Open plea to the Devs

[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.

[Aeristace]

5/6
Here is my very last point I want to set out, and I am not certain it has been touched on before. I could be wrong, because the forums and reddit, and everywhere really are loaded to overflowing with displeasure about housing and I can't read them all.

The Current Housing System Actively, Unquestionably, Discriminates Against People with Disabilities - If you read nothing else of this post, please consider this point.

From the discussions people have in the crowds about the housing system whenever I'm at a plot, I don't think anyone ever really considers this. There is a lot of "This system is better than a lottery", "This system is better than the old", and I can see how that view works for the average person. In general, most people can sit and click repeatedly. They shouldn't, because carpal tunnel and other health risks, but they can and will in order to keep their odds as high as they can towards their finger smashing down at just the right time.

On this front, I am at a severe disadvantage. I suffer from nerve damage and the relevant impact here is I do not have full use of my hands and fingers all the time. I can normally play all aspects of the game just fine and to be honest, it helps me feel a bit better and like I don't have this problem because it doesn't hinder me. Then we get here, where the only way to perceivably improve your odds is to speed spam and button mash, or go against ToS and use a bot which risks being banned. Sometimes I can't move my fingers, so i resort to tapping my whole hand on the number pad and trying to get it precise (you can imagine how that goes). Sometimes I can't move fast and one placard cycle takes a good while. This deeply plays into the demoralizing effect for me personally, given that I don't really see how I could ever obtain a plot with this system. The longer I try to click, the harder it gets which also reduces my chances given I cannot stay present for as long of a window as others.

[Aeristace]

6/6
So why complain, what can even be done before Endwalker?

A handful of key presses is all it would take for Square to lower how malicious this is. A 24 hour random timer is senseless. Square is the company that made ff11, many of the development team were members of the ff11 team. Back in ff11 monster spawns were camped for days on end, then taking their items to spawn bosses that could take, notoriously such as Absolute Virtue, over 30 hours of constant attack to defeat. The excuse that they didn't think the player base would camp a 24 hour timer for a house is extremely easy to dismiss. This is literally their fanbase and players, they have literally designed encounters like this previously and had people endure it.

I don't believe it was the intention to inflict direct suffering on players who wanted housing, but it was the result. I do believe they completely understood people would camp these timers, but that this would somehow be more fair and less prone to botting; though we all know it did the opposite. On my home server it's a guarantee that at least 5-10 bots are hanging out during prime time at plots. They're often the ones winning them.

I don't believe I'm asking for a fix when I ask for this, I'm simply asking to reduce the suffering inflicted. They need to lower the timer to not exceed 6 hours, ever. It won't solve botting, it won't increase it either. But it will let the rest of us move on with our days and reduce our burnout rate. If you want to have a timer, that's cool, but you don't have to be inhuman about it.

When you have a discord server of hundreds of people just dedicated to helping others get housing and keep their morale up (Shoutout to the wonderful human beings at Sadu Dothpawrl's Housing) doing far more to prevent burnout than the dev community managers, I think that says something about a company. I don't have a lot of qualms with this game, I love it. But this one is just so glaring and large that I do just often find myself in that mindset: Will this thing freaking sell, I want nothing more than to log out and play something else.

If you cared to read all this, thanks. I wanted to try to be as objective as I could and provide substance to my complaint while supporting the OP's original statement. Be nice to each other and remember that other players are not what makes the housing system bad, it's the people in control of it.

[Almagnus1]

I don't believe I'm asking for a fix when I ask for this, I'm simply asking to reduce the suffering inflicted. They need to lower the timer to not exceed 6 hours, ever. It won't solve botting, it won't increase it either. But it will let the rest of us move on with our days and reduce our burnout rate. If you want to have a timer, that's cool, but you don't have to be inhuman about it.

The problem we had before is that there would basically be no free houses because someone would snap up the houses and you had to go through a third party site (at the time, it was a FFXIV housing reddit), make a deal, and hope they honored it to get your house, often charging well about 2-3x (often 10x) the SE price for the plot. Tbh, if SE had wanted us to resale property and treat it like an asset, they would have given us an interface within the game to do it.

For better or for worse, the timer is their attempt at stopping this behavior - when the reality is the entire system needs an overhaul.