Open plea to the Devs

[anguel]

The weird thing is, as someone who has been lucky enough to have a house, I rarely ever see anyone in my neighborhood. I don't think I am alone there. I think the idea of a neighborhood was a fun idea of YoshiP but it didn't really happen. Anyone else's experience different?

nop never seen anybody arround me (i mean owner or visitor) i have my house for nearly 2 years now in spriggan, i live to a guy having a large house right next to me, and he came a bit after me, despite that no never saw him or anybody arround it kinda feels dead tbh


the problem with housing for me is not lottery or whatever, is the fact the moment you buy it, its free forever (i mean by that no rent whatsover), implementing a "renting" system (pay to the game) idk 1M every month, would make the housing market MUCH MUUCH more fluid

saying this from experience because (oh i can see ppl are goign to be mad at me xD) 8 month ago i took a 5 month break, but left sub going, basicly every month i just had to log in rq 5 min interact with something in my house and done, and managed to keep the house doing absolutly nothing for that 5 month period, that is why i feel like implementing a renting system would help things

or could add as a "rent" like having at least 1~2 commendation a week (even on a dps if your friendly and not being an ass its easy to get !), just to confirm that yes you are active !

[Jojoya]

I'm not sure why you're so against removing gardening from housing unless you make most of your gil from selling gardening items. .

I'm not against removing gardening from housing. I'm not certain why you're getting that impression.

What I said was access to gardening is not mandatory for crafting.

I've also pointed out in other places that based on what information has been shared so far about Island Sanctuary, the farming there will not be the same as the gardening in the housing districts so players shouldn't get their hopes up that they'll be able to grow the same items.

If SE wants to add the current gardening to instanced locations so all players can have access, great. We've had no indication they're interested in doing that.

As for the lottery, a lot of us are tired of band-aids. We want to see working solutions.

NO! Not instanced housing! More housing-instances! I dont want to be alone at my house. ESO`s housingsystem sucks.
Why cant the Devs simply make more Instances, now that they see how many new players are there.

More wards will not put more players into your ward where you can see them. If anything, it spreads them out thinner as there's a greater chance they'll pick someone else's ward instead of yours.

There was no consideration for what makes real life neighborhoods feel active and populated when the wards were designed. It's not the presence of houses that does it. It's the need to be doing things in the neighborhoods that creates foot and vehicle traffic so can see others passing through.

Ward design does not generate foot traffic. Owners, tenants and friends get to teleport directly to the owner's house. Need to be in another part of the ward? Players tend to use the Aethernet shards to teleport around instead of walking through the ward. Need to use a Marketboard? There are 7 scattered around every every ward/subdivisions so you usually don't have to walk more than one house over to reach the one nearest your house. The only houses generating foot traffic are the RP venues and they're generally just open a few hours a week.

Unless players are given more reason to be in the wards (not inside their houses where they can't be seen) and the number of wards reduced (not increased) so more players are forced into each ward, they're never going feel populated. We'd be better off with instanced housing so at least every player who wants a house could get one.

[anguel]

the thing with gardening, is that ppl put it on a pedestal, like "oh wow we going to make so much money with gardening omg i need it so bad !!!"
ima use it for everything cooking crafting, my whole life, then realize that most if not ALL stuff you can grow, you can farm with a botanist, yes you can have some minions, and chocobo food yes i agree,
but when you realize that, 1 crossbreeding is super annoying, and 2, gardening doesnt make that much money at all ! (yes a bit, but just a little bit)
really really overrated in my opinion

[Sotaris]

the thing with gardening, is that ppl put it on a pedestal, like "oh wow we going to make so much money with gardening omg i need it so bad !!!"
ima use it for everything cooking crafting, my whole life, then realize that most if not ALL stuff you can grow, you can farm with a botanist, yes you can have some minions, and chocobo food yes i agree,
but when you realize that, 1 crossbreeding is super annoying, and 2, gardening doesnt make that much money at all ! (yes a bit, but just a little bit)
really really overrated in my opinion

Then you should just stick with a apartment since it would seem you don't understand gardening.
No one said you make a ton of gil in it. If you go in with that mindset you going to get burnt.
Gardening is good for rare materials (that is only from gardening) and a passive moneymaker.
You shouldn't bank on gardening.

no im fine with my house thank you very much !
but maybe instead of trying to make fun of me

Don't think there is a need for that passive agressive tone. I wasn't making fun of anyone.

..that ppl put it on a pedestal, like "oh wow we going to make so much money with gardening omg i need it so bad !!!"

Rather you're making fun of the type of person who goes into wanting a house due to gardening. Please don't gaslight me.

----------------

Getting a house is generally for the ability to do gardening for many people.

Those who don't care for gardening or outside decoration tends to be content with just apartments.
It seems to be more of a status symbol "I have a house, ha!". I'll take myself as an example, I like gardening and decoration so that's a reason for me owning a personal large house to maximize on my gardening game. If gardening was less of a interest I'd probably just stick to a small or medium.

nearly everyone that i talked to in-game, or in ff14 discord all want to do thavnair onion for money making, so yeaaahh, im not tossing these words arround without any actual exp in the topics

That's great. I've been doing gardening since 2014 so I have a good experience in it too.
I didn't say you can't make gil on gardening, what I said was you shouldn't bank solely on gardening since making thav onions takes weeks of prep work and cross-breeding for seeds and playing rng game.

There is better ways to spend your time to make gil - if that's your goal. However making thav onions for example since that's the example you brought up, it's a good passive source of income.

please feel free to enlighten me ! what are these rare item that only gardening can provide, im curious !

Alright. On top of my head here is a couple examples that only comes from gardening that you can't (to my knowledge) get through other means. Feel free to correct me.

Jute, Cloudsbreath and a various different seeds that you'd need for cross-breeding but those two are probably the biggest ones that's actually needed in crafting but only comes from gardening (and is required to cross-breed).

[anguel]

Then you should just stick with a apartment since it would seem you don't understand gardening.

no im fine with my house thank you very much !
but maybe instead of trying to make fun of me, you could have a more appropriate reaction and actually explain reason you believe i missunderstand gardening,
but thats for a topics somewhere else in this forum, that i would gladly join you on the topic if you do make one !

No one said you make a ton of gil in it.

nearly everyone that i talked to in-game, or in ff14 discord all want to do thavnair onion for money making, so yeaaahh, im not tossing these words arround without any actual exp in the topics

Gardening is good for rare materials (that is only from gardening)

please feel free to enlighten me ! what are these rare item that only gardening can provide, im curious !

a passive moneymaker.
You shouldn't bank on gardening.

lol ..., anyway i never said i was banking on gardening ... i said that it was the argument i was hearing a lot of time from ppl requesting gardening for appartement
if you want to know, im making my own chocobo food with my garden yup yup, same reason i made a cook, so i could make my own food, anyway

[Almagnus1]

I've also pointed out in other places that based on what information has been shared so far about Island Sanctuary, the farming there will not be the same as the gardening in the housing districts so players shouldn't get their hopes up that they'll be able to grow the same items.

AFAIK the only thing with Island Sanctuaries we've had are the stuff from the digital FanFest and Live Letter 65.... is there another source that I missed?

[Aeristace]

1/6
Good morning, I've never posted on any forum before ever so please bear with me. This will get long.

It seems like these kinds of posts get derailed very quickly and veer off into all these different directions, but mostly boil down to a few things: An argument about whether players are entitled to housing, an argument about house hoarding, an argument about self-control and how devs didn't account for you to do _____ /ad hominem (insulting people), and a sort of rhetorical "who cares" thing. Mostly though, a lot of yelling at each other about whose idea is right.

It's very easy to criticize people you don't agree with and I definitely understand how given the past two years or so of just the general world, we all need to vent off steam that otherwise just isn't getting purged. Everything that's been said so far, for the most part, does really honestly have a point behind it from what I've seen. Even when people say that new players or people without housing aren't entitled to it, that is coming from somewhere I promise you. In general, and I cannot speak for everyone who has said such, when someone is saying you aren't entitled to it it's because they definitely were not. They're someone who had to keep a sharp eye on maintenance downtimes, wait up until 3am when the servers would come up earlier than scheduled after, and do a dead sprint race hoping they made it to the house first. It was never fair and those people were victim to it then. I'm not saying I agree with the mentality that my suffering merits others should have similar suffering, but I can find common ground with that thought process.

I think the point Athame was trying to make when she started this was to focus on the demoralizing effect the system has. It used to be that the time invested was much more minimal and the event itself didn't drag on, it was like a Band-Aid being ripped off. What stood between me, you and a plot was the speed of our loading time, our sprint cooldown, and the pixels of the path we took racing to the target after servers came up after maintenance. It sucked terribly when a new ward opened and you didn't make it to even 1 placard to buy first, but it was over in minutes. You could go about your day. This system we're in now works differently on the brain however, and is hard to see as anything but intentionally malicious, even though I'm sure no one at SE was just like "Let's wreck these people."

[Aeristace]

2/6
How is it Demoralizing?

I'm going to start this by saying that the argument about people shouldn't camp plots for extended hours is unfortunately invalid. We're going to, it's just reality. We'll get that later.

Paying a subscription to not play a game

We're all people who have paid for the game and continue to support it through a subscription. Housing aside for a moment, when you are playing an MMO that you pay a sub fee for and you find yourself not actually playing it then most of us will just eventually cancel the subscription. It's nothing out of anger, you just eventually feel silly for paying for something you aren't using. The logical thing behind it is that you pay for something, you should probably use it otherwise it's a waste of your resources. Before this gets pumped full of "oh so you'll cancel sub if you don't get a house?" - we're not going there, I'm just making a point to help with understanding the demoralizing effect the housing can have and this is necessary to understand for my overall point.

The Psychology of the Near Miss

With the random timer, the above is a feeling that sneaks up on you. Housing stopped being the equivalent of a band-aid being ripped off where you would go about your business and hope for next time, and became a sort of endemic infection. Unintentionally, Square is using the psychology of the near miss, which is a phenomenon in gambling that keeps people continuing to gamble in hope that despite all these losses, "they were just so close! Surely, this next one will be the winner!" This has been studied for decades, but first in 1986 by professor Reid at the university of Exeter. In the study it states that the manipulation of gambling machines to have near misses would have almost the same impact on the desire to continue gambling as winning, keeping the person going.

How does that apply here? Well, how do you feel when you have been spam clicking the placard and it suddenly sells to someone? Most likely, you think to yourself "If only i had clicked faster. I could have gotten it." You just barely missed it, so next time you're going to try harder. You're going to click faster, you're going to try to exert some sort of control in a situation you can't control, but feel like you could if you just improve your odds. It's almost like an addiction, but one grounded in and dependent on hope. The frustration builds each time, but we continue to engage hoping this time will be the win because last time we were just SO CLOSE.

Relocation Whiplash

Not much to summarize. You camped a plot for hours, it's in its most expected sell window, your hands and fingers are dying. Someone strolls up and transfers their house there. Good game. See you all tomorrow at that persons old plot. At any minute, you can just blanket lose to someone who already has what you're trying desperately to obtain because they weren't happy with what they already had.

[Aeristace]

3/6
The Stealth Drain

This is where the two above points combine. After weeks of trying to improve the odds and putting in daily effort, your attempts continue to go unrewarded. You're either losing to present people and congratulating them or you're losing to bots and feeling frustration grow even harder. Maybe you got up to go to the restroom or eat, dashing back to your console or PC to see everyone teleporting away and the plot is sold even though you've been there diligently for hours on end. Maybe this is the third or fourth plot that you experienced this with today. Maybe, like a terrible job, you are burning out and not realizing it. Your thoughts start to wander when you have to sit there just ceaselessly clicking for hours, worried that missing a single speedy click is the difference between win and the near miss, and it wanders to everything else you could be doing. Everything else you'd like to do. And really, it starts to be "Anything but this game". Being logged in has really become nothing more than being annoyed and losing to an arbitrary timer. A timer that now dictates your gameplay, because every single second is a possible win that you could miss if you aren't constantly active. All you want in the whole world is for the plot to sell, to anyone, just so you can log out and play a different game. Eventually this feels so defeating, so embarrassing how your paid time has been spent that you just can't enjoy the game anymore. You haven't been playing a game, you've been clicking. It sucks.


Why do people keep complaining when they're changing housing next expac?

I guess to put it bluntly, because they may not survive the burnout until the next expac. If you haven't actually endured this system, you don't really have a right to speak on it or tell people to suck it up; I'm sorry, but you don't. Unintentionally, Square created the most player abusing, malicious game component I have ever witnessed and from a psychological academic lens it's considerably alarming that any company would allow such direct harm on customer morale to be dished out so regularly. Until housing is part of the online store, it is not optional content, it's a component of the core game that now requires actual human suffering to acquire. It is very far beyond strange.

[Aeristace]

4/6
Housing is not Optional/Extra Content, it was designed content for Free Companies

I believe this is debated heavily, but subjectively and factually Optional Content is a tab in the cash store. As some have made as a point before me: I can invest my time in mount farming and savage raiding prep, and then achieve getting the mount or raiding a savage raid. I can do so without 24/7 investment, i can do so with as little as a day or two a week where i log on for a few hours. There is no "I might", there is no "raid every day for a year and you may get 1 piece of gear".

Housing provides Free Companies with a workshop, which is content. The workshop allows for the retrieval of exclusive items only obtainable through voyages that are required for crafting as well as mounts and other unlocks. It helps strengthen a community to have goals and all of the company clothing/items are locked behind this wall. Can you purchase these items off the AH? You absolutely can, but you will be paying about the price of a small house if you want to make 1-2 company hats or tabards just for the exclusive supplies.

If voyages did not have completely exclusive item sets and you could farm these things outside of owning an FC workshop, then I would say housing is cosmetic and optional. Unless it stops serving a function for free companies and generating a massively advantageous income, it is not optional content; it is part of the core game design and integral for the existence of a large number of items.

Additionally, numerous main scenario quests reward housing items. If this were optional content, that would be a very strange way to reward people for one. Second, given the state of things its almost insulting and adds to the demoralization. "Oh neat, a unique furnishing! Guess this will clog my inventory or get deleted."

It's not a question of whether or not this is optional content, it's a question of content being gated away behind literal human suffering and why it was ever acceptable to treat it this way as a company. I think this is often taken by people who say it is optional as an attack on them, but please realize it is not an attack on you. You suffered to obtain your house or houses, I'm glad that suffering ended and I hope it was brief. The point is, you shouldn't have had to suffer in the first place when it is presented as a main feature of the core game and actively advertised as such.