Time on House removal/reclaming is way to short! (private houseing)

[Rina_Leonhart]

What's the difference in having a friend reset it on your character vs a friend being a tenant on their own character and resetting it? Due to subscription? But then if the other person is making use of the house while actual owner is away due to family member issues or deployment, the house isn't going to waste in the end. The biggest issue most people had was the limited resource just sitting there unused and rotting due to someone perma quitting. But if it is being used by someone, then what is the issue? In the end, SE needs a second housing system that allows gardening and won't be as limited due to the style taking up so much server space.

[Beckett]

What's the difference in having a friend reset it on your character vs a friend being a tenant on their own character and resetting it?

The potentially nicer way of looking at it is: I could quit the game, and my buddy who's still playing, and already has a house of his own, could "keep the house warm" for me. Even though I might never come back to the game, that house remains unavailable because my friend is walking into it once a month, and my house will remain unavailable unless my buddy quits too.

The cynical (and likely correct) way of looking at it is that one gets SE a sub, the other doesn't.

[Rina_Leonhart]

But they are still getting a sub one way or the other. The friend can just let it go if they wanted to. But if it's about subs, then it just bounces back to the whole "they should make timer subscription based, not walk in based" in the end. It really isn't any different then having the friend log into your account to do it.

[MilaDazol]

This claiming system is really good, good for SE, because it can cash more people to pay their monthly sub, and good for the active players who play the game, as more houses will be available for them.

The private housing will not allow never tenants to reset the timer, so will force more houses in to the market, which is also good for the active players; that's a problem for you? use a FC house instead and let your pals reset it.

If you are so worried about losing your private house because you cant log in, ask a friend or a relative to lend you the money for the sub and let them, with your character, set a foot in it. (if you don't have money, friends or relatives, that's another, more serious problem you should solve first before worrying about a virtual house)

And yes, I have a home I worked a lot to get, (in Balmung, a really crowded world); and I do understand there's a lot of things SE has a LOT of work to do, like obviously, create more houses, and houses belonging to one account with multiple alts.

[Callback]

The system is fine in terms of timing, but they need a furniture reclaim feature.

Add a tab of "reclaimed furniture" to the furnishings menu. Let players respawn furniture from lost houses this way. Now there's nothing to complain about. If you lose your plot, you can get a new one later and redecorate with all your same stuff.

[Niwashi]

The system is fine in terms of timing, but they need a furniture reclaim feature.

Add a tab of "reclaimed furniture" to the furnishings menu. Let players respawn furniture from lost houses this way. Now there's nothing to complain about. If you lose your plot, you can get a new one later and redecorate with all your same stuff.

The thing is that they already have the foundation for that. They just implemented it horribly. If your house is foreclosed on (or you're dropped from an FC while you have a personal room), then at least some of your items get stored with the resident caretaker, where you have another month to pick them up before they're permanently deleted. SE would only have needed two changes to make this a reasonable system:

(1) They need to preserve all items, getting rid of this ridiculous rule about some items becoming irretrievable.
And (2) they need to make that caretaker storage permanent, just like our characters themselves.

With those two changes, then even if your house was lost to this reclamation process, when you get back you could try and get another house to replace it. Lack of availability would still be an issue, so it might take a while, but a player who managed to get another plot could be back to where they left off, without having to start over from scratch.

Once the plot has been reclaimed for use by other players, caretaker storage isn't a limited asset that needs another time limit. That's no different than if they decided to start deleting people's inventory or retainer storage whenever they didn't play for a while. It would guarantee that anyone who leaves for a bit stays gone permanently, as they wouldn't have much to come back to.

[Tagus]

You know... it's a subscription based game, and 45 days is a pretty long time. I hate to say it, and it's totally understandable that nobody would ever want to have something taken away from them, but if you really actually cared that much about your video game house, you'd probably play the game at least 1 time in 6 weeks. God knows I play every day trying to make enough money to buy one. If you don't feel compelled to long in, maybe you won the game!

And honestly, if it's because you can't afford a sub fee for that long, you've probably got bigger problems in life than losing your ffxiv house. That probably sounds insensitive, and I'm sorry. I don't really mean for it to sound cruel. But think about it. It's probably a little bit true?

This crap is just a game, man. If you come back and you have the means to make the money to buy a house, you're doing fine.

[BroodingFicus]

I think if housing was readily available to everyone, all the time without fail, repossession would not be so large an issue. Thing is (at least for the legacy and larger servers) having the 'means' to buy a house means absolutely nothing. There are no lots and so far nothing I have heard suggest there will ever be enough to meet demands. So even if Square gave you all your gil and returned all furniture, you still wouldn't be able to buy a new one. Personally I feel it should have gone like this:

1. The amount of days should have been in even subscription amounts. Ex 30, 60, 90. Minimum of 60. Personally I would have liked to see it /based/ on being subscribed to begin with if they insist on taking it back (for the record I think the whole system is out of order but *shrug*). Something along the lines of: After 60 days without a paid subscription, your house will be repossessed.
2. Those you share your house with should count in stopping the clock. If only to help people who can pay subs but are out due to medical reasons or military deployment etc since they chose to not make it subscription based in the first place.
3. Repossession should /definitely/ give you back everything. Funds. Furniture. It should also keep it stored indefinitely.

As Nicoba said, part of the saltiness in this whole mess is because Square came out, got on a box and said 'WELCOME TO THE FUTURE! There shall be no such outdated systems here!' and then implemented one to fix a mistake. A mistake they actually made worse on several occasions. Including the actual 'implementation' of personal housing itself. I love the game and obviously there are limitations to what the server can handle but punishing the players, even if they are willing to pay you for the privilege of keeping their house, seems out of sorts to me both as a matter of trust and from a business stand point.

[Ayerinn]

*SNIP* for space
I love the game and obviously there are limitations to what the server can handle but punishing the players, even if they are willing to pay you for the privilege of keeping their house, seems out of sorts to me both as a matter of trust and from a business stand point.

After reading comments / thinking about this for weeks - I'm in agreement now with some people that the entire point of the reclaim system is to:

1) "Hey look - we are doing something about the housing issues!"
2) Abuse the lack of housing as a means of subscriber boosts / retention

Unfortunately, especially with the timing /scope of the free login period, I believe 2 is more important to SE then making the reclaim system make any sense or to be fair.

[Jpec07]

I wonder how much of this is affected by their being in data centers, rather than using a scalable cloud solution for their servers. Machines in data centers cost a lot more to run than virtual servers, and there are ways that you can make virtual boxes scale with traffic and demand extremely easily. This would translate to servers that add wards when everything is full, or that completely save reclaimed player and FC houses with an option to restore into a new plot.

To the original point, I'm seeing that most of the people in this thread hold the opinion I agree with: in order to properly maintain the bottom line, SE needs to show preferential treatment with limited resources to paying customers. So yes, this is absolutely a bid to drive subscription retention and generate additional revenue. That's what businesses do. Asking SE to foot the bill for keeping your house active while you're not even paying them is absurd--and it's incredibly generous that they're giving even a portion of the house's contents back.

The only somewhat valid counterpoint is hardware failure, but asking them to plan for slipshod hardware is a bit absurd (it's like blaming Best Buy for selling out of the 50 UHDTVs they had for $2 on Black Friday because your car broke down on the way). But even still, it's not as if you lose everything in this case, and working up the additional .5M-30M Gil to repurchase a plot so you can restore your house when you come back should not be too difficult.