Shell FCs are a bigger problem than we think...

[MilkieTea]

So... reserving a lion's share of the new wards for personal houses negatively affects first time buyers how?

Because not all first time buyers are buyers of personal estates, and FCs benefit more from a house than personal owners.

[Almagnus1]

Because not all first time buyers are buyers of personal estates, and FCs benefit more from a house than personal owners.

And yet, there are far more players and due to how most FCs lock down FC housing, more players will get more out of housing with a personal house than they ever will with an FC house.

[Jojoya]

And yet, there are far more players and due to how most FCs lock down FC housing, more players will get more out of housing with a personal house than they ever will with an FC house.

FC housing still impacts more players assuming the FC uses grade 3 actions. You can't buy those from the affiliated GC. They can only be obtained by crafting the grade 3 wheels in the workshop then priming them on the wheel stands that can only be placed in FC houses. Once active, actions don't discriminate based on rank. Everyone in the FC gets that benefit.

Designating more wards as personal still doesn't give more players access to housing. A FC house is still serving at least one player same as a personal house.

From there it goes to the generosity of the house owner, whether FC leader or individual. The FC leader could potentially give up to 511 other players full access to the house, even if we know that's not how it works out in practice. The individual player could only give access to up to 3 other players. Should we also be getting on the case of individual owners who aren't adding 3 tenants and giving them full permissions?

All of this discussion keeps dancing around the real problem. There are not enough plots for every player who wants a house. Weighing ward designations toward personal does not help more players. It only cuts down on the number of players who can own multiple houses via FCs per world and SE could address that problem in other ways (namely, enforcing the one FC house limit).

[Almagnus1]

FC housing still impacts more players assuming the FC uses grade 3 actions. You can't buy those from the affiliated GC. They can only be obtained by crafting the grade 3 wheels in the workshop then priming them on the wheel stands that can only be placed in FC houses. Once active, actions don't discriminate based on rank. Everyone in the FC gets that benefit.

But how significant are the grade 3 buffs instead of the grade 2 ones? While it's been a while since I looked at the actual stat value, from what I recall most the buffs aren't THAT much improved over the GC ones.

Designating more wards as personal still doesn't give more players access to housing. A FC house is still serving at least one player same as a personal house.

From there it goes to the generosity of the house owner, whether FC leader or individual. The FC leader could potentially give up to 511 other players full access to the house, even if we know that's not how it works out in practice. The individual player could only give access to up to 3 other players. Should we also be getting on the case of individual owners who aren't adding 3 tenants and giving them full permissions?

No, for a personal house, the expectation is that it's 1 person : 1 house, not 4:1 house. At that point the personal house has basically become an FC house for all intents and purposes without a couple of the perks. I look at the tenant system for the personal house as a nice bonus feature, but not anything that should be calculated in with the math. The cleanest way out of this mess is by introducing a significant number of personal houses until that demand is sated, while also giving the FCs enough wards so things don't degrade further. Given the huge growth the NA playerbase has seen, there definitely needs to be more datacenters in the Americas because otherwise the North American housing issues are going to degrade even further.

All of this discussion keeps dancing around the real problem. There are not enough plots for every player who wants a house. Weighing ward designations toward personal does not help more players. It only cuts down on the number of players who can own multiple houses via FCs per world and SE could address that problem in other ways (namely, enforcing the one FC house limit).

Ward allocation (like what SE has stated in the above live letter quote) is something that I see largely as a mitigation for the shell FC problem. Getting more houses into the hands of players does, actually, increase player involvement with the system as more players are going to have meaningful access to the decorating rights than if the entire allocation was given over to the FCs - at least going by the population numbers for https://ffxivcensus.com/ with somewhere between 647,345 to 4,885,698 active characters (their active numbers are likely a gross underestimate), compared to the FC numbers from https://www.xivhousing.com/ which indicates a total of 330,325 FCs worldwide. While the houses are roughly a 2:1 persona/FC split (with 265,668 personal houses to 126,012 FC houses), the house ratio for FCs owned:total is a lot higher than the player owned:total ratio, which is why I'm leaning heavily towards more personal housing as that seems to have the stronger demand between the two.

The big problem I see with all of this is that the number of houses needed to fix this problem is going to mandate (at minimum) another datacenter or two, and then 2-3 more housing neighborhoods. Even then, we still may not have enough houses and we're still going to have the shell FC problem unless SE implements something to solve that problem.

The other problem with the shell FCs... what do you do with them as a fitting (but not excessive) punishment?
Should the shell FC be stripped of their house and have the FC remain?
Should the shell FC be deleted?
What does the mechanism to fix a false flagging look like?
How do you detect a shell FC without (for example) falsely flagging the couple's FC?

There's a lot of questions raised, and not a lot of answers right now, and while the vindicative side on me wants to burn them all to the ground (as I suspect that many members of the Hate Club are shell FC owners), that is not a good policy decision and not something that should be acted upon until an approach of greater finesse can be conceived... which also explains why SE has been so reticent to do anything about the housing issues because of all the possible collateral damage a mistake can create.

[Nepentha]

Because not all first time buyers are buyers of personal estates, and FCs benefit more from a house than personal owners.

I see the goalposts have shifted again. Rather than admit their ideas just won't work, they just shift to another idea.

[Almagnus1]

I see the goalposts have shifted again. Rather than admit their ideas just won't work, they just shift to another idea.

And what ideas have you contributed?

[Nepentha]

And what ideas have you contributed?

Oh I've contributed ideas. You just don't pay attention unless it's your ideas.

The difference between you and I is I want to make the playing field equal. You just want to find a way to get to the small percentage of people who own multiple properties. You don't care how you get that done, so long as it gets done.

Your last terrible idea not only failed miserably in combating resellers and flippers (and multi-home owners), it actually created a small, flourishing underground of placard click bots to be developed. That is your legacy.

[Almagnus1]

Oh I've contributed ideas. You just don't pay attention unless it's your ideas.

You've only started a single thread which states a painfully obvious solution (add more wards). You haven't started any further threads, so I'm guessing these "ideas" are basically barbs at other players based on your interactions.

The difference between you and I is I want to make the playing field equal.

The difference here isn't that we want to make the playing field equal (as I have long advocated for that from a policy perspective), the difference is that I'm actually trying to do something about it.

You just want to find a way to get to the small percentage of people who own multiple properties. You don't care how you get that done, so long as it gets done.

Yeah, that's not true. Main thing with this thread is to identify what exactly a shell FC is, how we can separate out the legitimate FCs so we can identify what of the 10,042 to 27,768 properties are actually shell FCs, and which ones are legitimate micro FCs. There needs to be discussion around what metrics identify a smaller FC from a shell FC so that the greedy people that are tying up these homes and locking out a likely 10k+ people from the housing system can stop doing that.

Given that you (and the rest of the Hate Club) have see anything and everything I post as "bad" (whatever that really means), I expect you to be an obstructionist towards any real efforts that I am putting forth to try to better identify and clarify this issue in hopes that SE will take further action to make this situation better.

Your last terrible idea not only failed miserably in combating resellers and flippers (and multi-home owners), it actually created a small, flourishing underground of placard click bots to be developed.

Eh no. Sometimes it's darkest before the dawn...

A lottery system will be implemented for purchasing housing plots. Relocation rules will be adjusted, and there will be designated areas for purchasing plots via lottery, or first come, first served. These are currently in preparation for the release of the housing area in Ishgard.

Players will only be permitted to enter the lottery if they meet the requirements necessary to own housing. A number of features have been prepared to prevent RMT and troublemaking, such as depositing the gil upfront and disallowing participation on Free Trial accounts. Furthermore, there will be a gil penalty for those who do not purchase a plot after being selected in the lottery. Please note that this penalty will be quite strict.

Additionally, certain areas will be reserved for purchase as personal or free company housing. Details regarding this and other housing-related updates will be shared later.

[Nepentha]

Eh no. Sometimes it's darkest before the dawn...

Finally an admission that your grand placard clicking idea was not at all a grand idea.

[Almagnus1]

Finally an admission that your grand placard clicking idea was not at all a grand idea.

Two thoughts:
1) If you had spent your time thinking and posting ideas instead of attacking me, we'd already be in a housing golden age and many of these issues solved.

2) It's been a rough week at work, so can I have whatever you're smoking? It'd help me relax =)