Housing Revision opinion

[Jojoya]

A single player doesn't make a "company". You want to keep your workshops, rank and amenities that comes with an FC, then yeah you should be made to do something that should also be the responsibility in owning an FC and recruit to keep the FC status and title. So you made every stick of furniture, crafted up subs and airships all for your own personal gain. How is that remotely a Free Company? That's just a "You Company" using the Free Company title and all that comes with it. You don't want to grow your FC, because you want your cake and eat it too. You just want to turn it into singular ran Party House someday for your own personal gains, is my guess. Even if you do that to be a success you have to "hire". If you can hire than you can recruit.

It really doesn't matter how a free company gets redefined and what member requirements you put on a free company to retain a house it has purchased. Players intent on owning the house will always find a way to keep meeting those requirements.

Easiest way is to form a "cesspool guild". Just keep randomly inviting more and more players. Enough will accept to meet the requirements.

After all, the FC Master is under no obligation to grant any FC member access to the house, garden(s), or workshop, or share anything produced with the FC members. The FC Master can choose to keep it all. The members can join and leave, oblivious to the company credits they're generating for the FC Master to use to make more gil for personal use.

How has increasing the requirements for FC house ownership improved the situation in that case? It hasn't.

On the other hand, if SE increased the supply of houses to meet demand there would be no reason for players to make shell FCs unless they were looking for workshop access. Most might like the idea of having a workshop but they'll never do it - it's too expensive and time consuming to get airships and submersibles set up even if you're an omnicrafter capable of building all the parts. It's worse than gardening, which is another piece of content that many players claim they need access to but then given access rarely (or more often never) use.

All these threads complaining about players "cheating" the system (which they aren't because SE specifically left the option open to them) does is divert attention away from SE so they're not under pressure to improve the system. Continuing to attack each other is not going to result in houses appearing out of thin air.

[Denji]

I would say exploiting a loophole is still sort of gaming the system... yet I don't blame players for doing what they need to just experience a part of the game.

While I'm not saying there should be no barrier to entry when it comes to making a house (mostly so trial and a million level 1 players can't just obliterate everything) I am saying that I don't blame people for doing what they need to do just to get a house. If square isn't trying to solve the issue (and hasn't, for years, actually done anything about the total lack of housing compared to the amount of people who want them) then they should 100% make an FC and take one of those. Does it suck? Yes, it does. Especially if you're an FC interested in a house for yourselves... but they aren't really to blame when the entire system has been a complete and utter catastrophe from day 1.

A significant chunk of the game is locked behind RNG. That is not fair. End of story, end of topic, discussion, whatever. Even worse is that the only reason housing isn't instanced is because Yoshi-P obsesses with the idea of neighborhoods filled with players... and yet you never see them because they all just teleport to their front yard and run inside. There is no neighborhood. It might as well be an old sims game with how empty it is.

[TwistedTea]

All these threads complaining about players "cheating" the system (which they aren't because SE specifically left the option open to them) does is divert attention away from SE so they're not under pressure to improve the system. Continuing to attack each other is not going to result in houses appearing out of thin air.

Yup, while we carry on bickering for crumbs, SE is whistling away not addressing the fundamental issue; supply.

We would not have to argue if there was a fully instanced housing system that would have enough supply for everyone.

Suggestions made over the years:

1. Improve apartments. Let us upgrade them in size to condos/penthouses for gil.

2. Maybe Island Sanctuaries or something similar can be fully instanced housing.

3. Keep the existing ward houses for those who want to fight it out for 'exclusive/flex' houses.

A fully instanced house which is a viable alternative to ward houses should be the baseline for all players.

[Amenara]

I love how every new idea is to punish players for SE being dead set on a failing ideal for "community" feel in neighborhoods instead of complaining at the people who are at fault for the failures in the housing system. Blame SE for being stubborn and unwilling to "innovate" (or just do what most other games with housing have done) in their game.

[Breakbeat]

I am in a single Fc and I exist ........ I have 4 alts that power the Fc and I play all of them everyday. If people are not active as I am I think they shouldn't exist.

Yeah, you tell 'em! I'm with ya.

[Imora]

Community feel, despite my FC ward 5 being devoid of houses.

[LaylaTsarra]

I love how every new idea is to punish players for SE being dead set on a failing ideal for "community" feel in neighborhoods instead of complaining at the people who are at fault for the failures in the housing system. Blame SE for being stubborn and unwilling to "innovate" (or just do what most other games with housing have done) in their game.

The take away crowd works hard to come up with new ideas to punish those who follow the rules. I'm not excusing RMT for multiple purchases and it's on SE to fix this so those with small FC stop getting a bad name as a result. One can never be sure what SE is going to do especially after adding lotto but I sincerely doubt they'll do anything retroactively to hurt people who followed the rules.

Long overdue for them to address the demand either by adding a sizeable amount of new wards or instanced housing. Allowing account wide access for alts to houses you own needs to be a thing as well.

[Avoidy]

Square's a two billion dollar company. They can just add more wards. They've done it before. What we need, that they can actually do for us right now, are more wards. I know from personal experience how cathartic it is to tell some smug cheeky dude with a solo FC made in May to pound sand, but at the end of the day Square can fix everything by just adding more wards. Why they won't, is what we should be asking Square. A live letter addressing these concerns related to housing would be excellent. Also an explanation on why they thought an 18/6 split in favor of FCs was a good idea would be great too.

With housing, it feels like all square does is incentivizes scummy behavior that pits players against each other and brews a lot of resentment. I'm a chill person irl and in game, but even I got kind of resentful when Square basically spent 3 years dangling Ishgard in our faces and then made it so limited that most individual purchasers got screwed. I spent a lot of time feeling resentment towards all these obvious shell FCs (formed in April, 3 members, it's pretty obvious who just made one on the day of the announcement), but now I try not to because it's not productive and at the end of the day they're stuck in a dead FC for an empty house that's anchoring them to a game with 4-month content droughts. And even in the clicking era, I'd see people sat at their PC clicking for hours, some peeing in bottles, others abusing scripts, whatever it takes for a house with a bad decorating system baked into it and a furniture cap so small that they have to wall off the upstairs. The system is terrible from an availability standpoint and it's abysmal from a basic usability standpoint. Nobody should be killing themselves for this garbage. But by creating a scarcity that doesn't have to exist, Square pits people against each other for something that's pretty poorly implemented, especially compared to how other games handle housing and decoration. I'm not pretending to be immune to this anger either; you can look at my post history. I pop off on people in the housing forums because they basically went "got mine" and then show up to troll and make stupid kindergarten-tier arguments, but being mad at idiots isn't productive. We need to be asking current-year Square Enix why they aren't just adding more wards when the game -- by their own admission -- is doing really really well financially. And when I say asking Square, I mean asking Square. Because I know someone's going to reply to this with their best educated guess, citing a translated interview from 2015 or something, and that's not what I'm after. I just want a live letter where they stop for a minute and Yoshi goes "oh yes, here is why we thought it was a brilliant decision to have an 18/6 split and incentivize the creation of cancerous solo FCs that have led to dead FC wards and loads of resentment, please understand."

[Arzalis]

Housing demolition shouldn't even exist. It flies in the face of the what the director of the game supposed wants by telling people it's okay to take breaks. At the moment, that has gigantic asterisk beside it that reads: "You will lose your house if you actually take a break from the game."

Suggesting to make that more common just because you want something you won't get anyway is not a real solution. They could demo the house of every FC in the game and you still likely won't win the next lottery. There will also never be enough wards to meet player demand as they are currently designed.

Focus your ire on SE for not bothering to design a new system for the last seven years. That's how long this has been a problem and they've done nothing to meaningfully address it.

[NekoMataMata]

Should be more like 75-25 for Personal to FC housing.

Also second point should be tweaked. It's not a bad idea to prevent solo FC housing actually but maybe something more along the lines of FC housing requiring that a FC have 10 people to bid.

While I am against housing demolition I don't really see any other way to keep these things in check though, soooo every few months to every 6 months the game needs to check to make sure that the FC has 10 people or else it's demolished.

This should be generous enough for say if a FC has some drama and has a mass leave or something. Just make sure that there's no public timer displayed for the checks to ensure that you don't have solo FCs that recruit 9 friends prior to a check.