Thoughts on Relocation removal

[Arazehl]

As somebody who has owned the same Medium sense mid SB in the goblet. I am really sad about this. I had to work hard sense the start of SHB to get enough to relocate. I just got enough in Oct for a Medium Relo and now its not an option anymore.

Being on my server (lamia) its a nightmare to get a house to begin with. I am torn. On one hand I see why its being taken out and I appreciate the consideration for new owners.

However as veteran who has worked hard to get the option to finally move house's only to be denied that altogether feels terrible.

And before any one says anything about not having to go through the timer to get my house. I did sit around for three of my friends houses 6-9 hours each house. To help get their's.

So I know the grind is real. These are still how I personally feel though.

Tldr: I don't think its right to remove an option from veterans house owners like this.

You can relocate if the plot is available for purchase. You can't relocate to houses that are on a timer. Yes there still is timers for houses that are relinquished due to relocation, if I'm understanding it right. Correct me if I'm wrong.
The new wards for Ishgard housing many will be available for purchase and with luck you can relocate into one of those. I never like the relocators swiping houses when they already have one, from the first time buyers.

[SweetPete]

You can relocate if the plot is available for purchase. You can't relocate to houses that are on a timer. Yes there still is timers for houses that are relinquished due to relocation, if I'm understanding it right. Correct me if I'm wrong.
The new wards for Ishgard housing many will be available for purchase and with luck you can relocate into one of those. I never like the relocators swiping houses when they already have one, from the first time buyers.

I believe the devs said they have not 100% decided if they will have first come first serve plots or all lottery plots. We have to wait and see. They said they will be looking for feedback on what people want the most.

I hope they do half of the 24 wards as first come first serve and half for lottery. Will be fair I think since allot of people have been waiting for Ishgard housing. To lock all the plots behind lottery will suck so badly.

[lezard21]

Terrible idea. Now without fear of player justice via relocation vendor, all PC gamers will be using auto clickers to purchase non lottery plots, and chance of getting lottery plots will be less than 0,0000000000000000001% with all the people that will be applying. Console gaming people can kiss getting a house goodbye.

[Jirah]

They should’ve added relocation to same districts and same sizes but restrict it if it’s in another district or a different size. Not delete it all together.

I always jumped home to home since half the time the warded are dead with 20 something inactive FC so blatantly formed. Now I’m kinda cornered as the FCs are STILL there hogging up the homes somehow and overall haven’t been addressed at all as a issue. Go ahead and count how many FCs are in your ward on peak times and then count how many have more than 2 members.

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

So I was curious to know how the Japanese community felt about this change and started a thread there to ask for their opinions, since I hadn't found one.
The difference in reaction is very interesting, and even if some players are grieving the removal of relocation privileges since they had prepared accordingly, overall they seem to care a lot more about making sure everyone gets a chance at housing, be it people who only care about getting a house, or people who don't have a house yet but want to aim for a specific one (due to size, location or area).
The conversation brought up many good points, and that changed my mind a bit.

I think what people who are against the removal of relocation privileges are actually worried about is that relocation privileges gave you a 100% chance to get the plot you wanted, and by removing it their chances are considerably diminished. Be it in this thread, on social media or on Discord, I saw a lot of people going "I'm never going to get the plot I wanted".
But likewise, due to how the lottery system works (or how it has been explained to us so far, at least) since both relocators and new buyers might apply for the same popular plot, both of their chances will be incredibly small.

I think a good compromise to both of these problems (removal of relocation privileges and really small chances of getting a plot due to number of applications) would be to introduce a "priority" system that would consider how hard people have tried to get a plot. Kind of like the notoriety system with Bozja and Zadnor duels, but not exactly the same (there's a pretty big restriction on duel registration after all, since only a maximum of 48 out of 72 can apply IF they fill the initial requirement. I don't even want to imagine how many people will apply per plot lol).
That way at least, you know that even if your luck is miserable, your chances of getting the plot you want will increase next time you apply.
It might still require a lot of patience (at least until future wards open) and a little bit of luck, but I think that would make people a little bit more optimistic about their plans.

Of course, unsurprisingly, everybody agrees that instanced housing as well as the ability to change the size of a plot would fix a lot of issues with the current housing system.
But who knows if that will ever be made possible...

Here's the link to the thread for those who are interested in reading.
(FYI, I don't read or speak Japanese, but with Google translate and another online translator communication seems to work... if you decide to participate please be mindful, everyone has been really polite so far)

[Big_Bap]

Give the Japanese players the NA treatment and see how their perspective might change...

This is your daily reminder that the Japs have had 32 servers, from the very beginning, while the NA region has 24 (only one has been added since 2013).
This is your second daily reminder that the NA population has always been significantly higher than the JP's.

Remember when nobody gave a f*** about Mateus housing until there was none left? Same shLt

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Too lazy to update this, but things have not improved within the 20 something months since I wrote that.

It’s been 3 months since the suspension of automatic housing demolition. If you are playing on the North American Data Center, chances are you are aware that all the available plots have been purchased for some time now. I sometimes post small analysis on the Housing Discord, but I figured writing a more complete text about the subject would probably be more beneficial. So let’s get started shall we.

Before going deeper into this, I must mention that some of the numbers below are not 100% accurate, but they are good enough to paint a picture of the situation. The last time Square Enix released official statistics or numbers regarding ingame content was in 2015. Keeping track of 342,720 plots across 8 Data Centers on a daily/weekly basis would require a ridiculous amount of time and becoming a full-time FFXIV housing statistician isn’t going to pay any kind of bills. So what’s the alternative? Thankfully, the Lodestone allows users to search for FCs based on housing criteria (Estate built, Plot only, No estate or plot).

That’s great and all, but what about the personal houses?

Sadly, the Lodestone doesn’t allow users to search for characters based on personal housing ownership, but it doesn’t really matter in this case since all the plots are occupied. There are 120,960 plots across the 3 North American Data Centers and as of earlier this week, 33,962 Free Companies owned a house. Below is the % of FC houses against the total amount of available plots. The 1.5% drop in November was caused by the release of the 3 additional ward tabs.

July 2019: 27,01%
August 2019: 27,20%
September 2019:27,45%
October 2019: 27,62%
November 2019: 26,10%
December 2019: 26,54%
January 2020: 26,93%
February 2020: 27,33%
March 2020: 27,65%
April 2020: 27,79%
May 2020: 27,95%
June 2020: 28,07%
Average: 27.30%

As you can see, that percentage has been consistent during the last year. As I said earlier, there’s no way to keep track of personal housing through the Lodestone. What you can do is use the monthly increase/decrease of FC houses on a given DC and combine it with the FC to personal house ratio of said DC to come up with a fairly accurate number. Obviously, if an FC relinquishes and another FC picks up their plot, that will not be reflected. Once again, these numbers aren’t meant to be 100% accurate, but they are good enough to give you an idea of what’s going on. If you have any serious doubt, let me point out that 17,280 plots were added in November and that the numbers below amount to 16,799 purchases a month before the auto demolition was announced.

https://i.imgur.com/yeJM4yt.png

These numbers are extrapolated by a combination of monthly FC houses acquisition and FC house/Personal house ratio. Now that the technical stuff is out of the way, let’s go back to the actual suspension. You can clearly see that there’s a significant dip right after the month of March, when the suspension was announced. The suspension itself doesn’t tell it all. If anything, it’s uncovering another underlying reason as to why North American players struggle to obtain houses. Here are numbers for all 3 regions in the past 4 months.

https://i.imgur.com/lcRZYaV.png

As displayed, the North Americans who are/were looking to purchase a house have been negatively impacted by the suspension. Meanwhile, the European and Japanese players have not been affected negatively by the suspension. How could that be?

Let’s look at how many “active characters” there are in each region according to ffxivcensus.com

North America: 279,480 characters
Europe:125,681 characters
Japan: 242,184 characters
So far so good. Now let’s take into consideration the amount of servers and plots for each region…

North America: 24 servers / 120,960 plots
Europe: 12 servers / 60,480 plots
Japan: 32 servers / 161,280 plots
If you divide the amount of “active characters” by plots in each region, you end up with…

North America: 2.31 active characters per plot
Europe: 2.07 active characters per plot
Japan: 1.5 active characters per plot
No wonder North America got hit hard with the suspension compared to Japan. The Japanese players nearly have 40,000 more plots available compared to the North American players, despite having not as many "active characters". To level out the situation, Square Enix would have to increase the NA’s server count to 37(+13). Since the rebirth of this game, 4 servers were added to the European servers (Omega, Louisoix, Spriggan and Twintania) while only one server has been added to the North American Data Centers.

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This is your third daily reminder that more wards were released when all the plots were sold out on the JP servers, while NA/EU have had to deal with that situation for many months. What a coincidence...