Island Sanctuary as a housing solution ?

[Jojoya]

Pretty much every server will have enough housing once Ishgard housing comes out regardless though.

What makes you think that? There's a pretty big gap in population between the lowest population worlds and the highest population worlds but every world will have the same 7,200 houses. Sure, it will be easy to get a house on a JP world that only has 8,000 active players. Not so easy on a NA world with over 20,000 active players.

Demand is not just from individual players wanting a house. There are FCS who also want a house. Those evidently make up 30% of house ownership right now, which would reduce the number available to individual players to about 5,000. Suddenly even the low pop JP worlds may have a shortfall depending on what percentage of players want to own a house.

Then there are the players who play on multiple worlds and have houses on each of those worlds. There are the player who have multiple shells FCs for access to more workshops and gardens. That further reduce the number of houses available for players who do not have a house.

Ishgard housing is not a solution unless SE will be making additional changes to how the ward system works that they have not shared with us.

[Arielen]

What makes you think that? There's a pretty big gap in population between the lowest population worlds and the highest population worlds but every world will have the same 7,200 houses. Sure, it will be easy to get a house on a JP world that only has 8,000 active players. Not so easy on a NA world with over 20,000 active players.

Demand is not just from individual players wanting a house. There are FCS who also want a house. Those evidently make up 30% of house ownership right now, which would reduce the number available to individual players to about 5,000. Suddenly even the low pop JP worlds may have a shortfall depending on what percentage of players want to own a house.

Then there are the players who play on multiple worlds and have houses on each of those worlds. There are the player who have multiple shells FCs for access to more workshops and gardens. That further reduce the number of houses available for players who do not have a house.

Ishgard housing is not a solution unless SE will be making additional changes to how the ward system works that they have not shared with us.

Where are there 20k active players? Because the largest server (Gilgamesh) lists 14.5k, and it's worth noting that 'active' doesn't mean currently playing, it means "characters that have finished 5.0". It's doubtful there are actually 14.5k people currently playing on Gilg.

(5 residential districts * 24 wards) * 60 plots = 7200.

That's literally more plots than the entire active population of Spriggan and Twintania. 7.2k plots is enough for every FC on the vast majority of servers + a large chunk of personals.

[Jojoya]

Where are there 20k active players? Because the largest server (Gilgamesh) lists 14.5k, and it's worth noting that 'active' doesn't mean currently playing, it means "characters that have finished 5.0". It's doubtful there are actually 14.5k people currently playing on Gilg.

(5 residential districts * 24 wards) * 60 plots = 7200.

That's literally more plots than the entire active population of Spriggan and Twintania. 7.2k plots is enough for every FC on the vast majority of servers + a large chunk of personals.

Unofficial census had Gilgamesh at 24k last summer. Player populations do rise and fall over the course of an expansion.

Your math is bad if you think 7200 houses will be enough for 14k players and all the FCs looking for a house, not to mention that the player population will have exploded upwards again by the time Ishgard housing is opened next year thanks to the release of the new expansion.

Not sure why you're bringing up the two worlds with the lowest population in the game. That does nothing to help the highest population worlds. Why should NA players be shortchanged when SE controls the number of worlds per data center and thus the number of houses available to players in those data centers?

Add in enough worlds to NA so we've got the same average populations as the JP data centers and we'd be okay. I don't see SE increasing the number of NA worlds from 24 to 40. Do you?

Set the ward system up so it expands dynamically by need per world and we'd be okay. Considering SE has already said they can't do that, I don't see that happening either.

[Arielen]

Unofficial census had Gilgamesh at 24k last summer. Player populations do rise and fall over the course of an expansion.

Your math is bad if you think 7200 houses will be enough for 14k players and all the FCs looking for a house, not to mention that the player population will have exploded upwards again by the time Ishgard housing is opened next year thanks to the release of the new expansion.

Not sure why you're bringing up the two worlds with the lowest population in the game. That does nothing to help the highest population worlds. Why should NA players be shortchanged when SE controls the number of worlds per data center and thus the number of houses available to players in those data centers?

Add in enough worlds to NA so we've got the same average populations as the JP data centers and we'd be okay. I don't see SE increasing the number of NA worlds from 24 to 40. Do you?

Set the ward system up so it expands dynamically by need per world and we'd be okay. Considering SE has already said they can't do that, I don't see that happening either.

That's 14k characters all-time that have finished 5.0, not that have finished 5.0 and are playing right now. The number of subbed players can be presumed to be much lower than that. According to this, there are only about 813 FCs with 10+ players (sorry, couldn't narrow it down to 4, it's either 1 or 10 lol) with rank 6 or above on Gilgamesh. So if we assume there are 10k people currently subbed and playing on Gilg and that every single one of those FCs is active, yes, that's a house for every FC and a house for 60% of the playerbase once Ishgard comes in. I'd say that's pretty reasonable.

The next issue with housing will probably not be a lack of housing availability, but lack of medium and large homes. And that, there's very little to do for: they probably can't make houses 'upgradeable' to the next size up and adding new wards doesn't change the ratio of smalls vs mediums and larges.

That being said, we do need like 3ish more worlds per American and EU DC anyway. In terms of housing crisis, 8k 'active players' on the smallest servers in the game lead to an excess of housing: so few people there want it that larges get devalued. While this can be attributed to a variety of factors such as baby server with slow market and broke ass players, a lot of people also move there for housing.

Edit:

Those 14k characters include duplicates per account. So that's 14k characters, not 14k individual players.

More edits:

The 24k you cited cannot be possible. Reason being that I'm speaking to the devs of FFXIVCensus on twitter right now, and the current number dates back to April 2020. There have been no updates since. One of the other devs mentioned that they could scan for the minion obtained with the completion of 5.3, but there's no date of estimate for that yet. This is the relevant twitter thread for FFXIVCensus dev responses.

[Catstab]

there are only about 813 FCs with 10+ players.

What kind of cutoff is 10 players? Currently 64,000 houses worldwide belong to FCs too small for you to count.* So all the rest of your math starts from a useless number.

Currently, FC housing makes up roughly 25% of plots. So if you want housing for 10k players, you need about 13,500 houses. So 7200 is a still a far cry short.

Additionally, Endwalker will bring new and returning players and that 10k active players number will explode. So your assessment that only 13,000 houses are needed right now means absolutely nothing this time next year.

*source: https://www.xivhousing.com/free-company-census-2020

[Arielen]

What kind of cutoff is 10 players? Currently 64,000 houses worldwide belong to FCs too small for you to count.* So all the rest of your math starts from a useless number.

Currently, FC housing makes up roughly 25% of plots. So if you want housing for 10k players, you need about 13,500 houses. So 7200 is a still a far cry short.

Additionally, Endwalker will bring new and returning players and that 10k active players number will explode. So your assessment that only 13,000 houses are needed right now means absolutely nothing this time next year.

*source: https://www.xivhousing.com/free-company-census-2020

The cutoff is from the lowest number other than 1 that I could pick on that same site that you linked.

Fair enough on the housing for 10k players based on the fact that FCs only make up 25% of plots, but that'd be 203 plots for FCs in this imaginary scenario of the 813 viable fcs exist, making 7500 plots needed for the 10k players on the server, no? Which, there's going to be 7200 plots in Ishgard, that means there's only a deficit of 500odd plots. Two new wards would be sufficient to cover it. I don't really understand where the "13,500 houses are needed" number comes from.

It's still worth keeping in mind that the number is entirely made up to begin with: 10k actively playing and running around seems quite high considering that Gilg has 14k characters that completed 5.0 in April 2020. And that's implying, of course, that all 10k of those players are interested in, can afford, and meet the requirements for housing. If there's such a big boom of new players, then they probably don't meet the reqs.

tldr I still don't think that it's fair to estimate that most servers will probably be fine.

[Catstab]

that'd be 203 plots for FCs in this imaginary scenario of the 813 viable fcs exist

Possibly. I guess my only issue is that if 25% of housing is FC housing right now, that means at at present, 1,440 FC houses exist per server with 4,320 left for personals. I don't see that 1,440 average dropping at all unless a system is put in place to forcefully divest undersized FCs of houses, and this would be to widespread player objection.

I presume that if another 1,440 are added with Ishgard, FCs will buy some of them and leave players with closer to 1,080 of the houses. So (assuming no further ward expansions) in the Ishgard era, there will be 5,400 - 5,760 houses available for personal use. While not all players wish for housing, I do not anticipate that this will be enough.

If I had to guess, Ishgard will be immediately followed with a 6 ward expansion as Shirogane was. It may even come beforehand. If you recall the August 2020 announcement of 22-24, SE said that they would place as many wards as possible on existing servers, but could not follow with physical server installation due to travel restrictions. I think this means that as restrictions ease, we could see more ward expansions as we did in October 2020 and October 2019. If we did chance to get another 6 wards, that would put the houses per server at 9,000 with Ishgard's onset. Now that might cover everyone except for the largest servers.

[Jojoya]

That's 14k characters all-time that have finished 5.0, not that have finished 5.0 and are playing right now. .

What does completing 5.0 have to do with housing?

Nothing. Purchase and completion of the expansion is not a requirement to obtain housing.

Requirements for personal purchase are reaching level 50 on a class or job and having the rank of Second Lieutenant in a GC (which can be done at level 47). Requirement for FC purchase is to have reached FC rank 6 and have 4 members.

So how many active players have reached the actual requirements for house purchase?

[Arielen]

What does completing 5.0 have to do with housing?

They're the only available population statistics that allow us to estimate the playerbase: we don't actually know how many people are actively subbed, let alone playing on each server. There aren't any stats for Second LT GC, lvl 50 and 2nd LT of a GC and lvl 50 offers us no hint at all of currently playing players. Per XIVCensus we know that there are 4,885,698 characters in total, 4+ million of which have likely quit the game, and only 647,345 of those are listed as active.

tldr we can only guess how many people are on every server based on what little info we have, since SE doesn't disclose the numbers

[Jojoya]

tldr we can only guess how many people are on every server based on what little info we have, since SE doesn't disclose the numbers

We know the active population on every NA server is higher than the total houses on each world. Otherwise those who want a house would have no problem getting one.