Turn on Demolish for Housing and fix housing please.

[Amarande]

So let me get this straight. Op never wanted a house until recently but had the maximum possible chances before now and is begging for anyway for them personally to get a house even if it hurts the game and others. And the cherry on top is asking for a system to return that will likely just take the house they begged for away anyways.

Of course it hurts individual players, but it's hard to argue it hurts the game. In fact, quite the opposite. Auto-demo helps the game, and its absence hurts it.

With auto-demo, players who want to keep a house are required to stay active and subscribing in order to do so; those who lapse return their land to the market on a regular basis, so that other, then-active, players get a turn. Without it, you get the situation where people join or return the game, are repeatedly reminded of housing and its benefits, and then throw their hands up in despair because it's literally easier to win in real life gambling than to get one. The result is that both housed and unhoused players are that much more likely to unsub.

Apartments only partially alleviate the problem, due to having such a limited subset of a "real" house's functions (due to a lack of outdoor access). Meanwhile SE repeatedly reminds you of that fact too (since among the housing items that are tossed at you on a regular basis are plenty of Outdoor Furnishings).

It seems like the "solution" for that was that you were supposed to put those furnishings up at the FC house instead, perhaps? Realistically, most will never get to do that either, because FCs normally maintain very tight control over housing decoration (as with most shared FC resources it tends to be an officers-only perk).

That has even more far-ranging effects on the community, too: large FCs become unstable compared to guilds elsewhere, because people are inclined to spall off in small groups for the sake of a separate FC house to themselves (also along the way promoting TOS violations when shell FCs are purchased illicitly as a means of house transference).

What becomes of the FC community in that case? Linkshells have too little capacity, and Fellowships seem to be a graveyard (most seem to realistically just serve to inform where the discord link is). As a result, the community is almost forced to move to social media as their main hangout. Besides the negative effects this can foster (knock-ons of the policy requirements from the SM platforms), the upshot is that FFXIV goes from being a focus to merely a launch pad for external communities (many of whose members rapidly drift away from the game they met in, and unsub).

Compared to this, inactive individuals, even ones who became inactive by force and not choice, losing their homes seems a small cost indeed.

I have no problems if demo is there when the housing has pretty much run out in the 4 zones, but if there are thousands of empty plots then autodemo really doesn't need to be on.

These thousands of empty plots only occur during new land rollouts, which creates an intensive FOMO effect and player stampedes (on a server system which we should repeatedly know by now is not well equipped to handle); people who weren't around for a few specific events ultimately have only the barest of chances.

This then forces SE to roll out even more land regularly, but how long can that be sustained at server level for (especially if 7.0 is as popular as Endwalker)?