Now That The Game Is Getting A Housing Upgrade, When Are The Extra Wards?

[Aidorouge]

Even on Dynamis, it's difficult to get a medium or large house now. There are plenty of smalls, though... which illustrates another problem, but that's not what we're discussing here.

I agree with others that instanced housing would solve most if not all problems, but that's not likely to happen while SE is doubling down on their chosen housing model. SE could take some measures to free up a few houses - by allowing access to company workshops outside of housing for example. But this is still a bandaid fix. As long as demand is far higher than supply, nothing will be solved. I wish they'd give some kind of instanced option.

Eh, I left two Medium houses behind on Maduin when I moved to Excalibur (abandoned the personal, gave away the FC), so I know I did my part to free up space over there. But it highlights the problem that as someone who wanted to actually play the game and not just own houses, there was "nothing" for me on Dynamis, and I gained more by moving out and never going back then if I had stayed any longer.

Anyway, I've no problems with making workshops available for all, but it would require absolutely destroying the amount of gil it produces to avoid mass inflation. Of course, they could destroy the gil-minting RIGHT NOW and that would still have the effect of freeing up a lot of plots as most, if not all, of the submarine farms shutter up. But Square-Enix is a master of maintaining problems instead of fixing them.

[Voidsent-Uchiha]

it alone would free up 100s of housing across all servers to begin with.

They'd need to free up likely 15-20 full wards (main and subdivision) PER neighborhood type to even dent demand meaningfully. The last several times they added 3-4 wards on main data centers, it was gone majority within a few hours, everything within 1-2 days back during non-lottery era of first come first serve, or 2-3 housing cycles when lottery got added. You'd need 10 wards minimum to even last a week/month before they got bought out, which would mean wiping out like a third of the existing houses.

[KiraRavens]

Every time someone brings up the housing in XIV, I think about how in SWTOR every player can get a (cheap) house in EVERY location that has housing and decorate it with 10 times the items, and there's no issues with server capacity or anything...
Shame we can't have that in this game too.

[Kaurhz]

95% of fcs in this game are dead anyway. You can always play with friends, thanks to server and data center hopping. You have cross world links shells aswell as fellowships to compensate being in a fc

Again, people should not really have to transfer away from said groups, especially when they do like said groups, and ultimately a limited housing supply is always going to be just that regardless of whether people do or do not travel, hence why it is a band aid and not really a solution.

It's like you missed half of what I actually said -- inane compromises like needing to server or DC hop for social interaction (or playing with others) and thus hampering their ability to interact with parts of the game, e.g., retainers unspoiled/folklore nodes.. Cross-world LS will only do so much. Especially when you're insisting on a solution where the onus is on the player and not on the developer to support their own game.

Like, if you actually had players making these compromises and just picking up whatever house were available, you would very quickly see some DCs and main servers would have an inadequate supply.

For a game that relatively speaking (Had up until recently) only had a booming subscriber count, they don't really do enough.

The onus shouldn't be on the player to continually make compromises for SEs inadequate support for core features in their own game.

If you want to go ahead and insist people should make a compromise if they really want it, then that's your prerogative, but don't go around selling it as an actual solution when it's nothing more than actual temporary problem coping.

[Batbrat]

Reminder that we havent had new housing wards added since 12/26/2022, which is over 3 years ago
Reminder also, that we havent had a new housing exterior added since 06/27/2024, which is almost 2 years ago now
Reminder again as well that the last housing residential district added was 01/19/2021, which is 5 years ago

Housing overall is drastically behind schedule and not the reason that we're not getting anything else, as it's been neglected thoroughly for years now! Ok that is all. Love that we're getting the increased items, but we're behind on everything else that they used to do on a regularly balanced schedule that came to a complete stop and never resumed since, and I simply will never let them forget about it, that's all.

[NegativeS]

They'd need to free up likely 15-20 full wards (main and subdivision) PER neighborhood type to even dent demand meaningfully. The last several times they added 3-4 wards on main data centers, it was gone majority within a few hours, everything within 1-2 days back during non-lottery era of first come first serve, or 2-3 housing cycles when lottery got added. You'd need 10 wards minimum to even last a week/month before they got bought out, which would mean wiping out like a third of the existing houses.

I honestly think this would be solved by closing the 'multi-per-account' loophole and removing grandfathered plots.

Knowing how the average person plays the game, there's a higher chance than not that only very few players both have the gil needed for a Medium or a Large plot, and are willing to tie it up in auctions indefinitely for only the chance of a house. Thus, it's likely that the many bids such plots get are not from house-less players looking for an 'in' to the system, but those with established venues or sub/airship farms trying to expand their 'portfolio', bidding on multiple characters to increase their chances and push out other moguls. This also explains why on the forums I only see the same 3 people in vocal opposition to any changes to the status quo, while everyone else seems vehemently in favor of changing it (and also why they so commonly use the argument 'why are there so many bids on larges but not on smalls?')...

So, remove the multiple-per-account loophole, make it so a service account can only own one house and one FC house across their characters. I guarantee at least half of Large plots would go up for sale overnight, and entire wards would turn into ghost towns. Would also prevent newly added/freed plots from being instantly taken up, since the demand would be more organic. If plot farmers want more, put your money where your mouth is--that's another 12.99 per month per house, please (they already do this with retainers lool). Housing problem solved.

Removing grandfathering would also help, but to a lesser extent. Can you imagine how many high value plots there are that are owned by players who haven't touched the game since ARR?

[Voidsent-Uchiha]

there's a higher chance than not that only very few players both have the gil needed for a Medium or a Large plot, and are willing to tie it up in auctions indefinitely for only the chance of a house

- anyone who does field operations had access to 600k-1+mil/hr gil income
- anyone who regularly does savage content that can do mercenary runs. ultimate clears were like 7-10+mil per person assisting last I heard. lot of raiders including streamers sitting on hundreds of million they don't spend from various mounts they sold like chaotic and delubrum and paid runs saved up
- every nsfw courtesan/freelance and shoutrunner for venues. shoutrunners often make several mil in one night for 4 hours, courtesans used to be 100-150k/30min but nowadays I hear of rates in the 250-500k/30min, some people charging a mil or more per hour with animations. that's excluding findom's, that's excluding lifetime packages
- housing designers get commissioned at anywhere between 10-30mil per house on average
- gposers have done commissions/collabs ranging from a few hundred thousand at a low level up to several million for a single picture, especially if it's post-edited. they have freelance work in open world and social media, work at venues as photographers with hourly rates, and some users on twitter are charging 20-50mil for collabs with their characters. JP has Gochuumon Studio that had like 20-30+ artists on staff line-up for the venue all doing ff14 fan art/artwork for gil
- achievement hunters that spam deep dungeons, field operations, levequests, etc. would all have the gil requirement
- anyone who has $15-25 irl that doesn't mind a 10 day suspension if they get found out
- venue attendants that have 10-30mil giveaways at 3-10 locations every single night on every data center, also includes the ppl who sold themselves at various auctions and had gross overpay rates due to the environment
- anyone who does crafting/gathering even casually as it barely takes a week/month to get enough for a large
- any saint/beatus of the firmament
- barding individually was several hundred thousand per hour, bard groups were 2-5mil/hr income
- hunt train ppl with an army of materia to sell on patches
- treasure chest ppl when new content first drops

Like there's thousands of people that could easily earn 100+mil after just 1-6 months if they felt like it, let alone speaking about years. nowhere near just venues and submarines for the bidding wars. even small personals on balmung were racking up 100-200 tickets. but you are correct in venues and subs being the ppl who use alts the most as everyone else I've talked to, even if they have the gil, they refuse to put in bids on their alts because they want the house attached to their main character only. same way they won't make an alt on dynamis to use for roleplay or their gpose studio and wud rather fight 50-100+ tickets at home instead. self-nerfing condition technically.

[AlliciaCapulet]

It probably wouldn’t be that difficult to simply add a new “tab” or additional wards when needed. They could even manage this dynamically for each world and each housing district.

For example, if Ishgard becomes full (let’s say around 95% of the houses are taken), even if Ul'dah, Limsa, Gridania, or Shirogane still have available plots, they could simply add another Ishgard ward so players can still obtain a house in the district they actually want.

On lower-population servers, they could also remove or disable empty wards until the others fill up.

I really don’t see why the system needs to remain static when server populations differ so much. Some housing districts are clearly more popular than others, and every server has a different level of demand.

At the end of the day, this is a video game. It’s virtual space, not physical land. Instances can theoretically be added or removed depending on demand.

And for those telling me to just transfer servers: I started playing on Jenova the day the server opened. I played until late 5.2 when I took a break, then returned in 6.4. Of course I lost my house during that time. But my FC, my friends, and everyone I know are still on Jenova.

I haven’t managed to obtain a medium or large house again, and the small plot I eventually won isn’t even in the district I wanted. But the solution shouldn’t be asking players to abandon the server they’ve always played on.

On Jenova, on some weeks, there isn't any houses in some district, not even a small one to bid on.

I also don’t really believe there’s a serious hardware limitation behind this. Housing wards are just instances. If the infrastructure can handle an entire expansion’s worth of new content, it should be able to handle a few additional housing instances as well.

[Kaosuko]

I mean you say this, but it's literally not legally the case. No point in even responding to the rest if we're not being objective legally. You can literally be banned at any moment and not even be allowed access to the game, to the forums, to responding on social media, with 0 legal recourse. Your opinion even being allowed to be spoken is a privilege. If you played other games where staff regularly locked threads from the start and deleted threads on certain topics for years, regularly blocked creators, filed copyright claims on youtube video commentaries, you wouldn't even be in the realm of conflating what you're allowed to do vs. what you're entitled to.

Do not speak about legality if you know nothing of the subject matter.
This isn't even on point of the topic yet you keep defending Square Enix by saying "you shouldn't be able to complain".

[Voidsent-Uchiha]

you keep defending Square Enix by saying "you shouldn't be able to complain".

Aaaannnnd here comes the gaslighting with quotes that never existed. Utterly surprised.