Remove FC housing entirely

[CatStarwind]

From what I understand, they had originally told players that personal housing would be an entirely separate system. The assumption is that they changed their minds and lumped personal into the wards when the wards remained mostly empty. The interest in FC housing either was not there, or no one was interested for the prices being charged at that time.

That even now FCs were given initial preference with the new lottery system, that assumption is most likely false. The incredibly small timeframe between FC housing and personal housing matches with how they still do it now.

I'm definitely one who would love to see a good instanced housing system implemented.

We already have instanced housing: Apartments. Little has been done with them since introduction and they desperately need some love. Simply giving them balconies would be a major improvement.

Most of the pushback seems to come from those who seem to want housing to be a prestige system in a game that pretty much lacks prestige systems outside of Ultimate, and if others were able to easily get a house their own purchase wouldn't feel as special.

I have never in my life seen a single person express this. Outside of periods where the demo-timer is off, housing is always viable to acquire.

I know I sound like a broken record but RIFT Dimensions was a housing system done right. The art aesthetic wasn't that great but the actual systems were A+. Placement on any axis, rotation on any axis, resizing items to a considerable degree, the ability to place a prefabricated building or create your own building from scratch using Building Blocks. Objects that could be used to create lighting effects, weather effects (and then block those effects in a specific section of the Dimension), set a static time of day/night instead of following the normal game cycle. Control over who could visit or be a tenant(public, friends, guild, whitelist, blacklist). Search system to allow players to find public Dimensions by location, keyword or Likes. You got to select your Dimensions from dozens of actual in game locations plus a few locations created just for Dimensions.

Best of all, everyone could have multiple Dimensions. No one got locked out of the system or the location they wanted because too bad so sad 500 other players already had it and there were no more left.

None of this is relevant to the discussion so I'm not sure the point of this non-sequitor.

FFXIV housing may be more visually appealing but the systems suck in comparison.

It sucks because it still has exploitable loopholes that are being abused.

[Jojoya]

I have never in my life seen a single person express this. Outside of periods where the demo-timer is off, housing is always viable to acquire.

Then it's clear you don't read through all the posts in this forum. Many have expressed they believe housing to be a prestige system that not everyone should have access to.

And no, demolition has done little to make housing viable to acquire when the overall supply of plots has always been fair less than the demand.

I lost my first house through demolition when I was unable to play for 9 weeks back at the start of Stormblood (I got back barely in time to reclaim my gil and furnishings from the Resident Caretaker). There was zero housing available at my return. I was thinking to myself "Okay, then I'll wait for Shirogane to open to get another house, that's only a couple of months away." Couldn't get a house when Shiro opened, not even from the plots in other districts vacated by those who relocated to Shirogane.

I did finally get my house in 4.2 and still have the same plot today. But that's because SE increased the number of available plots by 50%, not because of demolition.

Demolition does help keep a small number of plots circulating back into the system but it has never made it viable for everyone who wants a house to get one except on the low population worlds. And none of the NA worlds are low population.

It sucks because it still has exploitable loopholes that are being abused.

It sucks because if SE had designed a proper housing system in the first place, there would be no restrictions to get abused.

[CatStarwind]

Then it's clear you don't read through all the posts in this forum. Many have expressed they believe housing to be a prestige system that not everyone should have access to.

Obviously not enough for me to notice so I'm not sure what's to gain in giving more exposure to such a minority opinion.

And no, demolition has done little to make housing viable to acquire when the overall supply of plots has always been fair less than the demand.

I'm not sure what data center you're in but any time the demolition timer is on, there was always a handful of plots available. There's a reason why prices use to decay over time, which is coincidentally how I was able to afford mine. You probably should've just simply moved Worlds.

It sucks because if SE had designed a proper housing system in the first place, there would be no restrictions to get abused.

Neither ward nor instanced is "proper" they are just different styles, both with their pros and cons. The nice thing about SE is that they offer both.

[UkcsAlias]

I have never in my life seen a single person express this. Outside of periods where the demo-timer is off, housing is always viable to acquire.


It sucks because it still has exploitable loopholes that are being abused.

These 2 lines contradict each other. Exploitable loopholes are normaly only needed when its not viable to obtain a house. That they exist and are being abused is proof of the issue being there, hence not being viable. Otherwise abusing it wont have any effect, and then the question becomes: is it realy a loophole in that case?

So no, housing is still a problem.

But i think the best update they could do is making them not strictly tied to a server anymore (the server name is there for address reasons only, but someone on server A can just buy one in server B). This makes the total housing scale better towards an entire DC, and as a result, adding additional wards on empty servers means they will still be used instead of having half the server empty (and slowly taken over by dummy fcs/bots etc).

[CatStarwind]

Exploitable loopholes are normaly only needed when its not viable to obtain a house.

The abused loophole isn't for acquiring a single house, it's for acquiring entire wards worth of houses. It exploits an edge case to circumvent the official requirements.

[ThatsStellar]

We already have instanced housing: Apartments.

Sorry to ruin the illusion, but apartments aren't instanced. There's a max of about 90 per half ward, I've even heard of them being unavailable on contested servers at times.

[Stormpeaks]

Sorry to ruin the illusion, but apartments aren't instanced. There's a max of about 90 per half ward, I've even heard of them being unavailable on contested servers at times.

Balmung is a good example of that, I remember people paying their friends or contacting random people and paying them millions for them to vacate their apartment just so they could get one.

Apartments are not instanced housing.

[Jojoya]

Sorry to ruin the illusion, but apartments aren't instanced. There's a max of about 90 per half ward, I've even heard of them being unavailable on contested servers at times.

They are instanced, just as FC private chambers are. They're essentially the same system.

The apartment numbers have to do with how SE has designed access to the apartments. At the time apartments were added to the game, they told us it would be easy for them to add more "wings" (the 15 unit blocks) to apartment buildings if needed. If apartments weren't instanced, that would not be easy to do.

Since there are only two worlds that have ever managed to completely sell out of apartments and new apartments get added every time they add new wards, they've never bothered to increase the number of wings. It seems they at least realized it's not rooms that players are after but houses.

People don't understand what 'Instanced Housing' would be.
No matter what form it comes it, it will be limited by server capacity in some form. Not everyone can be in a private instance at the same time, as evident by the fact that thise in their Islands were preventing others from e tering theirs or their homes when it was first released. There will have to be a limit in some way.

Each world now has 27,000 apartments, which dwarfs the active playerbase of most servers excluding Crystal.
Everyone can get an apartment with no competition. That's Functionally as close to instanced housing as it's going to get.

If you want true instanced housing, you're talking timed sessions, afk lockout and limited database queries (like excluding retainers or glamour plates).

Timed sessions wouldn't be needed. Not enough players spend that much time in their housing to overload the housing servers. That's easily seen by going into the various housing districts then doing a player search. Player habits when it comes to use of housing wouldn't change that greatly outside of the initial period needed to decorate just because they moved from a ward into an instance.

Personally, I don't have a problem with 30 minute AFK lockouts. If you're going to be inactive that long, then you may as well log out. It is not a big deal to have to log back in when you return.