Why Removing Houses from inactive is NOT a solution.

[GenJoe]

A lot of non-housing owners seem to want to have SE take houses away from people who currently own them but are inactive.

That's where you're wrong, lot of the people who're advocating upkeep/relinquishment already own houses.. I myself have an FC mansion and have the means to buy a personal house if I wanted to. (Yes, Jenova still has a few plots left, I'm just not in a hurry)

The reason these people are advocating ownership to rotate is because we're sick of seeing all the dead houses in our neighborhoods, I can tell you that in my own FC ward, there are at least 5 inactive houses that see no use and my ward is a new one that just recently filled up about 2 weeks ago.

I regularly visit my old FC's house and in that ward, in the direct vicinity of a market board, there are 4 houses that I know for sure are completely dead, 1 of them being just a plot that somebody never even built a house on. and that's just within the vicinity of MB, in other parts of the same ward, there are even more houses that see no use.



Here are the facts:

1440 houses is not nearly enough to meet demand. Mind you, this number of 1440, was already expanded on TWICE iirc. Once by the addition of subdivision, then additional wards. We may see a few more wards added around 3.1 or 3.2, SE has expressed it won't likely be happening in 3.0. That's another 3 or 6 months out from now, how many wards do you think they can realistically add? 8 per city? doubling the number? That's being optimistic but let's say that they do.

Do you think 2880 houses will be enough to meet demand? No, especially on a server like Balmung, you should know this already.
So when do we get more wards? another year down the road from that point on? so that would be near the end of 2016 or after 2017, Realistically speaking, at the rate we're going with this housing issue, in 2 years, we may be looking at ~4000 houses per server.

In two years, and even 4000 isn't enough to meet demand for a server of 30000 players.



Upkeep nor automatic relinquishment will never be the silver bullet, nobody's suggesting that it is, but with the current situation, it's one of the only few things that can make houses rotate ownership.
There are many things that need to be done.

Let's just say, supply is fixed. All we can do to alleviate the problem is to shift the demand.

1. House sharing: If SE implements house sharing, like they announced ages ago, this would drastically cut down the demand for housing, especially if they allow friends to also share houses instead of just eternal bonded.

2. Upkeep/Relinquishment: This is needed to check for the people who have houses, but just let it sit without using it. If houses were unlimited, sure I don't care if somebody makes an empty dirt lot out of it, but it isn't.. So if you buy a house, you better make some good use of it.

3. House trading: Currently, there are many homeowners who bought a house, but aren't doing much with it, these people aren't inactive, they just don't have much interest in the housing itself other than the initial curiosity.. Now, do these people just relinquish a house at a loss? No, These people need a way out, let people trade houses and they can make their money back. I was one of those people with my personal house, I left it as a shell of a house for about 3 months until I decided to give it to a friend of mine, she takes way better care of it than I do, it's all furnished now too.

4. More wards: Nobody that's advocating any of the above are against adding more wards, that is on SE's part, but we've seen the rate at which they deliver, if you already have a house, you may not care that it'll take 2 years for them to finally add a decent amount of new wards, but I do. When I'm starting to see more and more dead houses around me, that takes away a lot from the idea of owning a home in the Lavender Beds, there are very few neighbors.. As HW hits and there are contents gated behind having houses, this will become even more important..


Hopefully with HW, it'll show like a launch deck on the yard, so we can tell which houses have an airship and which do not.. I'm betting that it'll be like 3, 4 houses on each ward that'll have this, and rest will be dead.. More people need to realize how dead the housing wards are in this game, it is absolutely absurd that veteran players can keep a house without having put any new work into it for the past year and more into it just because they played before other people? Why do people think they're more entitled to a feature in the game than others? If you like the housing, and you use it regularly, you'll find a way to keep it.. If you don't, you'll just lose it simple as that. Unfair you say? Well, with something as limited as housing is in this game, I think we're past the point of what's fair.

Fair is a mathematical impossibility at this point, no?

If you had 1500 servings of food for a group of 20000 people, there's no fair way to distribute it, but it also wouldn't make sense to serve the same 1500 people everyday and let the 18500 starve. If you ask me, that's way more unfair.