re-titled FC rooms darling, they are the exact same thing you were getting for a small house back in the days, minus the exterior. If you think 20 outdoor furnishing slots justified the insanely large gil chasm for what small houses used to be and the apartments we now have, you cannot be helped.

Your feelings towards being part of a community are meaningless as housing was never meant to be accessible to all. You want to have neighbors? Work for it. You have 0 excuses for not already owning a house considering you've been around since 2011.

[Shurrikhan]

If houses still had their original price tags, they wouldn't be as compelling as they are today. It's quite simple to understand the correlation so I don't know why you're struggling with the concept.

I'm not struggling with the concept, though it seems you might be.

The price tag is irrelevant when there are none left.

And, again... I've owned a small house before I transferred. Heck, I've owned a medium. I've of course owned an FC room. I now own an apartment. The FC room, if not a simple inn room, is by far the closest in feel to the apartment.