System to Automatically Relinquish Personal Housing?

[GenJoe]

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Says who? My primary reason for buying my personal house was so I can go craft in peace without people running by me all the time and to avoid lag spikes which would cost me money every time my macro got messed up..

Secondary reason? Didn't have one, I had a garden and stable but never used it, didn't decorate...

You're free to think what you believe is the purpose of having a house, but just like in real life, different people do things for different reasons..

By your refusal to farm your garden for profit, you're just hurting yourself.. If you can do without the gil, great, I don't work my garden either. But saying that gardening was not a main motivator for you does not negate its value as a gil making method..

I don't spiritbond, I find it immensely boring, but I'm not going to go tell other people that spiritbonding is not a viable way to make gil just because it's not a primary method for me as a crafter

[Niwashi]

Says who? My primary reason for buying my personal house was so I can go craft in peace without people running by me all the time and to avoid lag spikes which would cost me money every time my macro got messed up.
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You're free to think what you believe is the purpose of having a house, but just like in real life, different people do things for different reasons..

Umm... but that was kind of my point. Tocsin tried claiming that anyone with a house should be pulling in 750k a week or more from its garden. I pointed out that there's plenty of other reasons for having a house, besides just garden profit.

(And I thought your "place to craft in peace" reason would sort of fall into the general "place to decorate and hang out at" reason I listed, or at least the "place to hang out at" part of it. I didn't mention crafting explicitly, but it wasn't really intended to be a comprehensive list.)

By your refusal to farm your garden for profit, you're just hurting yourself.. If you can do without the gil, great, I don't work my garden either. But saying that gardening was not a main motivator for you does not negate its value as a gil making method.

I never suggested it wasn't a good gil-making method, only that gil-making isn't the only reason (or even the main reason) why the game has a housing system, and that those of us who don't use it as a gil farm should still be able to keep a house.

[GenJoe]

and that those of us who don't use it as a gil farm should still be able to keep a house.

Well, that would be a personal choice as to how you choose to come up with the money.. If you're just not interested in making gil with gardening, there are other ways to do it, it'll just be more time consuming than watering clicking 8 different plants twice a day.
I agree 100k a week on small is a bit much, but even at 100k/wk most people who had saved up enough to buy a house worth millions in the first place know how to come up with another couple million to cover the costs.

Other than the few people who saved up for over a year just to buy a house (I'll never understand this btw, why does it take so long??), this won't affect too many people and you'll have to forgive when I say I feel little sympathy for people who saved only 40000 gil a week to get there, way I see it, that's just from refusal to participate in anything other than exactly what they like to do... Like my friend who ONLY does pvp, or another one who ONLY does dungeons etc.. there's nothing wrong with doing just what you want and nothing more, especially when considering that it's just a game. But that comes with a price, not being able to afford a house is one of them. In an MMO, sometimes you just have to suck it up and do some things you may not enjoy as much as the other things.. If they're a personal friend of mine, I'm glad to spot them the money, but if it was a stranger, forget it. I'd tell them to suck it up and go spiritbonding once a month to make up the costs.. If they're unwilling to do that, then maybe housing isn't for them the way SE implemented it.


Tbh, I think the biggest reason for all these issues concerning housing is that FF14 has a lot of casual player base, many RP'ers than I would normally see in other games. In a game that's targeted towards such an audience, why housing is limited and why it costs so much, I don't understand.. Housing is one of the biggest activities for an RP'er and yet, SE has made it so that only the most hardcore MMO player can afford the housing in a reasonable amount of time (weeks to a month) That's the biggest issue, they rolled out a feature of a game that would be best enjoyed by RP'ers and casual players but made the costs and methods to obtain it difficult for them and people like myself take advantage snatching up houses that will never be decorated with any furniture. I've gifted the house to a friend and she's taking good care of it btw, but if another one opened up at the same plot (Goblet Plot 1) you can be damn sure that I'll be buying it up and doing the exact same thing.. just leaving it an empty shell of a house.


It's the same deal with Gold Saucer, they made a light hearted, casual content to be enjoyed in downtime like a mini-game on the side.. Yet, the only people seeing success in it are people who stay there 24/7 farming MGP by the tens of or even hundreds of thousands every day. Triple Triad is a good example for this, with its atrociously low drop rates for cards and it being an immense time sink.


P.S. People may think that I'm a rich crafter elitist that think that housing is only for the people with millions of gil.. and I'd have to say yes, I am. But only because that's the way SE implemented the housing system, if it were implemented differently like in Wildstar, then I wouldn't care what other people do with their house or if other people just sit on an empty plot for 6 months etc.. But given the very limited nature of housing in FF14, I think it's only natural to think towards a way to rotate home ownership to make them more available if someone's not around in the game anymore.. If SE could overhaul the entire housing system, sure but I don't see that happening.

[Niwashi]

I agree that the houses need to become available again if the player who owns it quits the game, or even if they just lose interest (long-term) in owning the house. But that doesn't require that the maintenance fee be expensive, only that it exists. People who have left or lost interest aren't going to pay it no matter what the price is set at. A much lower fee would still work as an "are you still interested?" check, so it would still serve to free up house plots for people to buy. But that way it wouldn't prevent people who are interested and took all the effort to save up for a house in the first place from being able to own the house they bought. Lets stick to just taking houses away from people who don't need or want them anymore and not from those who do but can't make enough for the payments.

So if an ongoing maintenance fee were to be added, it should be easily within the price range of even the lowest-earning of casual players. The expense burden to prove they really want it was already made when they bought the place. A one-time huge expense like that can be saved up for. An ongoing weekly huge expense can't.