Fix Housing Megathread

[Jojoya]

Could flip the housing system from the way it originally started. Originally it was intended to be Free Company only. Change it so it's personal only.

Create a new system to serve FCs as meeting halls for their members. Keep it to the theme of what a Free Company is - a group of adventurers contracting their services to the Grand Companies. Workshops could be attached. Customization with housing furnishings could be allowed. They might lose gardening (though Island Sanctuaries suggest that they've solved the gardening in an instance problem) but if most FCs use the garden mainly to grow Thavnairian Onions for their members, those could be placed on a vendor in Thavnair (would make sense) at the approximate price that has been seen across the MBs in recent months (somewhere between 100-150k).

There's still one outstanding problem with personal ownership restrictions and that is that ownership is per world, not per service account. There are far more active players world wide than there are houses world wide. Each player with houses on multiple worlds is taking away houses from players who don't have one. I have characters on 8 different worlds. If I were to buy a house on each of those worlds, that's 7 other players that would never be able to buy a house. Quite frankly, that sucks.

No one needs a house for each of their characters even if they want it (sorry, someone's RP head canon is not a reason to deprive other players of game content). A player can pick which character gets a house and the remaining characters can get an apartment. No, I would not expect SE to take away houses from players who have already legitimately obtained them under the rules currently in effect if they were to make this change. It would only apply to future purchases.

Above all, SE needs to get its act together and make certain that every player that wants a house can get one. It is shameful that they continue to cling to a system that does not serve their players adequately when they do so well in other regards. Housing drama like this does not exist in other games. Why does SE want it to exist here?

[Almagnus1]

There's still one outstanding problem with personal ownership restrictions and that is that ownership is per world, not per service account. There are far more active players world wide than there are houses world wide. Each player with houses on multiple worlds is taking away houses from players who don't have one. I have characters on 8 different worlds. If I were to buy a house on each of those worlds, that's 7 other players that would never be able to buy a house. Quite frankly, that sucks.

Until we've got the tech in place where I can teleport from one server to another near instantly... I don't see how this restriction could be changed reasonably. And even then, one personal house per datacenter would work assuming the teleport was reasonably fast.

But one per service account? We've got to be able to quickly hop from one datacenter to another for that to work, and we can't even see outside of our home datacenter at the moment...

No, I would not expect SE to take away houses from players who have already legitimately obtained them under the rules currently in effect if they were to make this change.

The only way this would work (and IMO SE should do it) is only after they have given players several months time to divest and there have been enough other things added where there is no functional loss for the players that have more than one house. Some players need motivation, and sometimes you need to have the choice between the carrot and the stick in order to get the desired result.