System to Automatically Relinquish Personal Housing?

[Madjames]

Reimbursing gil for lost housing plots is a catastrophically bad idea. One of the biggest design features of housing was to make it a method of destroying gil, to reduce the wealth disparity between new players and old ones. If they can simply take their gil back, it isn't really gone, now is it?

True but housing is NOT the only gil sink there is in this game. I would simple give the gil back as a way to be fair to all of the cry babys. The ones who let their house go are the ones who will probably not be back anyway.

I have a mil gil, I will get a house and from there I will be one of the riches new players on my server eventually. I always have been in every MMORPG I have played since september 1997. Take as much gil from us players as you want because eventually it will not matter to me one way or another as a 40 mil house will be chump change.

[Niwashi]

Reimbursing gil for lost housing plots is a catastrophically bad idea. One of the biggest design features of housing was to make it a method of destroying gil, to reduce the wealth disparity between new players and old ones. If they can simply take their gil back, it isn't really gone, now is it?

If, instead of getting it back as gil, you get back a voucher item of some kind that you can trade in to purchase a replacement house of the same size, that means the gil spent is still tied up in owning either a house or a voucher for one. (It also takes care of the problem of the houses changing prices. Instead of an amount of gil, you have a voucher for a small, medium, or large house plot. That way it allows an even replacement regardless of whether the replacement house is currently priced at more or less than the original one.)

[Souljacker]

What is the purpose of that though? It doesn't solve the issue of there just not being enough housing. So that plot is released, and someone else buys. We've only shifted the demand around a bit, not eliminated it which is what SE should be doing. So when the person comes back he has a voucher, but nothing to trade it in for because we're back to square one on plot availability.

It's not a real solution.

[Niwashi]

What is the purpose of that though? It doesn't solve the issue of there just not being enough housing. So that plot is released, and someone else buys. We've only shifted the demand around a bit, not eliminated it which is what SE should be doing. So when the person comes back he has a voucher, but nothing to trade it in for because we're back to square one on plot availability.

It's not a real solution.

Well, at least it would mean we only need enough plots for the currently playing people who actively want them at the moment, not for everyone who at any point in the past has wanted one. On some of the high population servers, that wouldn't be enough, and in that case you're right, there likely wouldn't be places to buy when you come back without other solutions put in place as well.

On many of the low and mid population servers, however, it would solve the problem. There it isn't a matter of all the plots being taken by current players, but all getting filled up because half of them are sitting empty, abandoned but still owned by people who have left. It solves that part of the problem. So there the voucher would be useful. The foreclosures would ensure a steady supply of plots being newly available, so if you came back and got a voucher for a house you'd lost, you could trade it for another (which is likely a plot that somebody else lost).

It's a partial solution, one which at least eases the problem and prevents it from growing continuously worse.

(Something like unlimited, individually instanced personal houses that avoid these limited-plot wards entirely would be a far more complete and effective solution, but also far more involved to implement.)

[Souljacker]

(Something like unlimited, individually instanced personal houses that avoid these limited-plot wards entirely would be a far more complete and effective solution, but also far more involved to implement.)

You know, it wasn't all that involved that it couldn't be done in a game that predated this one by nearly twenty years. This idea that instanced, individual housing is so complex and difficult that there's no way they could implement it and instead, every other convoluted wall-o-text idea would somehow be EASIER is just insane.

[GenJoe]

You know, it wasn't all that involved that it couldn't be done in a game that predated this one by nearly twenty years. This idea that instanced, individual housing is so complex and difficult that there's no way they could implement it and instead, every other convoluted wall-o-text idea would somehow be EASIER is just insane.

No, but for SE to implement instanced housing now would mean that they would have to handle 2 different types of housing systems in the game.. That's what makes it complex. Easier to build from nothing than to change something already in existence to something completely different..

[Souljacker]

No, but for SE to implement instanced housing now would mean that they would have to handle 2 different types of housing systems in the game.. That's what makes it complex. Easier to build from nothing than to change something already in existence to something completely different..

I buy that, but isn't that kind of their fault that it ended up this way? I mean, they didn't have to release it. They really didn't have to. So to use one terrible mistake to justify not fixing the terrible mistake is incredibly unprofessional. Besides that, half the entire game consists of instanced content. They can put us in a dungeon, they can put us in a mog house. For now, I'd just settle for them at least acknowledging that they understand it's still an issue, and more than that, WHY it's an issue (not that we're just too lazy to make gil nonsense).

Believe it or not, the players *in general* are reasonable. they came back after 1.0 failed so miserably because YoshiP came to them and said "I understand why you left, and this is my plan to make it better" and then he did it. And players returned. And now the population is HUGE because of it. The game is successful because of it. Then, somewhere along the way, missteps started to happen. And now here we are with systems that are still clunky, unbalanced, and some are downright broken.

I believed in YoshiP and this game, but lately it just seems like no one cares anymore. That's a terrible feeling to have. It doesn't make me want to talk this game up to anyone who asks how it is when I tell them my mmo is FFXIV.