Why is player housing so coveted in the community?

[GeminiReed]

I'm not asking this to be passive agressive, or dismissive, etc, I am legitimately curious. Does player housing offer things people wouldn't have access to through the game? Or is there more to it? I have assumed that since it's such a coveted system, it has some sort of advantage that the game outside of housing offers.

Adjusting for the gated features XIV's housing is no more or less desired than any other game. It only gets talked about because Square thought making it a limited resource was a good idea at one time. Instead of being able to celebrate players' creativity the Housing section here is flooded with gripe posts all trying to clue Square in that they need to solve this.

I think for some it's just a matter of having it and really nothing else. I logged into the game for the free weekend, and I haven't been playing for a few months. I was eager to see what cool stuff people had done with Ishgard housing since it's been out for 2 months now. Going through several wards on a few different servers yielded pretty much the same thing. Lots and lots of empty houses and a few that were furnished but really poorly. I think I saw one medium house that was pretty good.

I would have thought though, with all the hype and demand for Ishgard housing, and the years people had to prepare, that the end result would have been a lot better. Wards are a massive waste of resources and houses should have always just been instanced.

tl;dr: House decorating is harder and far more expensive than it looks and that's not something you're going to realize until you have a house to decorate.

From apartments to mansions the amount of things you can add, call it a decoration budget, is super stingy. It's so bad that many designs just wall off the other floors. The interiors have a base style dictated by the city the ward is attached to complete with columns, moldings, and wainscoting that you cannot change. The only way to correct that is to cover it up which eats into your decoration budget.

The decoration UI has no control to adjust height. There are glitches that can be used to do this but it's tricky and time consuming if done manually. The glitch only works in the up direction. If you're in an apartment and only want the top half of a decoration you're pretty much SOL.

There's an OK selection of things you can buy from vendors but some of the more useful things are crafted, bought with crafting scrips, require airship/submersible mats, etc. In other words prepare to spend another 2-4m. The initial cost of winning the plot is a known expense but what's not clear is that you have to buy a building permit on top of that so people are already reeling from an unexpected expense. Small permits are 450k.