So, a lottery system and a divide between FC and solo wards, eh?

[Almagnus1]

So before getting into this, for the scope of this post I consider a legitimate FC to be one with more than 4 members, while a shell FC is one that has between 1-3 members. Also, due to the restrictions outlined at https://support.na.square-enix.com/r...&tag=freetrial free trial accounts are completely irrelevant to anything housing as they do not have enough gil to buy an apartment (let alone a house) and cannot join (much less create) an FC.

One of the things I think we should start zeroing into is the supply side of things. I think a good thing to do is start with defining exactly how much supply we need, starting with the personal houses. Going by https://ffxivcensus.com/ there are roughly 650k active players (although that number is definitely in dispute and doesn't take into consideration the influx of Asmonsprouts). So pulling in the data from https://www.xivhousing.com/ (which has greatly improved since the last time I have seen it), there are roughly 267k personal and vacant houses across all of FFXIV, so we're looking at roughly 40% saturation for the houses going by this number.

If no additional wards are going to be added, Ishgard will add about another 98k houses across all servers (68 unless I failed at counting >.>). That's going to help the personal house side of things greatly if at least half of those are in personal house only wards. SE should probably also add 6 more wards to bring it up to an even 30, and then continue to add in neighborhoods as time progresses at 30 wards until housing stops being a problem.... like having us help rebuild Ala Mhigo and giving us Ala Mhigan housing... and possibly Sharlyan housing down the line.

So looking at the FC houses, there are roughly 120k FC houses worldwide, and using https://www.xivhousing.com/2021-cens...enters-regions to slice the data, roughly 23k of those are shell FC houses, that's about 20% of all FC houses worldwide are shell FC houses. Like I have been saying for a long time, the shell FCs need to be dealt with because they are exacerbating the housing problem, with the Chocobo server being the mascot for this problem having 2613 FC houses with 891 of those houses belonging to a shell FC, the single highest of all of the servers both in terms of legitimate and shell FC housing.

Yes we need more supply, but the shell FC issue CANNOT continued to be ignored because it's making this entire housing thing harder than it needs to be.