Fix Housing Megathread

[Almagnus1]

Anyway back to the topic at hand....

So on top of those rules added in 2018, what changes do you think should be made to the system? Since that's sort of the purpose of this thread.

This is going to be a rehash of many things I have suggested before soo...

Personal House Changes:

• Make gardening available without the need for housing - hopefully this is happening with Endwalkers
• Give each character on a server on the same service account a teleport location to each personal house owned by any of those characters. So if you have one personal house on a server, all four characters on that server get a teleport location to that house. A grandfathered in account with four houses would have all four teleport locations to each house on each character.
• Give personal houses storage so players can easily transfer items, crystals, and gil between chars on the same server

FC Changes:

• Make a workshop accessible to anyone not in an FC so solo players can build an airship (or sub) and can run airship (or sub) expeditions without needing to be in an FC
• Have FCs do an active service account check and if they are less than four service accounts with active subscriptions the FC will lose the house after a grace period that allows the FC to bring the active subs above 4
• Allow the FC leader the option to transfer the FC house to their personal house through a Mogg Station purchase

Additional changes:

• Allow for a housing buyback at full sticker price for someone that wants to sell it back to the housing market
• Stop the loss of items at the Residential Caretaker, and have them all the non-bound stuff from the house there, even if it means disassembling aircraft and subs
• Allow players to mail things between characters on the same server

The main point with this is to remove the incentives for owning multiple houses. I get that it removes some of the uniqueness from housing, but it also opens up mechanics to more of the player-base (as the assumption is that the FC workshop and FC gardening are locked off to most players due to FC permissions).

And being realistic, until most of the above has been implemented, the grandfathered in personal houses should be left alone as you want to allow players to naturally divest the houses rather than forcing the issue.

That said, shell FCs need to die in a fire.

[Catstab]

Have FCs do an active service account check and if they are less than four service accounts with active subscriptions the FC will lose the house after a grace period that allows the FC to bring the active subs above 4.

Everything you suggested is decent except this. Thinking about this one for about 4 seconds will tell you that it is not a material change from what currently exists.

Current: FC house goes boom if untouched 45 days
Suggested: FC house goes boom if members list is not maintenanced for 45 days

"They're the same picture"

Literally asking SE to do a bunch of work to zero end on that one.

[Almagnus1]

Everything you suggested is decent except this. Thinking about this one for about 4 seconds will tell you that it is not a material change from what currently exists.

Current: FC house goes boom if untouched 45 days
Suggested: FC house goes boom if members list is not maintenanced for 45 days

"They're the same picture"

Literally asking SE to do a bunch of work to zero end on that one.

That is suggested specifically to address the shell FCs, since you are correct that it's completely invisible to a healthy FC. However, that's the entire point as it's a deterrent to make it harder for the shell FCs to tie up housing while not affecting the legitimate FCs.

That said, if someone is willing to fork over the money to maintain the account subscriptions needed to pass the FC check, they can keep the house as I'm not distinguishing who is controlling the subs, only stating that they should exist and it should be applied to all FC housing equally. And really, if someone has the disposable income to fund it, who am I to tell them how they should spend their money since it's more money going to FFXIV and we all benefit from that.

Running the math on this, if you have four service accounts, with 8 characters each, they would only be able to tie up 12 houses between the accounts assuming you had 32 characters rolled and ready to go. That's 8 FC houses (as IMO the FC housing restriction that SE has isn't good and it should go), plus the four personal houses from the service account as each FC would need to have a character from each service account to stay compliant, so in essence, each account could only tie up 3 houses. To own a ward, you'd need 12 service accounts (which would be a theoretical maximum of 36 houses which IIRC is slightly larger than the size of a ward allowing for some flex in the houses), and if someone is willing to pay 12*$15 USD = $180/month to keep the ward (or more realistically $150 USD * 12 = $1800/year as 2 six month subs are about $75 USD) then more power to them as they are helping fund FFXIV. However, when you start getting into that much of an annual expense, the financial cost starts to become it's own deterrent and most people would seek to divest the houses at that point... which is why everything listed needs to be present for it to work together correctly.

[Catstab]

Running the math on this, if you have four service accounts, with 8 characters each, they would only be able to tie up 12 houses between the accounts assuming you had 32 characters rolled and ready to go.

My math says 29 FC houses for 4 accounts. 4 accounts x 8 characters = 32, minus 3 to float from one FC to the next. You join the 3 floaters into a different FC for each day of the month, keeps the grace period rolling. This only has to be done from day 1-29, from day 30-45 you can just focus subs.

And you could always run all 32, provided you have a friend willing to run 3 alts for you.

Unless the system is sophisticated enough to avoid being exploited in this manner, it wouldnt be effective.

[Almagnus1]

My math says 29 FC houses for 4 accounts. 4 accounts x 8 characters = 32, minus 3 to float from one FC to the next. You join the 3 floaters into a different FC for each day of the month, keeps the grace period rolling. This only has to be done from day 1-29, from day 30-45 you can just focus subs.

And you could always run all 32, provided you have a friend willing to run 3 alts for you.

Unless the system is sophisticated enough to avoid being exploited in this manner, it wouldnt be effective.

It'd be a pointless system with a timer reset when they hit four subs as the system can be gamed as you're describing.

The system would need to have something like a time debt that was accrued if you were below 4 subs in the FC, and the time debt was paid off at the same rate regardless how high you were above four subs, and if the debt ever hit a specific threshold (like say, 45 days) the house was released immediately when the threshold was met. TBH, it'd make sense if the debt threshold was lower than 45 days, as a lower threshold would force players to be a bit more proactive with the FC management.

I wouldn't be opposed to just outright disbanding the FC if it was below 4 members... but there needs to be more of the above laundry list of features in play before that makes sense as a game mechanic.