Housing Ownership Restrictions

[Almagnus1]

So your FC wants a beneficial incentive awarded to them as a prize for their valiant efforts in attempting to relocate to 'Kurogane.'

No, they don't. They're quite happy in Mist as we have a large house that's been well utilized by the FC.

The relo attempt was a miserable failure despite the efforts made by the officers because we're on Cactuar and we didn't expect that the wards the officers went to would be full by the time they all loaded in (PS4s FTL). On the bright side, all the fundraising the FC did so we could relo means we don't have to do that again for quite a while. And just because I'm mentioning a failed relo attempt doesn't mean we are entitled to anything, I'm merely pointing out that we're probably not the only FC on Cactuar that had a similar experience.

Housing is a result of time and resources spent in game. That is what a reward is.

It's amusing when you apply the same thinking to RL ("my car is a result of time and resources spent IRL. that is what a reward is.") that statement falls apart. A house is an item (or more accurately, an asset) and the sooner you can accept this truth, the better off all us will be.

Again, if the process for demolishing the grandfathered houses can be stopped with a simple login, no problem.

There are three main parts of the current problem:

1. There can be more than one personal house per server per service account, which reduces supply
2. FCs that fall below the number of people needed to create the FC retain their houses, which reduces supply
3. FFXIV has had tremendous population growth and SE is lagging with houses, which increases demand

For #1 SE screwed up when they allowed the housing rules to be as loose as they were initially with the personal houses. SE should fix this first by giving everyone teleport locations to all personal accounts owned by that service account on that server. For example, if Maley, Moe, Larry, and Curly all have a house on Cactuar, all four get a teleport location to all four houses. To further help resolve the problem, SE should turn on personal house ownership transferal for a time so that people can keep their houses if they wish to transfer them to a different service account. If someone wants to free their houses, they should get back 100% of the cost of the house instead of the usual 80%. Should someone fails to do this within that timeframe, SE should demolish the extra houses which will free them up. Notice how I'm suggesting a way for multiple house owners to keep their holdings?

The second point stems from a flaw within the FC system that most other MMOs, don't have because if a guilds/FCs/whatever falls below a certain membership threshold they are penalized and/or deleted. In FFXIV, the house ownership should be taken away after a significant warning time if the FC drops below four (which is the number of people needed to create the FC). Again, if someone wants to hold onto the FC house they just need to add a few alts and the FC will keep the house. Additional, FC house ownership should be tied to the FC itself, and should have no bearing on whether or not a service account has a house. Again, there's a way forward here for those with multiple houses to keep their house.

#3 has been hashed over numerous times and includes stuff like adding more wards, instanced housing, public gardens, and public workshops. I'm not listing the buffs because you can get some of the FC buffs from the GCs, and that's good enough for the time being.

I find it hilarious that I keep getting demonized as some entitled multi-house hating idiot, despite suggesting a way for those people who are demonizing me to keep their holdings while also fixing flaws within the system that never should have been there in the first place.

[Catstab]

1. [grandfathered personals]
2. [shell FCs]
3. [lotsa people, itty bitty living space]

1. So few accounts exist with multiple personal houses that this is not a significant contributor to the problem. The number is constantly going down, and never going up.

Adding just a single ward would be more benefit to the homeless, less work for SE, and hurt zero players. Your solution is too much work, too much damage, and produces too little result.

2. This would solve nothing.

A restriction would be put in place similar to auto demolition. "If you have fewer than 4 members for 45 days, we will disband your FC." People with shell FCs for housing would then dedicate 3 alts to roaming between FCs for one day every month and a half, and nothing changes. So, SE spends time programming a change and makes 0 additional dollars for it, and the few players this applies to spend a couple minutes a day clicking away on their FCs to keep them.

I can already hear you saying "No, no, not 45 days! Disband the FCs immediately when they hit 3 members, at least destroy their house!" Here's why that doesn't work: Now any officer who can kick a player also has permission to either destroy the house or disband the FC outright. Solutions have to be made that won't inhibit functional free companies.

3. Demand is indeed increasing! More housing should and is being created. We have "more plots" on the way, per SE. That very likely means new wards, like it has in the past.

It could also mean a pending release of Ishgard, which may be traditional wards, or may be an instanced home for everyone who completes The Firmament quest line. Level those crafters, folks.

Some of the best suggestions beyond new wards / instanced Ishgard include:

-Larger apartments. Possibly with balconies, terraces, or sunrooms for gardening

-FC workshops being tied to your GC headquarters, the same as squads currently are. This eliminates the need for 'shell' FCs except for hardcore roleplayers.


You mention that the increasing population and how to get more of them into housing gets discussed frequently. That's because it is the actual heart of the problem.

5,040 houses gives about 1,260 FCs and 3,780 players places to stay. On your average NA server you have 24,000 players. So more than 20,000 players are left to pick between apartments or nothing. It's definitely a problem. The only way to get 20,000 more houses is open 84 more wards, or give every single player in the game an instanced house and yard. Either of these is a monumental task for SE.

They're certainly doing what they can for us, but they've identified #1 on your list as a non-problem, and #2 as not easily solvable, and anyone who puts real thought into the situation will agree with those designations.

[Jojoya]

They're certainly doing what they can for us, but they've identified #1 on your list as a non-problem, and #2 as not easily solvable, and anyone who puts real thought into the situation will agree with those designations.

Grandfathered houses is a problem when it means fewer players have access to a house but it's also not something SE is likely to change because it's a small one compared to other issues.

The issue of shell FCs can also partially be solved by setting active membership requirements to unique accounts instead number of characters. I might have 6 active characters on Coeurl but they all belong to the same account. If the requirement was to have a minimum of 4 characters from unique accounts maintaining consistent membership and logging in at least once every 30-45 days, I wouldn't be able to set up those multiple shell FCs from my single account. I would have to get multiple accounts.

Obviously, there are already a few players who are happy to pay multiple subscriptions to get access to more housing. But not everyone would be willing to do it. Many of those shell FCs getting run by a single account would end up disappearing.

Both problems get solved by instanced house plots. When every player can be guaranteed a house plot regardless of how many are owned by other players, then owning multiple houses doesn't matter.

We know instanced housing works successfully in meeting player demand because of all the other MMOs that use it. You don't see players complaining "I can't get a house" in those games. Their complaints are related to what they're able to do with housing (usually items limits just like we see complaints about item limits here). If instanced housing was just as if not more stressful on server resources as the wards are like some players here want to claim, instanced housing wouldn't be as extensive as it is in those other games.

[Penthea]

1. So few accounts exist with multiple personal houses that this is not a significant contributor to the problem. The number is constantly going down, and never going up.

We have no way to know exactly at what rate these grandfathered plots fall because we don't have access to SE's internal statistics. Also there is no guarantee that the number will ever reach zero. Not every grandfathered player is going to eventually be careless with demolition timers, have unfortunate life circumstances, or quit the game.

Perhaps of those you know of and yourself included, you only have a small handful of grandfathered houses each, and this makes you feel you're being harshly targeted despite having a small impact. But there are some players who have gone very far beyond that, and others who have done it to that degree on several accounts. It's these players in particular that have made some people exceptionally angry.

Certainly in my case when I think of the major players in the issue of grandfathering I'm not thinking of someone who only has three or four houses. I'm thinking of people who have eight or more. Sure every grandfathered player is causing an issue to some degree, but there are those whose impact on other players is ludicrously high. A famous pair of players who own an entire ward are a prime example of this.

However to look at the full picture we must recognise it is not only grandfathered plots that are an issue, but also the removal of the restriction on the amount of fc houses that can be purchased. Since this restriction has been lifted players have been creating shell fcs for personal use, or for the expansion of their fc.

If this trend of turning fc purchase restriction on and off continues every time we get new wards, then this particular issue will one day end up far outpacing the issues grandfathered plots cause. I'm really curious to see what happens with this in the future. If players know by now that many fcs and players are able to increase how many houses they can own because the active restrictions are inconsistent, then SE obviously knows it too.

And honestly the above issue I mentioned is actually causing problems for people like you, because they draw more attention to players or fcs who own many plots regardless of when or how they got them.

Adding just a single ward would be more benefit to the homeless, less work for SE, and hurt zero players.

As long as the purchase restrictions on fc houses continues to get turned on and off, it's not as beneficial as it could be. But that specific issue is not related to grandfathering. It's SE making some very questionable decisions that go against some of the things they set out to fix. It's very strange. It was a completely unnecessary step backwards.

Some of the best suggestions beyond new wards / instanced Ishgard include:

-Larger apartments. Possibly with balconies, terraces, or sunrooms for gardening

Introducing this would be an excellent way to make the competition for housing fall without even needing to add any wards. If apartments were bigger and had access to all the same mechanics and features as houses, regardless of whether you are a private owner or a fc, then the amount of players unhappy with housing would very significantly fall. Some would end up no longer caring about hoarders at all.

-FC workshops being tied to your GC headquarters, the same as squads currently are. This eliminates the need for 'shell' FCs except for hardcore roleplayers.

I am not really sure what you are suggesting here. Care to elaborate? Are you suggesting workshops be tied to GCs to prevent abuse? Or to have more/different features? Or something else?

Both problems get solved by instanced house plots. When every player can be guaranteed a house plot regardless of how many are owned by other players, then owning multiple houses doesn't matter.

We know instanced housing works successfully in meeting player demand because of all the other MMOs that use it. You don't see players complaining "I can't get a house" in those games. Their complaints are related to what they're able to do with housing (usually items limits just like we see complaints about item limits here). If instanced housing was just as if not more stressful on server resources as the wards are like some players here want to claim, instanced housing wouldn't be as extensive as it is in those other games.

Ah the dream, this is the exact solution that I want above all others but for such a long time now SE have made it clear they have no intention of doing this. I don't know whether it's because the game's spaghetti code won't allow it without significant expensive changes, or they utterly fail to see the real solution to housing as a whole. Whatever the case may be, it's so disappointing to know that the likelihood of ever seeing this in the game is close to zero. The best we can realistically hope for is tweaks

[Catstab]

[Cat: grandfathered houses are a tiny percentage of the owned houses on a server]
Perhaps of those you know of and yourself included, you only have a small handful of grandfathered houses each, and this makes you feel you're being harshly targeted despite having a small impact.

[Cat: FC workshops should be tied to the GC headquarters like your squad is]
I am not really sure what you are suggesting here. Care to elaborate? Are you suggesting workshops be tied to GCs to prevent abuse? Or to have more/different features? Or something else?

Fun fact, I do not own any grandfathered houses. I do have friends that do. If they lost their multiple houses, they would probably quit the game. They lose enjoyment, I lose friends, SE loses money, a tiny group of people gain houses. It's a lose/lose/lose/win. The detriments outweigh the benefits. The same benefit can be had by just launching more wards, and it avoids all the problems deleting the grandfathered houses would create.

As for the workshop being moved to the GC headquarters, I can break that down for you. Currently, there is a game feature called "Squads" where any player of captain rank may enter an instance through a door to the left of the GC counter. Inside, you manage a group of adventurers that run instances with you, or do errands for you. The "Tie FC workshops to GC headquarters" suggestion would remove the workshop from the FC house and instead place it at your allied GC headquarters building. The workshop would still function exactly as it does, but it would no longer be entered from the FC house. This way, no shell FC that only wanted to pilot submarines would need to own a house.

[Penthea]

Fun fact, I do not own any grandfathered houses. I do have friends that do. If they lost their multiple houses, they would probably quit the game. They lose enjoyment, I lose friends, SE loses money, a tiny group of people gain houses. It's a lose/lose/lose/win. The detriments outweigh the benefits. The same benefit can be had by just launching more wards, and it avoids all the problems deleting the grandfathered houses would create.

As much as I dislike any hoarding in general, I can completely understand that assets being removed could drive a person to quit the game. I love my house and I would be devastated if I lost it.

This is why I would prefer instanced housing as a solution. No one loses anything. Every single one of us would gain. But I don't think SE is going to do this. They have not expressed any interest in it at all. So then instead I ask for tweaks, because at least that is something possible : / Well at least the apartment upgrades would improve things without anyone losing anything.

Though you can't say for sure that the detriments outweigh the benefits. For you personally this is completely true, but I know quite a lot of people who keep their sub rolling only because they have a house. When they had no house they unsubbed very periodically between content patches. SE have certainly made more money from individuals like this when they got houses. That being said I do understand what you mean.

As for the workshop being moved to the GC headquarters, I can break that down for you. Currently, there is a game feature called "Squads" where any player of captain rank may enter an instance through a door to the left of the GC counter. Inside, you manage a group of adventurers that run instances with you, or do errands for you. The "Tie FC workshops to GC headquarters" suggestion would remove the workshop from the FC house and instead place it at your allied GC headquarters building. The workshop would still function exactly as it does, but it would no longer be entered from the FC house. This way, no shell FC that only wanted to pilot submarines would need to own a house.

Ah so you are saying that by taking the house out of the equation for workshops and submarines, you then reduce the incentive for and advantage of shell fcs. That is certainly a very interesting idea, and not one I have come across before myself. This of course would not completely stop people making shell fcs to get houses because there are other motivations to get them, but it definitely would reduce the amount of people doing it.

I'm quite surprised that you don't seem to have made a thread with this suggestion. Or if you have I have not seen it. I honestly think it's good enough to warrant a discussion of its own because it tackles two major issues: incentive for hoarding fc houses, and fcs being locked out of fc content due to not having a house. And it is something that helps to improve things without taking anything from anyone. Really if you make a thread about this, I would be there to support this suggestion. It really is excellent.