Housing is just so broken

[DigbyCaesar]

I was about to make my own thread regarding this until I saw this, may as well add this here.

Firstly I know how horrible it is to have to buy a house for the first time, me and my FC leader spent weeks trying to get a small for our FC and ended up getting it after camping a whole weekend away, suffering the rigorous spamming of the placard for hours on end.

I feel it should be wrong to say that there were 5 people competing for the plot and I still considered myself lucky throughout that process because no one was relocating, not because of the former.

The relocation alone kind of breaks the game in a way. Relocating should have no timer if you're moving up to bigger houses, not if you just bought a random plot to relocate and steal away the one that everyone else is going for.

My biggest issue (my reason for actually writing this) is to do with house flipping. To put it simply, I raised up 20mil for my FC some time in January/February, since then I've been putting in my time to find a medium house on my server (Zodiark).

Over the months I did loads of research, the funniest thing I found was the fact that there's actually a subreddit, dedicated to the flipping of these houses.

As far as I was concerned, SE are supposed to be against that. At least, as quoted from Yoshi-P "Our fundamental stance toward housing prices was that we wanted to ensure that plots would be evenly distributed, avoiding a situation in which the wealthiest players could easily buy up all available plots of land."

There is currently a community of players out there who thrive on manipulating in-game mechanics to find themselves owning as many houses as possible, and selling them to people who will only continue to flip the houses for triple the price.

In all the research I've done, I've found that some of the most common ways these people obtain houses are to join partially inactive FCs with housing with an alt character, waiting for the FCs to finally become fully inactive, and through waiting, end up getting control over the FC and the house.

They then sell the FC and the house by passing on leadership to the buyer. Effectively leaving the plot to never be up for purchasing.

What makes me sad, is that there isn't just a subreddit on this, these houses are actively advertised on the in-game party finder, I would say right under SE's noses, but it's blatant and in their face.

It's very clear that little will be done when reporting, as I've seen several cases in the past where a GM's response to these reports have been "it's not RMT so it's okay" (paraphrasing), but they're ignoring one fundamental rule which stands in SE's rules & policies, you are not allowed to interfere or disrupt another player's game experience.

Putting together Yoshi-P's intentions with this policy clearly shows that the market was designed to be a free-for-all, and that people holding these houses "hostage" are interfering with the natural game experience.

I had a horrible experience recently as I decided to take things into my own hands, where I had found a house being sold, did my research and attempted to swoop in to try to buy the house when the placard was available (was player-owned and required relinquishing first).

Needless to say, it was not successful, however my complaint is with the fact that I met these people who flip houses, and I met the uglier side of the FF community. The very greedy, association of house flippers.

As I stood by that placard, I was met by the two people who didn't even greet me, they started by /slapping me continuously before telling me to go away. I mean, sure, I get that I wasn't welcome, but I didn't interact.

Over the hours of waiting (just as you would for a regular house in-game these days), more and more people showed up, surrounding me, harassing me, watching me from afar. I'm not going to name the 7 individuals who did this as I've already made my report with SE and can only hope something will be done (and I'm sure there's some rule against that too), but what really upset me about the entire ordeal, was that I wasn't allowed to purchase the house the way SE had intended it to be done.

It's worth noting that I had made several reports about a player who I noticed acted as an actual "virtual real estate agent" and all I'd been told was it was being investigated. They're currently advertising a new house on the party finder in Zodiark as I type this.

I understand that SE do not act as much on this, mostly because they never act on this before, but it's still wrong. What's happened here is like dominoes, where one or a few GMs set the tone from the very beginning, disregarding the fundamentals of the game, and since then every report follows the same response. Maybe I'm wrong but that's how it looks when you correlate the policies with the developer's intentions.

Personally, I think it's not so hard to look into a party finder and find people who are actively indulging in these transactions.

If the moderation actively sought out to prevent this activity, it could've been done a long time ago, but unfortunately what's done is done. That doesn't mean that nothing should ever be done though. Something needs to change.

The sad truth is that Ishgard will not help solve this problem, more wards means more to monopolise. There are large communities out there just in this game for the flipping, and making it harder on other players to at least have an attempt at buying houses at the prices SE set.

I do apologise if my rant was a bit too rant-y, I had a lot of ambition for this game and really do appreciate it, as well as its community, but this is all taking a huge blow to my motivation.

Also my first post so, hello! o/

TL;DR

- Skipping timer on relocation should only be if you're upgrading from a small house.
- House flippers publicly flip these houses and most GMs have condoned this, disregarding the developer's intentions and game policies (3.2 in rules & policies). SE needs to step up and act on this.
- Ishgard will be amazing, but will only fan the flames and open up more opportunity for flipping if SE do nothing about flipping.

Also ty @Edax for the tip, hope this tidies it up!

[Edax]

Again, apologies for the multiple posts, there was a character limit and I had to split it into 3

Just editing your post lets you circumvent the character limit.

[Burmecia]

Sniiiiiiip

You clearly have way with words, and I am not contesting your experiences with housing on Zodiark.

But oh boy. I used to be on Zodi too, and own small house there, so just let me be a bit baffled here: Has that small server grown so much to have + half dozen people camping on free plots, /slapping and being kinda awful to others? O_o

Compare and contrast: When I bought my Zodi plot (ye olden days of something like 4.2 or 4.3 so not even that outrageously long time ago) it was max devalued small, and not even the only free in just that one ward.
On average I have seen 2-4 people at most camping at Rag, which is supposed to be a lot bigger server. Everyone seems nothing but civil.

I was not even sure if I am going to be on Rag in year, so at first I held back on trying to buy house. I clicked on plots for like 5-10 minutes at a time and determined rule for myself to give up if someone else came along. I was pretty sure it'd keep me from acquiring anything ever --- until it did not xD

https://youtu.be/qaU5Sqqu2MQ?t=123

(On my shaky defence about me breaking my own give up policy I did not notice the person at the beginning of the video when I first came to the plot. As you can see I did not even click but once here and there because I was reading something from laptop or something, semi-afk mode. She was not there then, which was less than 5 minutes ago from the beginning of the video. You can see her... kinda phasing in and out of existence throughout even that short clip. Internet problems? :thinking: )

Housing is battleground, for sure. But I suppose it is working as intended making it not broken per se: limited resource for players who have the cash and luck at their side at right time. Unpopularly I never found anything bad or even outrageously unfair about that system.

I'd love to see SE give us those bigger apartments people keep suggesting. I would actually prefer that.

[TalithaSolarien]

You clearly have way with words, and I am not contesting your experiences with housing on Zodiark.

But oh boy. I used to be on Zodi too, and own small house there, so just let me be a bit baffled here: Has that small server grown so much to have + half dozen people camping on free plots, /slapping and being kinda awful to others? O_o

IDK about Zodiak but on Odin it's the same and I would assume it's the same on all other servers. Currently auto-demolition is halted which means that there are virtually no free plots to have, not even on less popular cities like Ul'dah.

Basically there are way to few plots available for players to buy and SE apparently pretty much has abandoned apartments (no changes, no different sizes). Ishgard housing might relieve the strain a but but the fact remains that SE has pretty much painted themselfes in a corner here.