Horrifyingly bad experience

[SoulEchelon]

Wasn't one of the issues of an 'instanced house on it's own lonesome plot' the idea that gardening is (through the code somehow) tied to weather, which if needing to be applied to endless instanced houses, could lead to some severe data congestion?

You can have planters inside your home, so at this moment in time weather isn't a factor when it comes to gardening.

[Fym]

I like having neighbors with whom I can interact. With instanced housing, wouldn't your house be a "stand-alone" area cut off from others?

[Kenky]

I like having neighbors with whom I can interact. With instanced housing, wouldn't your house be a "stand-alone" area cut off from others?

That's the idea.

Everyone gets a house, yet said house is cut off and put in the void, away from everyone else. Meaning the social feature of housing is gone. Pretty counter-intuitive for a game that is trying to promote social interactions and players finding groups / Free Companies.

Even then. "Instanced Housing" wouldn't fix the issue, just as much as people clamor about thinking it will. Even gave the reason back in a previous post in this exact thread. Nobody cares about what issues their choices bring with them, so long as THEY get a house. Or boiling back down to the "I am entitled to a house, because of X" reasons, which are laughable at best. The reason being that instanced Housing would take up the same data-space as a ward house, as it's the EXACT SAME. Just without the trimmings around the outside. Same inside, same capabilities. It wouldn't solve the Server burden (the reason why we don't have infinite wards. Read up on that, please!)

And to top it all off. People are confusing "acceptance" with "Defense". Plenty of people who are "Defending" the current system have come to terms that yes, it does suck and yes, it needs to change. But compared to the other recommendations and solutions, the "placard spam" option is the only fair one as all the others have ignored ramifications.

Raffle? Great. You've just made it all the more disconnected and worthless to do. On top of adding another big slice of "bad for you, it's RNG" to the community. Something you should KNOW is despised.

Auction? Wonderful. Now only the richest players can get it, due to them having the option to jack up the price so anyone that wants a house can no longer afford it.

Instanced Housing? Awesome! You just made zero progress, infact you just went BACKWARDS, removing the Housings "neighborhood" feeling that plenty of players strive for (Especially Roleplayers, which SE actually adores, might I add!)

With those in mind, clicking a placard is the only fair option as nobody has a "higher chance" of winning. Yes, people use macros and bots (which are against ToS if I remember rightly) but you can do the exact same thing to keep that equal ground. It's not perfect, it definitely needs work, but we don't know how long it'll be before the placard gets swapped for a new system and we certainly don't know if the 'new system' won't be just as agonizing as the Placard Spam.

If you want a house THAT badly, you'll have to make due with the system currently in place and just bite the bullet. Yes, it'll suck. Yes, you'll get angry and yes, you'll definitely loses houses. But there is legitimately nothing you can do (beyond joining an FC, buying an Apartment or joining a House-hunter Discord) to make it easier. Or, you could just laugh in other peoples face and just "Buy" the house off another player for 100x the price. Because House-flipping is still a thing. Just not talked about in-game. The only "suggestion" I could really give is to not go at it 100%. Wait for 5.11 when the 3 new wards show up. That could open up plenty of plots all over the wards so your chances are at an all-time high. Or wait for the player-count to dwindle after ShB has finished its content cycle. (Similar to Stormblood's end-cycle.)

[Brynne]

You can have planters inside your home, so at this moment in time weather isn't a factor when it comes to gardening.

That's not entirely accurate. The 'weather' code is somehow tied to crossbreeding, which is why you can't do any kind of crossbreeding in your indoor housing plots. However, some have noted that the Crystarium inn room has a window that reflects the weather outside so perhaps they are working on that issue.

The reason being that instanced Housing would take up the same data-space as a ward house, as it's the EXACT SAME. Just without the trimmings around the outside. Same inside, same capabilities. It wouldn't solve the Server burden (the reason why we don't have infinite wards. Read up on that, please!)

I don't know the exact facts, but my understanding is that most of the burden that wards put on the servers is because of their persistence - ie, wards are always active, even if no one is in them. The interior of houses are instanced - they are torn down when no one is in them, and rebuilt when someone enters. For this reason, instances are less work because servers don't have to maintain them indefinitely. This is why wards aren't added on demand, but apartments (theoretically, according to something said by the devs long ago) could be increased without worry.

For the record, I think the wards should stay and we should have instanced housing as well. Improving apartments is probably the best solution to this issue. The neighborhood feel - and the customizable housing exterior - would be the perk of a ward house. If they added purchasable upgrades to apartments, including a way to use outdoor furnishings and access to crossbreeding gardening, I think it would make them seem more like a viable alternative.

[Leloa]

The only thing that is needed is to give each server only one FC just like with personal housing. I don't know why SE encourages multiple FCs on one server. And I never had a problem with a timer (Ive had a house for a good time before it became a thing) but I am sure soon it will be time for SE to make changes to that as well if they'd only make the FC rule a real thing.

I'm also curious, do people just camp at their favorite location only? If I was house hunting I'd seek the crappiest Goblet corner and snatch that small hut. Relocating is the only way to a good house at this time.

[Illy_Peridot]

Worse? It wasn't. The shortage of houses started to happen when they tried to make it better and look at the mess we're in. Be grateful an apartment costs you 1% of what some small houses used to cost. You want improvement... get a house.

hey, honest question, who hurt you?

[Vahlnir]

hey, honest question, who hurt you?

Anyone who disagrees with them. Pretty much it. Like another FC house hoarder on these forums they do NOT take criticism well, nor are they accepting of other points of view.

[GojuSuzi]

I'm also curious, do people just camp at their favorite location only? If I was house hunting I'd seek the crappiest Goblet corner and snatch that small hut. Relocating is the only way to a good house at this time.

Most folk do go for literally any that's up on timer; outside of the current post-patch shuffle, the absolute max on my server I ever saw was three plots at the same time, so not like there's ever enough choice to get picky. The issue is, everyone says "just get a small in the Goblet and then relocate", so even the objectively worst plot will have several folk click-spamming for the many hours it's on timer.

Loads of folk are sitting on holding plots waiting for their desired plot to open up because relocation is required to get anything even remotely desirable...at one point, I counted and almost half of all smalls in The Goblet across all wards were clear holding plots, no house built until the last minute, and even then just a shell added to stop demo. So that's hundreds of plots that many folk would be perfectly happy with being hoarded for a relocation that may never happen.

Relocation as a pre-requisite is a large part of the problem. I'm lucky that I only wanted a small with my FC, and could be there for patch launch, so got my first choice plot (Shirogane 27) for us as an outright purchase this week. But I spent months haunting literally any plot that came up for sale with no success, and even saw the same plot (Goblet 20) turnover three times in one week, because people bought it to use as a relocate, moved, then another bought it to use to relocate, repeat ad nauseum while I'd have been perfectly happy to buy it and keep it (I like waterfalls). One even relocated away half an hour after purchase, admitting he found a plot he liked but it was on a timer, so cycled all the open ones until he got lucky and then swapped to the one he was actually after... effectively resetting the timer on one plot to bypass the timer on another. That's aggravating.

There should at the very least be a cooldown on relocations of a significant time (say 6 months), so that it's an option for an FC that outgrows it's current size, individual that gets more gil than they anticipated, or someone who has found some insurmountable issue with their current location (problem with the neighbours, bored of the view, etc.), but buying that random small is making a commitment, and you won't be able to relocate to [insert desired plot here] if it comes up any time soon. It should be an option for if things change way down the line, not the intention at point of purchase.

[GoldenVoice]

There is absolutely 0 acceptable reasons that people should be required to sit around spam-clicking a sign for HOURS, praying to RNG gods that they get the opportunity to purchase a "feature" of the game all while we are paying for game time to play.
The experience is less fun than buying a house IRL.
Instanced housing, or infinitely generated districts are far more acceptable of a solution than this RNG timing.
Until this is fixed, I find it to be a joke to call it a "feature" of the game.

Your right, your absolutely right. Games are supposed to be FUN, first and foremost. And the Lock out serves no real purpose ever since they made it that you can only own one house per server. All it does is cheat people who get to the plot first out of their rightful purchase. To miss out cause of a crowed of campers clicking that sign over and over is just infuriating. not to mention the time wasted sitting there doing NOTHING when you can be advancing in your quest lines or Reputations quests of crafting etc etc etc. The lock out needs to change. Only lock out we need is after buying a plot you are locked in for 1 week from buying a new plot that way griefers don't run around buying plots to harass people, cause they are out there and God only knows what kind of sick jolly they get from this sort of stuff, and that's it.

[TheForce]

3 words.

Not the same.

Apartments are just FC rooms without the FC requirement. A small, compact space that, while giving the basic features of housing (decorating) it doesn't go far enough. Is it better than nothing? Oh yeah, definitely. Is it the same as regular housing? Not even close. Apartments are far more limited in that they don't allow for outdoor furnishing and customization, as well as providing an extremely small space for people to work with.

Man...there's just so many things that are wrong in this response. I'll start with what you said about how apartments "don't go far enough". Here's a tough pill to swallow, but apartments are actually more on the generous side when it comes to housing in this game, so it's kind of annoying seeing the entitlement in this post. Here, in case you don't believe me, I'll break it down:

With apartments, you are given an teleportation aetheryte crystal for free, you must buy it yourself with an estate.
With apartments, you are given a chocobo stable for free, you must buy it yourself with an estate.
You are able to put a summoning bell, orchestrion, gardening pots and many other amenities in an apartment. The only things you are really losing from not having a house is a little more space, decorating the outside, and intercrossing. But, for literally 1/6 of the price of an estate, that's still an incredible deal. Honestly if it was up to me, I wouldve priced apartments at 1,000,000. Getting them at 500,000 is a steal.

Btw, I cannot think of a single MMO I've played that allowed one to customize the outside like FFXIV does, it's definitely not a norm or something one should feel entitled to. It should be seen as a perk, a bonus, so the fact that you're trying to say how it's essentially unfair that apartments can't do it
is silly to me. If you ask me, the best solution for the current housing situation is to just simply increase apartment sizes (but of course at an appropriate price).