Just Another Housing Complaint

[Divinemights]

Ion addressed why WoW doesn't have housing in an interview he did with Preach before Preach got fed up and quit WoW. It doesn't have housing because they would have to use a hook system, which MMO players have long since made clear they detest.

That actually helped make more sense out of why Garrisons were such a disappointment - they were a hook system. Small buildings could only be placed on the small hooks, medium on medium hooks, large on large hooks, achievement monuments on monument hooks. Artifact trophies could only be placed on their specifically assigned hooks instead of displayed in an order meaningful to the player.

But that was WoW. We know the systems are different here. We know that instanced housing is possible because we're already using it. We know that having an outdoor area within a personal instance is possible because that's what Island Sanctuary is - a big outdoor area. SE has the tools to make a better housing system at hand - they just need to put in the effort to combine them so that no player that wants a house is left behind.

Exactly, Ion said a lot BS after he took the position and it is not difficult to see why Preach fed up with his lies
For a company size of Blizzard with much more resources and more advanced server technology they choose to use a laughable "hook system"
Could it be corporate greed or could it be the fact RIFT style of instanced housing is either too costly or impossible when population reach certain size?

Island Sanctuaryf?
It better not be another Garrison because it too is just another sandbox instance

You don't need to make it sound like everyone is dying for a house because that is not a fact
Over 90% of player base don't care, that is not what they are here for
Housing to most of players is something nice to have but not a necessity
On this forum, this is just minority making loud noise.
Remember, SE has the actual data of how players interact with housing (FC room, personal, the apartment)
It is not actually difficulty to see why they are only making 19 to 24 for personal housing.
Majority of players just leave it be after they obtained one.
It is only FC housing has more frequency of players click on the door.
You are smart, it is not difficult for you to understand what I am saying.

You are going to do much better than just making up story on the forum (like this one) to convince corporate suits that FF14 housing is actually a "crisis"
Most of servers apartments are empty and most of FC housing only have few FC rooms

[TwistedTea]

Over 90% of player base don't care, that is not what they are here for...

Please provide a credible source for this.

What is a fact, is that SE has made many band-aid fixes to the limited ward housing system over the years and attempted to increase the supply by adding new wards. You claimed only a minority of players are complaining about ward housing.

A profit driven corporation like SE does not make significant changes over the years to systems, if only a minority are complaining.

[Fybrile]

Over 90% of player base don't care, that is not what they are here for
Housing to most of players is something nice to have but not a necessity
On this forum, this is just minority making loud noise.

Again, the flaw in your logic is you presume to know a lot of things you actually don't.

You don't know what percentage of players want a house, or how most players feel. No one does. These are "facts" you're pulling out of thin air.

You can, however, infer and extrapolate how many agree with us and agree with you by the amount of likes these posts receive. By that metric, it would seem more people agree with the premise of this thread than with opinions like yours, by at best a 4-1 margin. Of course, there's a bias in the thread title, so not an objective environment. If we go by the general themes of threads in this subforum's first few pages instead, it would seem the statistics are even more in our favor - around 10-1, suggesting players are unsatisfied with the current housing system by the inverse of your fake conjured statistic.

It's also hard to claim 90% of players don't care about housing when:

i. Personal houses are perennially sold out;
ii. New plots are sold out very quickly upon their release;
iii. On most servers it seems that there are between 20-50 players participating in each auction.

By every single metric, it's proven that many players do in fact care about housing. I wish PVP had this level of engagement - then queues wouldn't be so long.

I don't know how you go from thread to thread playing the gatekeeper, get 1-2 likes on your posts to the dozen or so likes on the posts refuting you, and then purport to be the voice of the majority.

Talk about fantasy role playing...

Majority of players just leave it be after they obtained one.

You know it's a house, right?

[Amenara]

Things I disagree with wholeheartedly

Why do you even care? You have a house as you have so plainly said. None of the changes we want would get rid of your ability to have your house in the ward next to your friends. In fact, instanced houses opens the possibility of you having another house provided to you by SE. I don't understand why homeowners like you are so vehemently against any kind of change in housing and why you think that the majority of the playerbase shouldn't have the option to have a house in the game. FC rooms are a dumb thing to talk about when talking about housing as your FC room is at the whim of your FC leader. If they decide to kick you it is gone with no recourse. Apartments are a nice separate feature but don't have all the perks of owning a house. And as for your unsubstantiated argument that 90% of the playerbase doesn't care about housing, who cares. Give everyone the ability to have a house so the 10% that really want one can have one and then the 90% can have the option whenever they decide to try it out. I imagine if the housing system was accessible by everyone you would see a much higher percentage of the playerbase start to care about it.

[HeyMcFly]

I agree; Housing needs to be made available to all in some way

Apartments & FC's do not offer different features from one another yet apartments are more expensive
Apartments & FC's need to be made the same size as a Small Cottage house- 200 items & 200 storage with a bottom floor

I've seen alot of people say housing wasn't meant to be this popular according to the devs which is why it's so limited & frustrating to deal with
This is on the XIV team for not trying to find a fix
Lotto was not a fix, just a poorly executed solution- hence the amount of FC wards over private wards.
The Lotto has gotten the Hrothgar/Viera treatment -implemented, half finished & left to collect dust

[Shibi]

One of the more salient points I can take away from all this is that there is a woeful lack of data. We really don't know what percent of players (more still, how many characters) have/don't have a personal house.

It's not hard to work out approximately. Lucky Bancho gives a fairly good idea of population. The number of houses are fixed, paissahouse shows how many are available and the housing census shows how many are FC/Personal.

But it's also not really useful. Of more use is how many people are currently in the lottery.

On siren, your server, 852 people are bidding for smalls in this round. So that's a pretty strong indication of the people who desire a house. We know the population is about 35,000 so, ~2.5% of people on Siren currently want a home. The other sites show 8.8% have one.

Of the remainder,
* some will have homes,
* some won't be interested,
* some will have stopped playing in the last two months, and
* some will have thought it still too hard and not bother.

Errors in the Bancho numbers make up the rest.

I think ~10% interested in housing sounds about right tbh.

SE can make these people happier, mostly. Well as much as people can be happy.

[Silverbane]

On siren, your server, 852 people are bidding for smalls in this round.

Not quite. A person can place one bid with each qualified character they have. So 852 bids may represent less than 852 people. I know this because in the last round of the lottery, my spouse entered three bids (using three characters) for one small lot.
And won it, BTW.

How many players are using this strategy to increase their odds of winning, only SE knows.

[Edit: I currently have three characters on Faerie qualified to enter the lottery, and I am leveling three more.]]

[Shibi]

Not quite. A person can place one bid with each qualified character they have. So 852 bids may represent less than 852 people

This is quite true. But I was trying to keep it a bit simple.

[Fybrile]

Useful Information

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I mean, you're right, it would be simple to find the information I described in the part of my post that you quoted.

Could you not make it even simpler by just taking the number of personal plots x wards x districts x servers (150,300 plots) and then dividing it by the number of player accounts (39 million) or active players (2.2 million) to get your percent for all players since release (0.4% of players have a house) or just currently active players (6.8% of players have a house)?

That should be it unless I'm missing something? Is that misrepresentative somehow?

And while, granted, it may not be a perfectly accurate statistic with which to make important business decisions costing millions of dollars, it does seem to indicate a woeful lack of housing. Even if my math is wrong by a couple million players, the numbers are not even close to equal. No reasonable person would be happy with content that 50% of players are immediately and irrevocably locked out from, let alone 93 out of 100 ACTIVE players as those figures would suggest.

Allow me to overextend myself for a second:

Those numbers would mean that players have the rarest obtainable mount in the game at a RATE of almost twice that who are even able to buy a house (and that's not taking into account that one district, 20% of the plots we're using for this math, is only a month old. A few subscription payments ago, this statistic was 20% worse.

I think we can all agree that a house should not be twice as rare as the rarest RNG mount in the game.



But, it was the following four points that were the data points I was really interested in seeing. Interest, attainment, opinion. Essentially, how "satisfied" are players with the system, either pre- or post-auction system. It would help illuminate how many players WANT a house, but can't get one - which is at the heart of the complaint of this thread. While I think your focus on the number of currently-bidding players is interesting, I don't think it's a very accurate one (as there are a number of variables that could make this auction cycle not very representative of how many players would try to get a house if they wanted one.

And, also, the fourth data point was also interesting to me: how many gatekeepers would also want to learn this information. I'd genuinely be curious how many people currently trying to guard the artificial rarity of houses would overextend themselves into blocking access to information as well.

Which would connote that, at least on some conscious level, they'd know their position is petulant.

Don't get me wrong, it's fair for them to feel undeservedly proud of their rare trophy. I just don't think SE ever intended housing to function as ultra-rare drops, and I'm happily looking forward to the day when houses work as intended.





A few additional questions and points -

1. I saw the 35k number for Siren as well. Is that the population of players, or the number of characters? When I saw it, I thought it was the number of characters on the server. I myself have 3 characters on Siren, so if it's the latter, your estimate would probably be low.

2. The number of personal plots is 1,440 on a server now (isn't it?). On a server of 35,000 (I'll assume players), that's only enough houses for 4% of them. Surely you'd estimate that more than 14% of players are interested in getting a house. (based on the 4% with houses I've guesstimated, plus the 10% you've guesstimated are interested in it). Does that really sound right to you? I'd have guessed a third really want one, a third won't say no to one, and a third don't care about one.

3. I would bet that the "remainder" variable: "some will have thought it still too hard and not bother" - is much higher than you're giving credit for.

[Amenara]

It's not hard to work out approximately. Lucky Bancho gives a fairly good idea of population. The number of houses are fixed, paissahouse shows how many are available and the housing census shows how many are FC/Personal.

But it's also not really useful. Of more use is how many people are currently in the lottery.

On siren, your server, 852 people are bidding for smalls in this round. So that's a pretty strong indication of the people who desire a house. We know the population is about 35,000 so, ~2.5% of people on Siren currently want a home. The other sites show 8.8% have one.

Of the remainder,
* some will have homes,
* some won't be interested,
* some will have stopped playing in the last two months, and
* some will have thought it still too hard and not bother.

Errors in the Bancho numbers make up the rest.

I think ~10% interested in housing sounds about right tbh.

SE can make these people happier, mostly. Well as much as people can be happy.

My more hypothetical question is if housing were guaranteed, how many of the people who aren't participating would be interested in getting a house? I think the lack of "interest" in housing is more of a housing supply problem then a potential want for a house problem. I get saying ~10% of players are actively trying to get a house or have one, but I believe the want for a house is much higher.