Please SE, do something about housing

[Gemina]

Please SE, i beg you. Add more wards, more subdivisions, a third, a fourth but please. This housing is a mess. It's very tiring to click for hours and see so many people trying to get the house too.

Just add more please and now. We all want a house!

Assuming you do not own a plot, out of curiosity if you finally got yourself some housing today or tomorrow; what would you do with it?

If you do own a home, why are you begging SE to add more wards? I am going to dismiss the notion that everyone wants housing. While it is commendable to desire that everyone is happy with the housing market, it also isn't realistic by any stretch. So why do YOU want more wards knowing what you know about the game at this point?

[MsQi]

I am going to dismiss the notion...

Oh! Please No! Don't! You monster!

It's not unrealistic.

[Skivvy]

While it's impossible to have all players completely happy with the housing system (and this goes for any game), making housing available to all characters in a theme-park MMO should be the bare minimum they strive for.

For all the things they copied from XI, borrowing and expanding upon the moghouse system could have been a good idea. They were a similar size to that of an inn-room (I think slightly larger), but they could be fully decorated, had gardening via flower pots, gave access to and you could apply various buffs to your character. These were later expanded to add a second story, a patio, and a large gardening instance.

So with that train of thought...I wonder how the playerbase would feel about expanding inn-rooms as a starting point instead. They're already available to every character, and this could let each person choose a location of their liking. Open up decorating and allow pot-gardening (or preferably add a garden instance), and if they're feeling generous, maybe continue to follow XI and add that second-story and patio as well. I feel like that could appease the housing need for a large amount of players, while building upon an existing system in the game.

I do realize similar suggestions have been made for apartments. My reasoning for going the inn-room route is that even apartments are limited, and many servers no longer have any that are available. Also, with apartments you are still limited to The Mist, The Goblet, and whatever Gridania is called (totally drawing a blank) - opening up inn rooms in this way would give far more options for where someone can call home. All characters have access to inn-rooms, so it could be a nice place to start.

Is it my ideal housing? Nahhh, but it could be enough to make me give up my house.

[Jojoya]

Oh! Please No! Don't! You monster!

It's not unrealistic.

It's definitely unrealistic. There are plenty of players who have stated they don't want housing. Not everyone wants their own space to decorate or cares about intercross gardening. They're perfectly fine going to one of the cities to use a Summoning Bell or Marketboard.

But I doubt those players are the majority. The majority would like to own a house.

The problem this game has is how the active player population is distributed and how housing is designed so that all worlds end up with the same number of wards (and houses). JP players tend to prefer lower population worlds so 5040 houses per world easily serves their majority on all but two JP worlds. Western players tend to prefer high population worlds so the number of houses only serves the majority on 4 EU worlds and 1 NA world. When you factor in the number of houses owned by what are essentially solo player FCs and multi-house owners (grandfathered or otherwise), that probably drops to only 2 EU worlds where the majority is served with those being the new worlds added just before Shadowbringers launch.

The ward system just isn't designed to handle rapidly increasing player populations or large disparities in population distribution. We know something is coming at the end of Ishgard Restoration but we'll have to wait to see if it's just a new housing district or if there's additional changes that will be introduced at the same time.

[AngelCheese77]

You are not the first nor will be the last to ask SE to do something about housing. The true question is when will people come to terms that clearly SE wants housing to be limited, and not readily available to all.

Those that say well God Yoshi said otherwise in a live letter. Fair, but their actions over the years clearly state otherwise.

I've already come to terms with it. I'd be happy if they made apartments 2 floors and the ability to use more than 2 damn flower pots. Meh.

[MsQi]

It's definitely unrealistic. There are plenty of players who have stated they don't want housing. Not everyone wants their own space to decorate or cares about intercross gardening. They're perfectly fine going to one of the cities to use a Summoning Bell or Marketboard.

But I doubt those players are the majority. The majority would like to own a house.

The problem this game has is how the active player population is distributed and how housing is designed so that all worlds end up with the same number of wards (and houses). JP players tend to prefer lower population worlds so 5040 houses per world easily serves their majority on all but two JP worlds. Western players tend to prefer high population worlds so the number of houses only serves the majority on 4 EU worlds and 1 NA world. When you factor in the number of houses owned by what are essentially solo player FCs and multi-house owners (grandfathered or otherwise), that probably drops to only 2 EU worlds where the majority is served with those being the new worlds added just before Shadowbringers launch.

The ward system just isn't designed to handle rapidly increasing player populations or large disparities in population distribution. We know something is coming at the end of Ishgard Restoration but we'll have to wait to see if it's just a new housing district or if there's additional changes that will be introduced at the same time.

Not unrealistic, just not the best solution.

[Shougun]

While it's impossible to have all players completely happy with the housing system (and this goes for any game), making housing available to all characters in a theme-park MMO should be the bare minimum they strive for.

For all the things they copied from XI, borrowing and expanding upon the moghouse system could have been a good idea. They were a similar size to that of an inn-room (I think slightly larger), but they could be fully decorated, had gardening via flower pots, gave access to and you could apply various buffs to your character. These were later expanded to add a second story, a patio, and a large gardening instance.

So with that train of thought...I wonder how the playerbase would feel about expanding inn-rooms as a starting point instead. They're already available to every character, and this could let each person choose a location of their liking. Open up decorating and allow pot-gardening (or preferably add a garden instance), and if they're feeling generous, maybe continue to follow XI and add that second-story and patio as well. I feel like that could appease the housing need for a large amount of players, while building upon an existing system in the game.

I do realize similar suggestions have been made for apartments. My reasoning for going the inn-room route is that even apartments are limited, and many servers no longer have any that are available. Also, with apartments you are still limited to The Mist, The Goblet, and whatever Gridania is called (totally drawing a blank) - opening up inn rooms in this way would give far more options for where someone can call home. All characters have access to inn-rooms, so it could be a nice place to start.

Is it my ideal housing? Nahhh, but it could be enough to make me give up my house.

Interestingly FFXI also managed making an entire garden island for everyone and expanding your mog room to a second floor.

While obviously the large houses are certainly larger than the mog rooms, and the island is separate from the inn room, I would definitely agree that if they had taken their system from FFXI and went big it would have been pretty cool (assuming improvements, and particularly the continued concept of smooth growth).

I really think it would have a far more impressive system if they started everyone on a journey of homely growth... As I think it is really interesting to have a home base, a certain sort of lodestone of return, that grows alongside your character, because heck most of us like RPGs because of the growth- it's great fun to grow your character, having more than just your character grow I think adds an interesting element.

Dinky little cupboard you're afforded early on simply for being part of the GC or something, congrats here is your cupboard under the stairs. Shortly there after upgrading it to an actual room, more impressively adding features to it since you can rely on everyone having access to it (can make it a core part of the game), and just keep upgrading the system. Gaining access to new floors, balconies, outdoor plots, larger and bigger, as the story does itself lol. Like finally after ShB we get Wild Star housing from starting at an inn room, made fairly logical via the MSQ of ShB as I can easily see ourselves finding a little pocket of 'that one place' that is manipulable, it would be an amazing journey. . .

Even though a lot of servers have apartments available they're still pretty hobbled by the system, in that the game doesn't really beckon you into the as I think would have been a much better choice (like FFXI's, a sort of progression mechanic), they are technically limited (which means you can't realistically bind interesting features to them without very potentially making a very sad system for some players, like houses and FC who don't own one), they're fixed and unwieldy which adds to potential buyer's remorse (picking the wrong location, wrong ward, don't upgrade smoothly if you had wanted to go house but weren't sure, etc), and they're clearly the worse version of actual houses (which has it's own issues, and leads back into buyer's remorse lol).

Anyway, yeah.. I think housing is a really interesting opportunity to add basically a second character to your character. Even in sRPG that weren't so customize-able I thought it was pretty neat, like seeing all your achievements in Bastion. Or the previously mentioned Assassin Creed games with limited decoration ability.

[Yue_Amariyo]

You are not the first nor will be the last to ask SE to do something about housing. The true question is when will people come to terms that clearly SE wants housing to be limited, and not readily available to all.

Those that say well God Yoshi said otherwise in a live letter. Fair, but their actions over the years clearly state otherwise.

if korean servers are anything to go by each district can have 32 wards.

[Yue_Amariyo]

Please SE, i beg you. Add more wards, more subdivisions, a third, a fourth but please. This housing is a mess. It's very tiring to click for hours and see so many people trying to get the house too.

Just add more please and now. We all want a house!

as far as i know from looking at past live letters, SE didnt plan ff14 to be as popular as it is, and housing from ARR. it was fc only, but players wanted FC housing as personal as well so they just added to it.

[Packetdancer]

If you do own a home, why are you begging SE to add more wards? I am going to dismiss the notion that everyone wants housing. While it is commendable to desire that everyone is happy with the housing market, it also isn't realistic by any stretch. So why do YOU want more wards knowing what you know about the game at this point?

I own a home, which I got largely through Dumb Luck. When 5.1 hit and the new wards opened up, I went wandering the Goblet, the Lavender Beds, and Mist looking for vacant plots where people had relocated to larger plots in new wards (or to plots in a different housing area), and I found people camping literally every single one. I didn't want to get into a click war with any, so after like three hours I decided to give up; I teleported back to my FC house in Shirogane to deal with something... and then thought "Hey, maybe there's a plot in one of the Shirogane wards." I went and looked, and found one small plot free. I thought "Well, that'll be camped, but I'll go check" and it wasn't. And I thought "Oh, it must be on the timer still, but I'll click anyway..."

Boom, unexpected house. And I was lucky; as I started settling in over the next couple of hours, several of my neighbors came over with housewarming gifts and I made new friends. (I have since learned what an unusual experience that is, which makes me a little sad; meeting neighbors and making new friends who I've even gone and run content with was one of the best parts of buying the house, and I strongly suspect is what SquareEnix was aiming for originally.)

Two of my friends also were lucky and managed to snag houses once the new wards opened up to non-FC/non-relocation purchases a while later (though neither had the 'neighbors wandering over to greet and give welcome gifts' experience, which was where I started to realize I was unusually lucky that my ward is actually not dead).

But I have a lot of friends who also want houses who were totally unable to get them, and still haven't. That's why I don't use the garden plot at my house, though I love hanging out in my yard (I am happy with my landscaping work); I garden at the FC house and gave a friend permissions on my house so they can garden there. Another of the friends helps me with the FC gardening, and gave another of the friend group access to the garden plot at their house to do gardening there.

It feels a little silly to do this musical chairs with garden plots, honestly.

So despite having a house, why would I want more housing in some fashion? Because I have a lot of friends who want to experiment with gardening, or who want to be able to do exterior decoration/landscaping, neither of which you can do in apartments or FC private chambers. And doing the "I'll use this garden so you can use my garden" shuffle is a bit ridiculous.