Housing discrimination

[PewPewPewPewPew]

Based on the data mass extracted by Mew directly from the lodestone for August 2020:

Single ownership FC houses with plots make up 7,390 total plots out of 107,092 total plots owned by FCs across all worlds (which is 30% of all houses available in the entire world).
That means only 7% of all existing FC owned plots are single-owner FC plots. At the same time, single owner FC plots make up 2% of all 342,720 plots across all worlds.

If we expand and look at that same data for FCs with 1-3 people total, the total number of FC's with a roster ranging from 1 to 3 people make up 21,209 FCs that hold plots.
That means just under 20% of all existing FC owned plots are owned by FCs with a roster of 1-3 characters. Meaning FCs with a roster of 1-3 characters make up only 6% of all 342,720 plots across all worlds.

Conclusion: These numbers show that shell FCs are too insignificant to be a leading cause of housing shortages. This data was extracted directly from lodestone as of last month.

Posting this from another thread here because based on the above data:

One-man FCs or FCs with less than 4 people are not a significant cause to house shortages.

[Penthea]

Posting this from another thread here because based on the above data:

One-man FCs or FCs with less than 4 people are not a significant cause to house shortages.

Maybe not now but it is a problem that will get worse if SE do not make the purchase restriction on fc houses permanent. Removing that has increased the amount of shell fcs quite noticeably on some servers. As I mentioned before in another thread, it is an issue that will one day far outpace the hoarding of grandfathered players if SE continue to turn fc purchase restriction on and off instead of keeping it on. While the problem with shell fcs is relatively small right now when you look at the game as a whole, there is something to be said about tackling an issue before it becomes a serious problem. History has shown us several times that some players or fcs buy as many houses as they possibly can and sometimes it's to the point that they strongly dominate wards. This is not good when housing is a limited resource.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuut OP's suggestion on how to tackle the above is not what I would consider a good solution. It would too easily punish legitimate fcs who are small whether that's through just starting off, having difficulty in recruiting the sort of members they want or wanting to stay small for the happiness of the members.

If a requirement on the amount of members having access to a fc house is to have a specific base number, then it should be 4. Not 10. As it is now 4 is the minimum requirement to do group content. 10 doesn't even make sense considering it's not even a group size for any content and you need only 8 to do raid content. But even this I disagree with, I just happen to be more okay with 4 as a base requirement than 10.

[Arielen]

Maybe not now but it is a problem that will get worse if SE do not make the purchase restriction on fc houses permanent. Removing that has increased the amount of shell fcs quite noticeably on some servers. As I mentioned before in another thread, it is an issue that will one day far outpace the hoarding of grandfathered players if SE continue to turn fc purchase restriction on and off instead of keeping it on. While the problem with shell fcs is relatively small right now when you look at the game as a whole, there is something to be said about tackling an issue before it becomes a serious problem. History has shown us several times that some players or fcs buy as many houses as they possibly can and sometimes it's to the point that they strongly dominate wards. This is not good when housing is a limited resource.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuut OP's suggestion on how to tackle the above is not what I would consider a good solution. It would too easily punish legitimate fcs who are small whether that's through just starting off, having difficulty in recruiting the sort of members they want or wanting to stay small for the happiness of the members.

If a requirement on the amount of members having access to a fc house is to have a specific base number, then it should be 4. Not 10. As it is now 4 is the minimum requirement to do group content. 10 doesn't even make sense considering it's not even a group size for any content and you need only 8 to do raid content. But even this I disagree with, I just happen to be more okay with 4 as a base requirement than 10.

By the logic of shell FCs being a bad thing, then why not tackle personals?

[Penthea]

By the logic of shell FCs being a bad thing, then why not tackle personals?

Well I personally don't think they're bad as long as the account has only one fc house per server. I mentioned this before in the beginning of another post in this thread, along with a reason why a person may have a fc of this kind. Not everyone who has a one-man fc is doing so with the sole goal of hoarding.

Even if a person has several accounts I'm okay with this as long as the restrictions remain at one fc and one private house per server because the impact these people under this restriction can have is minimal unless they have enough money to keep subs rolling on a large number of accounts. Which appears to be a rare occurrence to me, obviously due to the tremendous cost of this sort of activity.

The main difference between personal and fc houses is the workshop. Some fcs have shell fcs with the sole purpose of using the extra workshops to funnel the money to the main fc. If we are to look at abuse of the housing system, fcs have the potential to abuse it far more due to the increased amount of gil they can generate with these houses. Catstab actually presented a very good solution to this that would simultaneously grant fcs without houses access to workshops and reduce the incentive to create shell fcs to purchase additional houses.

Abuse or taking advantage of the limitations of the housing system is going to happen whether we like it or not. As long as housing is a limited resource there are going to be issues somewhere about uneven distribution. The best we can hope for is to make purchase restrictions be always at only one private and one fc house per server per account. The only legitimate solution to any of this is a fully fledged instanced housing system with unlimited plots...but as I mentioned so often already it doesn't look like we will ever see this.

And well personals have already been tackled due to the purchase restriction being one per server per account and it has not been lifted since it came to the game. An improvement to this that I want to see is to allow all characters within the same server and account to access to same private home. It would be beneficial to anyone who has alts within the same server, and it would reduce the incentive to purchase several houses.

[Jojoya]

Maybe not now but it is a problem that will get worse if SE do not make the purchase restriction on fc houses permanent. Removing that has increased the amount of shell fcs quite noticeably on some servers.

Justice is partly being served by that. The reason why so many players want the shell FCs is to run workshops to make gil selling rare items from submersibles.

The number of FCs in general (real and shell) doing this has greatly increased the number of rare items getting to market, driving the prices down rapidly compared to the past. That's led to occasional comments from some players that's it's not worth doing anymore because they feel like the gil being earned wasn't worth the time and effort to level the subs and build a good farming configuration.

But it does hurt the real FCs who were using the workshops to fund FC activities as much as the shell FCs. They're also getting less back as supply increases. We're still making a decent amount from our FC fleet but we're more of a small to mid-sized social FC so we don't really need that much gil for the things we do. Larger FCs would feel it more.

[Penthea]

Justice is partly being served by that. The reason why so many players want the shell FCs is to run workshops to make gil selling rare items from submersibles.

The number of FCs in general (real and shell) doing this has greatly increased the number of rare items getting to market, driving the prices down rapidly compared to the past. That's led to occasional comments from some players that's it's not worth doing anymore because they feel like the gil being earned wasn't worth the time and effort to level the subs and build a good farming configuration.

But it does hurt the real FCs who were using the workshops to fund FC activities as much as the shell FCs. They're also getting less back as supply increases. We're still making a decent amount from our FC fleet but we're more of a small to mid-sized social FC so we don't really need that much gil for the things we do. Larger FCs would feel it more.

Thinking about this it does make me wonder if the workshop needs another look at by SE. Is it perhaps too easy to get a workshop up to date even with a relatively new fc? I don't recall it being difficult for us to achieve this and we're certainly not a fc who heavily concentrate on it. Even when we lag behind it never takes us long to catch up. Could this be a contributing factor as to why it's quite tempting to create shell fcs? Because the amount of workshop effort involved isn't quite as much as it could or even should be? I would be very interested to read people's opinions about this. Especially anyone from a fc who craft with the workshop content very often.

[Arielen]

Thinking about this it does make me wonder if the workshop needs another look at by SE. Is it perhaps too easy to get a workshop up to date even with a relatively new fc? I don't recall it being difficult for us to achieve this and we're certainly not a fc who heavily concentrate on it. Even when we lag behind it never takes us long to catch up. Could this be a contributing factor as to why it's quite tempting to create shell fcs? Because the amount of workshop effort involved isn't quite as much as it could or even should be? I would be very interested to read people's opinions about this. Especially anyone from a fc who craft with the workshop content very often.

You can buy premade sub stuff via the mb or the sub discord so that doesn't help lol. However, shell FCs don't have enough members required to farm for company credits to maintain submarines and airships with any regularity. You can powerlevel a new FC to 6 in the span of like 2 hours of spamming Shisui of the Violet Tides, but you need like 10k credits for 1 voyage or something like that. Shell FCs aren't spamming them in other words. The only real benefit is gardening.

[Jojoya]

Thinking about this it does make me wonder if the workshop needs another look at by SE. Is it perhaps too easy to get a workshop up to date even with a relatively new fc? I don't recall it being difficult for us to achieve this and we're certainly not a fc who heavily concentrate on it. Even when we lag behind it never takes us long to catch up. Could this be a contributing factor as to why it's quite tempting to create shell fcs? Because the amount of workshop effort involved isn't quite as much as it could or even should be? I would be very interested to read people's opinions about this. Especially anyone from a fc who craft with the workshop content very often.

With respect to the workshop, I don't see why any FC should feel penalized for being "new". There's still going to be a time investment to rank up all the vessels assuming no one in the FC is rich and willing to buy the parts off the MB.

Then again, having someone rich in the FC willing to donate the gil is generally the only way the FC will get a house in the first place. FCs have no gil making activities that deposit the gil directly to the FC chest. They're reliant on member donations until they get their first airship/submersible built.

It's not how easy it is to get the workshop up to date that creates an incentive for shell FCs. It's how easy it is for a single player to get a FC to the rank necessary to purchase a house. I remember when the wards were added in 4.2 and SE announced that only FCs would be allowed to buy at first that people were posting guides on how solo players could get an FC to the proper rank within 2 days. It's too easy to spam Expert delivery turn-ins or mass craft HQ items to generate the credits.

If SE wants to promote FCs as active social groups instead of gil making opportunities, they need to take a look at what WoW did with guild levels, perks and challenges - then try to avoid making some of the mistakes that ended up causing the system to suffer. The guild challenges themselves were a good idea - the guild was rewarded for doing things as a guild group. Maybe if FC houses were purchased with company credits instead of gil but company credits could only be earned while doing specific content with a group that includes at least 3 FC members? The game is old enough it's probably not worth SE's time to overhaul the FC system beyond what they're working on for rank permissions to cut down on theft by compromised accounts.

[Barraind]

The number of FCs in general (real and shell) doing this has greatly increased the number of rare items getting to market, driving the prices down rapidly compared to the past

This tier is also absolute garbage compared to prior tiers.

No mount.
No minion.
No rare component for house item crafting.
No uncommon component for sub or house upgrading.
No uncommon or rare component for glam.
No common, high-use component for crafting (either workshop or FOR workshop).
No "oh wow, really?" luxury crafting item from old content. (polarized glass from a couple sub updates ago)

The same sub builds that were good last tier are just as good this tier.There's one new sub build thats seeing use, but it has a 4 day turnaround time, and won't be better than 2x 2day.

The profit this tier is down because the new sectors added 1 thing that people care about, and its a novelty umbrella that anyone who just wants an umbrella won't spend money on because you can get one from restoration for a few k in mats.


You could add hi-mythrite and dress material to the loot table and they would instantly be the most valuable thing added this batch by an unsurpassable margin.