Housing Situation

[CCheshire]

Although ppl have told me that Dynamis has extra housing, and I DC traveled a few weeks ago but mostly all the M/L houses had been taken along with the nice small house plots, so RIP.

OP, I think you'll have to start smaller, like a small plot in the Goblet level of housing ambition levels vs bidding against 100+ bids for any medium plot on a busy server unless they add more wards one day.

[Remx]

Every reply here unfortunately suggests that you lower your expectations rather than the developers make small changes to improve the housing system.

So many players buy *multiple* houses just to make Gil off of their submarines, 'shell houses' and 'shell FCs,' all over the place no matter what ward, what location, or what server you pick. I've found them everywhere. One thing that could at least alleviate the issue on Crystal is to move the airship and submarine management for Free Companies to the OIT Administration in the major city-states.

It's unreasonable to ask people to transfer from servers they've cemented themselves into Free Companies on to just up and move to literal dead servers.

I don't think anyone who suggests transferring to Dynamis actually plays on any of those servers. I have a character on Dynamis that I made specifically to enjoy a house, and the experience is dreadful. There are no players to find on that Data Center, besides the occasional RMT bot clipped into the floor of Limsa Lominsa, and even they don't seem to care to visit Dynamis that much (says a lot!).

At this point, NA does not need new Data Centers, and further server infrastructure should be dedicated to supporting this clearly very complex housing issue.

[Catwho]

I'm not a developer, but if SE can store an unlimited number of player accounts/characters and all their associated data, I don't understand why they can't store an unlimited number of housing wards too.

The vast majority of player data is not accessed in real time. Knowing what I know about database design, I'd guess the character tables are stored in a separate view that is copied over from a NAS to the lobby server once you select a character to log in with, and then copied over to the main World database once you've actively logged in. So while a given server might have 100,000 character accounts made for it, it'll only have 7,000 live characters being stored on the world server's tables at a given time.

Changes made to the character are saved to the world server, and then copied over to the character tables periodically. Maybe the character tables remain on the server for 24 hours or some length of time before they're put back to sleep in the separate character database (in case of server crashes to prevent roll backs) but they're copied back over fresh the next time you log in, whether that's on your own server, another server, or on another different devise. It's ugly, but it works.

For the housing, however, there was a fundamental flaw in the design, in that the entire neighborhood would be stored on the server itself, with the INTERIOR of the houses as their own instances, as opposed to having the neighborhood be an instance. That lets anyone wander in to view the houses, but also puts a hard limit as to how many neighborhoods can be stored in the server's RAM.

It's a hole that SE dug for themselves. All housing should have been done as full instanced zones from the start, instead of neighborhoods.

[Canadane]

Placard clicking was better than a lottery, but the masses are always right and wanted a change.

[Roarmiaka]

Sadly, there's not much they can do cause the neighborhood system is inherently flawed and can't change it without demolishing everyone's house and starting from scratch. The solution in my mind is to make the apartment system better. Have a Tier list with Apartments ranging from 250k gil to 15m gil (random numbers) that increase the size of the apartment. So, for example:

250k: The current apartment size (with added balcony for exterior furnishings
500k: Small house sized apartment, two levels
3mil: Medium house sized apartment(maybe this could have a huge exterior furnishing balcony?)
10m: Large House sized apartment

Once you buy a larger one, you can down and upsize to different sizes at no cost. This would get rid of the "Oh, I have to quit for a year, but I'll lose my house FOMO" since apartments don't get deleted. And people would get bigger houses.

Just my idea on how I would "fix" the system.

[Luca_]

They also have severely nerfed the number of houses available to FCs even though FCs have access to company workshop that single player housing do not get. All of the company workshop features have been nerfed to only require a single person to perform, so they've turned into lowman FC "fight club" submarine retainers that give the privileged few 1million gil per 24 hours. I'm honestly amazed SE hasn't nerfed the NPC sellable items from subs, nor have they just made the workshop available to all housing. At least they TRIED something with FC airships getting access to a special diadem zone back in the day, but it was really unpopular and disappeared pretty quickly.

I own a large with high level subs and airships and I kind of have a hot take:

Workshops were a mistake and shouldn't be limited to housing at all. They've ruined FC wards because they're so lucrative that it's worth the effort to make multiple alt FCs and buy as many houses as possible for more of them, and extending that to personal housing would just make it easier. There should be an unlockable workshop elsewhere in the game that's available to all players with housing workshops being more of a convenience than anything.

[Devotions]

Workshops were a mistake and shouldn't be limited to housing at all. They've ruined FC wards because they're so lucrative that it's worth the effort to make multiple alt FCs and buy as many houses as possible for more of them, and extending that to personal housing would just make it easier. There should be an unlockable workshop elsewhere in the game that's available to all players with housing workshops being more of a convenience than anything.

Which would also mean that if you unsub for a while, your hard work isn't destroyed. Subs take something like a year to level to max, but if you lose a workshop, they're gone forever.

[CCheshire]

Placard clicking was better than a lottery, but the masses are always right and wanted a change.

No. The lottery allowed everyone to bid fairly, and it's how I got my small house when they added new wards 2 years ago. In the old system, ppl would bot the placards, so it's impossible or extremely rare for someone to get it on their own.

[Espon]

Demolition has been paused for far longer than since the LA fires started. There's always something going on in the world that forces them to halt demolition, which should be a good indication that what we currently have doesn't work and should be changed to give people easier access to housing without having to transfer to a dead server. As neat as wards are, half the yards in my ward remain undecorated and the only time I see other people is when they're coming to visit me to hang out during our weekend get-togethers. I would be completely okay giving up the ward system if I was able to just plop my house on my Island Sanctuary and just let people travel there from the Moraby Drydocks or teleport via the Friend List.

Placard clicking was better than a lottery, but the masses are always right and wanted a change.

Clicking on a placard for 13 hours straight doing absolutely nothing else until finally I could no longer hold it and decided to quickly go to the bathroom, only to come back to the house being sold to someone is an experience I think everyone should enjoy.

[USAFJerrySo]

But if you get a house, you have to keep paying to monthly to keep it, even through you're taking a break.