Obvious gil farming, or FC house reselling

[Zofian]

Housing is pretty useless in XIV, you can't do anything with them and they give no advantage. You can plant crops and do invisible submarine retainers, yay, that's it. The solution is to realize that at least 1 in 3 people who want a house in XIV only do so because they're hard to get- usually a game with a housing system has a bunch of other reasons and also has artificial scarcity, instead of natural database limitations from limited resources, in XIV's case. No one will ever see your house and you will put 100x more time into decorating it than time spent by others enjoying it, in 99% of cases. If everyone could build a house at any time without having to fight over plots, would they really drop 20-70 million gil buying and decorating it. It's an empty status symbol, with part of the allure being the hope of emulating those 1% of FCs who successfully built an active membership and genuine hangout spot.

The solution to housing is to give the Island Sanctuary 4x9 crop plots for planting regular seeds, or open up the existing Sanctuary crop system and to allow the normal stuff. I'm not bothering to even open and start the Sanctuary because I knew from experience on day 1 that it is an unrewarding grind. Then allow workshops in private houses and allow putting your company's logo on the placard outside.

The features and capabilities you have with a house are limited and it's obvious that it will never be in the game's future plans for these to be expanded meaningfully (the addition of a 'house storage' for 100 items and more of certain currencies and other things, is never going to happen), so the solution to the housing supply struggle is to dilute the existing couple of feature aspects that cause it's current demand. At some point inside of roughly 2 years there will be some kind of exodus from XIV as we already know the game has been sliding downhill for a while- I'm sure square doesn't want a ton of swiss cheese wards on their hands at that point, so adding more wards now will only create a headache of having to get people to move for a ward reduction later (to save on database/system resources).