Lack of Housing - Still an Issue

[Grimmel]

I was a little upset that a question on the first page of one of the "Ask questions for Producer Live" Which questioned if and when more housing would be introduced went unanswered after gaining a lot of interest from likes.

The issue in lack of housing still exists on a lot of servers. Balmung being one with zero plots available and still many Free Companies without a house.

[DragonFlyy]

Was stated recently that since most servers have available housing, they feel it's fine the way it is. Hurts the servers that don't have availability, but they are all linked so adding more housing to the full ones would add more empty housing to the ones with availability, eating up more server resources. Personally, they should make the housing separate per server. That way if Balmung needs 20 wards but another lower pop server only needs 5, they could do just that. As it stands now, if one server has 10 wards, they all do, regardless of availability, which sucks.

[Fenral]

Logic.

To begin with, even if scalable instanced housing was never in their design spec, the current system should have been designed to create wards on-demand, with each new ward taken from a data-center specific quota (which could be increased over time). If there are worlds (not going to call them servers, because each is actually a server cluster linked to the other worlds) with empty or mostly unused housing wards, the resources being used to maintain those empty zones should go towards maintaining a new ward on a more populated world.

I think what they want is for housing to be a contributing factor to the evening-out of world populations, but it's not nearly enough of a motivator on its own. And who would even want to leave a world like Balmung or Gilgamesh (except to go to the other)?

[myahele]

Doesn't help that people who bought houses and decide to quit playing will still have that house. Period.

These empty houses will not contribute to the servers community. They wont grow the ever-increasing need to for certain crops that the devs keep adding.

That abandoned house will not become an FC house where members can mingle. Now new FCs can never advance since having a house offers so many perks.

But this only affects highly populated servers in their mind.

[Bluevann]

While they said they felt they met the demand, they also said they'd monitor each server's situation. That's what I want to hear about.

[Quesse]

I am still a little bitter about housing. Let's look back a little.

We knew housing was coming even in 1.0. We also knew that our gil would have a zero knocked off it. So it was a big question - what is housing going to cost? How much would be available? I had about 40 million gil at the time out of a possible 999 million. The thinking was that would easily buy a medium house and 100 million would probably be the upper limit for a big house.

So 2.0 arrived. One VERY IMPORTANT thing happened. Our gil was reduced (mine from 40 million to 4) BUT the total amount you could amass was left the same at 999 million. Why was this important? Because it allowed Yoshi to both reduce the economy's gil but still charge astronomical amounts for housing. After all, who would pay 90 million for a house if the max gil you could carry was 99 million?

This is important because in the name of "people have too much gil" "gil needs to be removed from the economy" Yoshi was able to get away with providing only a very very limited supply of houses. Think about it. Was it a coincidence that there happened to be an important reason for removing gil and raising housing costs at the same time that there was an inability to provide enough server capacity for housing?

As time has gone on it has become more obvious. SE has reneged on all the promises given about affordable, plentiful, separate personal housing and has no intention of providing any of it. What I cannot understand, is WHY? I think this is the reason for your OP. SE has done a terrible job explaining exactly why housing should not ever be affordable, why it should be extremely limited, why it must remain integrated with FC housing, why there can't be additional more affordable instanced housing.

I love housing and the community experiences it builds. I'm sad everytime I hear an FC member say they can't afford a house or that there is no house available. Or that we can't easily form an FC neighborhood.

In case anyone has forgotten:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ore-affordable.

[Fenral]

Doesn't help that people who bought houses and decide to quit playing will still have that house. Period.

As a fellow Greg-dweller, I'm sure you've seen them: the ghost towns and endless fields of dead Jute, Glazenut, and Thavnairian Onions...

Housing should never have been a "first come, first served" system.

[Zelas]

Putting FC housing and Personal housing in the same basket was a dumb idea to begin with. Who really benefits from housing? Who is getting a ton of new content added to their housing in 3.0?

Free Companies.

Personal housing offers no advantage whatsoever, except showing off, or having a personal place to spend time at if you don't want to chill in the city. Personal housing owners are not getting FC crafting, or FC airships. Free Companies are.

So it makes absolute no sense that people can buy off ALL the FC housing for themselves, and lock all the potential new Free Companies out of the upcoming content.

And I wish SE would at least talk about it. It's infuriating not to have our questions answered when the situation is an obviously dire one. They should be DOING something about it, but they're not even TALKING about it. It's like they're pretending nothing's wrong.

[Saccharin]

Purge of abandoned houses has to happen. How many in the earlier ward actually still have players active.

[lun4tic]

So 2.0 arrived. One VERY IMPORTANT thing happened. Our gil was reduced (mine from 40 million to 4) BUT the total amount you could amass was left the same at 999 million. Why was this important? Because it allowed Yoshi to both reduce the economy's gil but still charge astronomical amounts for housing. After all, who would pay 90 million for a house if the max gil you could carry was 99 million?

This is important because in the name of "people have too much gil" "gil needs to be removed from the economy" Yoshi was able to get away with providing only a very very limited supply of houses. Think about it. Was it a coincidence that there happened to be an important reason for removing gil and raising housing costs at the same time that there was an inability to provide enough server capacity for housing?

JET FUEL CAN'T MELT STEEL BEAMS