The big housing problem, why it isn't the amount of houses

[Saefinn]

I used to be a huge fan of the wards because it felt like a fun neighborhood. However due to the nature of the game and the fact that a lot of homes are own by alt characters/people on hiatus, the wards feel very empty. I would like to see the limitation of 1 house per account implemented as well as more important NPCs being brought to wards to make them more populated. Instanced housing would be dope too but I feel like they're gonna be introducing something like that in the new expansion with the "Stardew Valley" type island paradise instance. We shall see.

If the Island Sanctuary includes a new housing implementation then that'll be super cool. But my fear and suspicion is that this is going to be a FFXIV implementation of FFXI's Mog Garden. But I am hoping it's more Stardew Valley like too and with a customisable house to go with it.

With regards to a 1 house per account implementation. I am curious how this should work as far as FC leaders are concerned, I would say 1 personal house and 1 FC house per person, it does mean people could still abuse the system and get 2 houses, but it's better than being able to have many. This would affect me because I am an FC leader and we have an FC house, and it's for the FC, heck I barely even touch the design myself and it fits around the theme of our FC and many chipped in a lot of work and gil into the house, so it'd be really s**** of me to claim it as my own. But I also have a personal house, which I use for something different. Both get a lot of use and I am not trying to abuse the housing system.

[LineageRazor]

The problem is, and always has been, that the housing system we have was not originally designed for player housing. It was originally intended for FC housing only, and player housing was going to be separate (and much more affordable). Both player and FC housing were going to be non-instanced. This, however turned out to be more than the devs could handle at the time, particularly since FFXIV became WILDLY more popular than really anyone anticipated. As a hasty kludge, they modified the FC housing areas to be available to players, as well, and that's the system we've had since.

The idea of non-instanced housing is neat, in concept, and if they'd actually been able to pull it off, it would have been totally awesome. I'd love to see a single, city-sized area with every house being a real, living house owned by an actual human being. What we have now, though, IS instanced housing, with thirty houses per instance. So they pretty much failed the concept right out of the gate.

When they added apartments, they should have given them outdoor patios, even if they were smaller than the outdoor portions of even small houses. Make them large enough to have a small garden and room for a few outdoor furnishings, and that would solve most people's complaints.

[Mykll]

When they added apartments, they should have given them outdoor patios, even if they were smaller than the outdoor portions of even small houses. Make them large enough to have a small garden and room for a few outdoor furnishings, and that would solve most people's complaints.

That is what I am mainly missing with the apartment. I can't do jack with any outdoor furnishings.

[RyoXander]

In my opinion this is the real problem with the way housing content is designed. The devs forsaw a community building experience with neighbours and even wards, so they built the system the way it is built. But because there's so little to actually do in the wards, the whole concept fell flat on its face, just like the real world.

While there are FCs and even LS (or Fellowships nowadays) milling around in the wards, they're the extreme minority.

There's just too little reason for the rest of the playerbase to ever visit the wards. Maybe seasonal events could be held in the wards instead?

A probable solution would be to get rid of personal housing in the wards all together and just make them housing for FCs. That would surely increase the population of the wards as there would be significantly fewer wards. They can then just make personal housing instanced. Also, add high traffic NPCs to wards.

[Kaurhz]

I don't take issue with the number of houses, but rather the extraordinarily poor implementation changes they've made. The adjustments they've made have just made the system worse. If you aren't going to make housing immediately available, then put a visible timer on it. Don't make it a random invisible timer that nobody can see because the latter is worse than the former.

Not to mention with their clear lack of backbone, they've still had the issue right from the start and that is a lot of people have more than 1 house, with some having entire wards to themselves which shouldn't even be permitted and should be addressed.

[Vespar]

Technically the apartments are instanced, but that just proves the point that instanced housing could be done without too much load on the servers.

[Ardeth]

The fact that the number of houses is finite means it will never be fixed with the current system. Apartments is the better solution. Though knowing SE some hither to unknown amount of those might screw that system up if we all only had one choice.

I honestly think the open world multiple separate houses in a zone for players to see them all is just not a feasable system unless you incorporate phasing like Blizzard uses in World of Warcraft and even then how many people get to occupy that phase? In Wow it's party members and would an empty housing district be as appealing as what we have now? I don't know, but the current system is awful.

[Avatre]

Not to split hairs but it already is. You're limited to one personal/private house per account, as far as I'm aware of there aren't work arounds to this. FCs are a different story but still also have their limitations depending on certain circumstances.

IIRC, if you owned multiple houses before they made it 1 per character(2 if one of them was a FC house), you were grandfathered in and able to keep all your houses for as long as you made sure to enter them during the appropriate time for the demolition timer reset.

[Jojoya]

Technically the apartments are instanced, but that just proves the point that instanced housing could be done without too much load on the servers.

So are house interiors. Those are all instanced as well. It's just the outdoor portion in the wards that isn't instanced.

[Rongway]

Not to split hairs but it already is. You're limited to one personal/private house per account, as far as I'm aware of there aren't work arounds to this. FCs are a different story but still also have their limitations depending on certain circumstances.

There are still methods by which one person who has sufficient desire to abuse the system can acquire multiple houses on one service account even with the restrictions currently in place.

Technically the apartments are instanced, but that just proves the point that instanced housing could be done without too much load on the servers.

It proves nothing. "Instanced" is not the same as "capable of handling an arbitrarily high server load". There is still a defined limit on apartment and housing interior instances that cannot exceed the number of houses and apartments in all zones. You cannot make a judgement about the stability or resource intensiveness of hypothetical unlimited instanced housing based on this.