Hello everyone. I usually stay out of things like this since I'm happy with my FC room and house, and I generally think that forums are full of trolls or fanboys. Really, they're the same thing when you stop to think about it. However, after looking through the patch notes, I must say that this housing solution is...how shall I put it? The fevered dream of an insane madman bent on boosting the RMT market to new heights or feeding off the tears and cries of the homeless. Let's run through some numbers, shall we?

After a quick count of the servers, there are 65. Looking at the amount of houses there are in a ward, there are 30 per ward. There are also 3 areas, with now 8 wards. So after crunching the numbers:

3*8=24, the amount of wards altogether.
24*30=720, the amount of houses on a single server altogether.
720*65=46800, the amount of houses of all servers.
46800*512= 2,396,1600, the amount of potential players who can actually use housing if every FC was filled to the brim.


Even if housing doubled 93,600 houses and 4,792,3200 potential rooms like Yoshi claims it can be done in 2.4, this still leaves the question of how many FCs will actually be occupying these houses, how many will keep registration open, how many will be bought out by insanely rich people looking to expand their gardening market, population of the server, etc. Tl;dr, there are a lot of issues if you want to be fair to everyone using the ward system, which should be your priority since no matter how casual or hardcore a person is, they're still a customer giving you money month after month.

So 2.4mil give or take can access FC housing if every FC was filled to the brim. Which would be amazing since that's supposedly every player that has an account. This would be great, except a lot of FCs close up registration in most cases I've seen and now with the newly added "personal housing" (in quotations because it's just retooled FC housing minus private rooms.) people have to contend with private buyers who have insane amounts of gil, and effectively throwing off the above equation even more than it already was. This means that paying customers won't be able to access a lot of content, such as chocobo coloring/training, decorating, gardening, and any other housing features I'm too lazy to look up atm.

Now, I know it's ludicrous to think in best term scenario where all FCs are filled to the brim, but I use this model to illustrate a bigger problem. Personal housing takes away 511 people from ever even theoretically experiencing housing in the current ward system every time a private buyer can buy a house alone. If this game means to progress and provide for all of it's customers as it keeps acquiring more subscriptions, provisions must be made. Along with all these issues, I'm assuming that all servers have equal population. They do not. For servers that have a large amount of people like Excalibur or Balmung, plots will be instantaneously gone. Jenova or newer servers on the other hand will have spare plots for a time because of lower populations/gil flow. The problem is not how fast the plots go, but the plot availability. There will never be enough plots for legacy servers at this rate for people to even have suitable FC housing, let alone private housing. On lower population servers, I could see it as a possibility, but it is literally impossible to sustain private housing against the FC horde that needs housing on legacy servers. Eventually, if this game is successful, even the low population servers will end up as heavily populated as the legacy servers, and we'll be right back to the same problems we have on Excalibur and Balmung, except more people on Jenova will have had more time to buy more private housing and subsequently deny more FCs the ability to buy FC houses. Remember: every private house sold is 511 people never getting to experience housing content. That is truly painful in a legacy server where people with established FCs can't even get a home. It's not even a matter of money, (well, it is, but to a lesser extent.) it's about availability.

My proposed solution is this: make FC housing and private housing truly separate. If you want to copy+paste your old work, fine, but at least make it in separate wards from FC housing and adjust the prices to be slightly more reasonable. Make it around 1-2 mil for small, 6-10 for medium, 12-20 to large or whatever; any more than that and why not just buy an FC house with combined funds? The point of private housing is for a solo accomplishment; a dedicated FC has no excuse to not be able to pull off the funds you've asked for in ward housing (30mil+), but a solo player should have it scaled in their favor to some extent. If not that, sell apartments like the Mog House in FFXI and give them a flower box to do light gardening with. Move chocobo raising to the chocobo porter or add a community stable for the apartments. I personally liked my Mog House a lot in FFXI; hell, that's probably why I like my room in game so much. A shame it seems like a lot people will never get to experience housing at this rate.

P.S. I know this all falls on deaf ears since Yoshi is probably on a company jet eating gourmet lunch on the tears of our wallets, but I want him to know I truly respect his trolling game. Classy move on waiting til the last second with a prewritten response ready for the rage. You truly earned your title as RNGeesus. I know that you laugh at us, the fat chocobos chasing after the gil. I dedicate my latest work to you. Ohoho.