The Housing Black Pill. Truth Hurts. /Housing Salt General/

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

Holdup lemme bust out my tinfoil hat for these threads today.

By this logic, wouldn't they just add a bazillion more wards, all the while requiring people to hold onto their sub to keep the house? Therefore securing even more subs than they do now?

In actuality, no.

See, if they added many, many more wards to the point that there was enough housing for everyone to get one, people would actually be much more comfortable unsubbing (especially if they only have a small) if it'd be easy for them to obtain a house once again when they came back due to massive supply. Why worry about having to constantly log back in to hang on to that small when you could come back in a year and still easily get a small to replace it?

The shortage of the current wards is extremely powerful at keeping sub retention, since if you lose the house, your only options are 1 in 100+ odds of winning a lottery, or ditching all your friends, FC, etc to go get a guaranteed one on OCE. Thus anyone in the current housing climate will cling to a house like their life depends on it, since if they lose it, its immensely unlikely they're getting any back for potential years.

[Jojoya]

In actuality, no.

See, if they added many, many more wards to the point that there was enough housing for everyone to get one, people would actually be much more comfortable unsubbing (especially if they only have a small) if it'd be easy for them to obtain a house once again when they came back due to massive supply. Why worry about having to constantly log back in to hang on to that small when you could come back in a year and still easily get a small to replace it?

The shortage of the current wards is extremely powerful at keeping sub retention, since if you lose the house, your only options are 1 in 100+ odds of winning a lottery, or ditching all your friends, FC, etc to go get a guaranteed one on OCE. Thus anyone in the current housing climate will cling to a house like their life depends on it, since if they lose it, its immensely unlikely they're getting any back for potential years.

Except they would end up losing their furnishings and all of the gil used to purchase the plot and erect the Estate Hall if demolition remained part of the system.

Considering how many players complain about trying to earn gil, they absolutely would remain subscribed to prevent that from happening. Furnishings usually cost more than the plot and Estate Hall did. Seasonal event items and Mogstation purchases lost could only be reacquired by buying them again from Mogstation. It's a relatively small number of players that would feel no loss if their house was demolished and they lost everything.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

Except they would end up losing their furnishings and all of the gil used to purchase the plot and erect the Estate Hall if demolition remained part of the system.

Considering how many players complain about trying to earn gil, they absolutely would remain subscribed to prevent that from happening. Furnishings usually cost more than the plot and Estate Hall did. Seasonal event items and Mogstation purchases lost could only be reacquired by buying them again from Mogstation. It's a relatively small number of players that would feel no loss if their house was demolished and they lost everything.

And? it doesn't undermine or change what I said. Extreme artificial scarcity drives up value, it's basic human nature. Someone in the current system will be 10,000% more pressed to keep their sub rolling when the stakes are much higher when in an alternative system, they simply lose gil. For many people which gil is not cumbersome nor hard to obtain, the decision on whether to let their sub pass or not would be way more influenced by the difficulty of securing a house. If there's a tinfoil conspiracy from the devs to drive up discussion and keep sub retention through housing, the current system is far more effective at it then any system that provides more supply than demand would.

But in reality, as a network engineer by career, its so incredibly obvious their housing server hardware just can't handle an infinitely scalable system (which was easily shown during early EW when getting into your house was impossible around primetime due to too many housing instances open from people afking inside), so they're sticking with the system that let's them have absolute control over server load & I/O. Which being blunt, when you combine it with sunk cost fallacy the devs are experiencing, will likely result in no true fully instanced system ever coming for housing, just more worlds slowly being added that add tons of houses at once and doubles as a way to force the crowded populations to spread out with a tantalizing reward.

[Yshtola_Cat]

The shortage of the current wards is extremely powerful at keeping sub retention, since if you lose the house, your only options are 1 in 100+ odds of winning a lottery, or ditching all your friends, FC, etc to go get a guaranteed one on OCE. Thus anyone in the current housing climate will cling to a house like their life depends on it, since if they lose it, its immensely unlikely they're getting any back for potential years.

You are absolutely right. The fact that auto-demo has been off for 40% of the time since it was introduced and how, on average, it is turned off for nearly half a year is totally meant to keep players subbed.

[BananaSnap]

Who in the right mind fed you this crap?

[Jojoya]

And? it doesn't undermine or change what I said. Extreme artificial scarcity drives up value, it's basic human nature. Someone in the current system will be 10,000% more pressed to keep their sub rolling when the stakes are much higher when in an alternative system, they simply lose gil. For many people which gil is not cumbersome nor hard to obtain, the decision on whether to let their sub pass or not would be way more influenced by the difficulty of securing a house. If there's a tinfoil conspiracy from the devs to drive up discussion and keep sub retention through housing, the current system is far more effective at it then any system that provides more supply than demand would.

Even though gil is easy to make for some players, others struggle a lot and they have more things they want to be buying than just a house and furnishings. Even if supply was met, those players would fear demolition.

Other players hire decorators to get specific looks for their houses. A good example of players who might have enough gil not to care but likely would not want their houses demolished because they wouldn't want to lose the custom decor and have to find an available decorator to do it all again.

When it comes to scarcity, the history of housing in the game doesn't support those tinfoil hat theories that the developers want to retain sub revenue through housing scarcity.

If they truly did, auto-demolition would never be suspended.

They also wouldn't have expanded the number of wards as rapidly as they had been before COVID hit, which put a lot of obstacles in their way so they couldn't follow through as planned with previously announced increases. When the game had the large increase for Shadowbringers, their original goal was to increase the number of wards from 18 to 30 by 5.4 but COVID restrictions followed by the start of the semi-conductor shortage forced them to settle for half that number.

If they had been able to increase wards to 30 as they had originally hoped, then right now we would have had an additional 1800 houses per world. Considering that's pretty close to the personal entry counts we've been seeing in the recent lotteries except when prime plots go up so relocators flood the entries (plus all the still available FC plots to handle FC demand),

Sub retention through scarcity is not their goal.

At the same time, even if they resume ward additions after all the announced new worlds get added they are going to run into the same problems again if the player base continues to grow as they hope and they leave the loopholes for multiple house ownership. They need a better solution than more ward additions.

[Padudu]

Island Sanctuaries are going to be your Instanced housing there is a reason they made it so you can gather and plant things. After all it is your own private island.

Something about server stability? No wait it can't be that Server limits?

I remember something similar being argued against instanced housing, hmm.. I wonder why that is? I wonder if it's because fine people such as yourself like to argue "1.0 spaghetti code" and "but server resources" when SE can just give everyone instanced islands lol. They also said they can add more apartments if those filled up. Well, where are they for Balmung lmao? They can add all these cool instances for everyone but more wards? No, server stability and server limits!!!

But we know that you made this thread with good intentions and not to make the housing forums ree some more :^)

[SanadaX]

Then you will hear them complaining no Large/Medium left. No Large/Medium Plot I want left etc. Remember when everybody thought they get a Free Ishard Large?

It was the same with Spriggan and Twintania on the EU DC. No one who wanted a House badly gave a fuck about those 2 new Servers.

And after all was gone we had this reaction of the average FF Player and OF Users



It will the be same on the New NA DC as well. Even with World/DC Travelling, Cross-Linkshells there will be complaints "but I dont want to leave my filthy ERP Server" etc.

In the end Squares solution will be just new DCs and Servers to spread out the population.

The solution isn't to spread the player base. People are just that desperate. Players asked for a lottery and they hate it. Just give it another month and we'll throw around another suggestion that they will grow to hate as well. Such is the state of online games lol

[Oizen]

The solution isn't to spread the player base. People are just that desperate. Players asked for a lottery and they hate it. Just give it another month and we'll throw around another suggestion that they will grow to hate as well. Such is the state of online games lol

It probably be a lot easier if the obvious solution didn't have the Squenix defense force spit venom at you and pretend that Wards are a good system.

[Drakengarde]

The ward system was in essence perfectly fine up until Stormblood as houses were for FC only. When people wanted personal plots that is when things became chaotic. When square developed the housing system it did not have in mind for personal owned plots and only fc but this changed for stormblood and thus the housing crisis. The only way they can keep the housing ward system sustainable is A. Release more wards over time or B. release more worlds. The will not make housing instance, I and many others know this so those who keep suggesting it give it up will not happen they are deadset on the way it currently is and will not change it. As some people mentioned if truly want a house make an alt make a fc and try and win a plot on a new world.