Remove timer SE

[Penthea]

There is an actual hard cap on how many characters can be displayed. Personally I never seen it get to that point at a plot. Yesterday I went ot a plot near my home and it was camped by 14 people. YOu can see the hard cap easily during hunts and when the fate for restoration pops.

Yea I was thinking the same thing. I think only pcs very much below the spec of a ps4 would noticeably chug long before the cap on characters displayed is reached.

I don't think people realize that instant housing isn't as simple to implement as everyone thinks it is.

I understand it isn't easy. However...

Sure other MMOs have it.

This is precisely what makes the situation infuriating. The tech is there, SE can well afford to do this. And everyone knows this. But having the money and wanting to spend it on housing are not the same thing.

Personally I like BDOs approach but its completely different engine with a completely different coding scheme and even different server infrastructure. FFXIV is a mash up of coding from 1.0

Yes this is certainly a problem and not an easy one to fix but keeping things as they are now is leading to other big problems.

Every single release of wards has been very controversial. People are supposed to be looking forward to new housing content, not be worried, stressed out or being at each other's throats about it. And it's not getting better. The game is becoming more popular at a rate faster than houses are being added. I know SE had planned to add even more wards than what we recently got and covid got in the way of that, but the fact is the system is unsustainable. By not having a proper instanced housing system SE have doomed themselves to constantly struggle to keep up with the demand, and they never get anywhere close to satisfying it. As long as all we have is wards I seriously doubt they ever will.

That said there are ways for SE to improve the ward system that would alleviate the demand for houses. And by this I mean apartments. They're better than nothing but they do leave many players just end up feeling like they get something too basic. I would never expect them to be as good as houses, but I don't think anyone expected them to be simply just fc rooms with a chocobo stable. Just a handful of upgrades would drastically improve them.

Of course another way to improve it is to allow all characters on the same server access the same private home. However SE already expressed interest in doing this a few times so I think it's only a matter of time before it comes. I suppose the soonest we can expect is with the release of Ishgard wards, which is starting to look like will come in 6.0.

I just want the housing system to no longer rely on luck. I understand if SE want houses to feel like a long term goal to aim for but this can instead be done with quest chains and rep grinds. Having players directly compete with each other just creates animosity which isn't healthy for any gaming community. SE have frequently said one of the reasons why they don't have an in-game parser is because they want to avoid the drama that can come from them. Well their current stance with housing goes directly against this ideology.

I'd still rather try to figure something out than throw in the towel... but then again I seem good at finding Sisyphean things to get behind >.>

Ugh some of the comments you have gotten about that timer thread have been awful. You're not directly responsible for it. The most likely thing is that you and SE had the same idea. The timer does definitely hinder most house flipping but because the housing system is so flawed it ended up replacing that issue with another issue. That's not your fault. To me it just shows that tweaks won't ever be enough. However a good tweak would be to dramatically reduce the max time. Having it potentially has high as 24 hours isn't helping anyone and we have seen it creates a lot of unhappiness. I think a max of five hours would be enough for it to still function as intended without players doing something as unhealthy as camp for more hours than a work shift.

[Almagnus1]

This is precisely what makes the situation infuriating. The tech is there, SE can well afford to do this. And everyone knows this. But having the money and wanting to spend it on housing are not the same thing.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's some seemingly random reason for why this isn't possible tied to 1.0's design decision that makes this far more expensive than we would have thought.

That, and I don't think it's going to be taken seriously until Yoshi-P (or another major dev) decides to try to get a house on the live service as housing probably isn't high on their list of things to fix.

As long as all we have is wards I seriously doubt they ever will.

Also factor in FFXIV's growth... that's another aggravating factor for this issue. Owning an entire ward on a low pop server was fine back in ARR or HW when we didn't have near as many players... now... it's tying up a scarce resource.

I just want the housing system to no longer rely on luck.

I think that's what a lot of us want (at least, those that aren't rubbing it in our faces that they have multiple private houses, multiple shell FCs, or are just trolling).

Ugh some of the comments you have gotten about that timer thread have been awful. You're not directly responsible for it. The most likely thing is that you and SE had the same idea.

Yeah, it's like "that was almost three years ago when it was posted, why are you necroing/linking to it?"

The timer does definitely hinder most house flipping but because the housing system is so flawed it ended up replacing that issue with another issue.

I don't know if there's really a good solution there. I imagine SE was probably getting enough tickets about some random person walking up and stealing the house, or someone deciding to peace out after the trade, that they wanted to take a nuclear option to the problem. Then there's the distinct possibility that there was RMT activity tied to accruing enough gil to get a house off of one of the the house trading sites.

However....

Having it potentially has high as 24 hours isn't helping anyone and we have seen it creates a lot of unhappiness. I think a max of five hours would be enough for it to still function as intended without players doing something as unhealthy as camp for more hours than a work shift.

This is not a good thing, and definitely needs to be looked at. Camping a house site for anymore than about four hours (let alone as long as some have reported) is not healthy, and SE should make it a priority to find a solution (like raffling off the lot) so that this kind of behavior isn't possible in FFXIV.