[Housing] 1 House Per Service Account. 1 FC Per Service Account.

[Amarande]

I do personally believe that a lot of animosity that is thrown at house owners originates from a place of envy. And I can sympathize - as the system provides a much desired but limited resource. The creators of this system are ultimately at fault for that.

Even as personally an owner of a nice beachfront Mist small now, I still think it is a problem on a systemic level.

If you are a casual player, there aren't a lot of things for you to do at endgame. Non-hardmode patch content peters out very quickly. The side content is sometimes enough to keep people mesmerized for months (e.g., Eureka), but that's an exception: more often, the Exploratory Missions have not been so well received (Diadem with its goofy queuing or needing to get permission from FC officers to use an airship, and Bozja just didn't recapture the magic Eureka was) or aren't there at all (EW).

Deep Dungeons' fatal flaw is requiring too long at a single session (as you'll almost never get a group back together to finish if you don't), and being too vulnerable to things outside of the players' control (like Internet quality, especially in the USA where ISPs are fond of suddenly disconnecting you and THEN telling you on the phone app that oh, sorry, there was something we needed to work on, we'll be back up in an hour or two, or even "oh sorry, we had scheduled maintenance, you didn't check under the Vogon bulldozer papers in the filing cabinet where we posted it?").

Non-Savage Criterion could've helped (there's Variant, but since most of the stuff people actually want requires the tokens from Criterion instead ... yeah), but instead they decided to go with the old Second Coil model where normal's basically Savage and Savage is Ultimate. Womp womp.

This almost entirely just leaves crafting (mostly only relevant at the start of a patch unless you get lucky on maps or are on the EX farm circuit), hunts (which are now heavily regimented Discord-managed safaris - completely gone are the adventures like early Stormblood with my first FC where we'd just hit a random A rank somewhere or other, it was actually FUN trying to 8-man Mahisha in 4.1, but try that now and OMG HUNT SNIPER YOU HORRIBLE PERSON I WISH WE COULD REPORT YOU TO SE sets in), maps (with the time gate), and ...

Decorating your house. Which painfully reminds everyone that Apartments are too small with no outdoors or gardening, and that the game routinely hands out Outdoor Furnishings which are purposeless except for the anointed lucky.

I feel like a far more viable solutions exist but I'm under the impression the developers have no interest in entertaining them.

Yeah, sometimes I even find myself starting to wonder if SE is actively trying to bifurcate the playerbase (between the relatively small cadre of raiders at the top and absolute casuals at the bottom, throwing the middle under the bus) as a goal.

The only question is why this would be a goal (is the only way to keep toxicity in a popular game manageable regrettably to gut the advanced casual/lower midcore tier in particular to create a firewall so skill levels don't mix? Are they even perhaps afraid of the political storm clouds surrounding Internet socialization in the past few years, and fear that an abuzz social MMO would require financially crippling levels of moderation and/or a shift to the industry standard "too many reports, you're out" summary punishment system that they've thus far avoided? I'm not sure, honestly).

[MAJRIS]

I highly doubt auto demo will do that much "damage" to houses, people will resub, sure it might free a few, but that'll be it really

exactly this. people will resub every 40 days right before auto demo.

it is not solving anything, maybe just the bottom 5% of people that left without return.

[Midareyukki]

exactly this. people will resub every 40 days right before auto demo.

it is not solving anything, maybe just the bottom 5% of people that left without return.

It never did. We've had the demolition timer for years. I've seen individual plots being destroyed just because people wanted to take a break from the game for a little more than 40 days, whereas those plots overrun by one individual or FC are still standing.

If anything, it just shows how those timers really don't help solve the problem and only add in a limitation for people who objectively did nothing wrong other than having a house while on a break.

And Square knows this. Hell, it might even be in their best interest. More money off of subs~