Housing Reclamation - Buying time? Or something else?

[Kosmos992k]

So, the housing belonging to FCs or individuals that go past a threshhold of inactivity will be reclaimed by the system and offered for purchase to other players/FCs. Great, it's a step in the right direction, although only a small step on crowded servers.

But, are the Devs simply trying buy time in the hope that if we are made to wait, enough players will give up on attempting to buy a house, so that their undersized housing system will be able to cope when the new housing wards in Ishgard open up?

Or, are they preparing a surprise that makes things work for everyone?

[T2teddy]

Well they better do something spectacular imho.
As examples on Sargatanas and Balmung:

Sarg has around 220 qualified homeless FCs with another 300 or so sitting at rank 5 and very active.
Balmung has 320 homeless qualified FCs and several hundred more at rank 5 and rising.

[Jynx]

The purge system will only really have one large wave of removal and that's from long unsubed players or companies, expect a big boon of houses to show up for the first wave and then see few trickle in afterwards as people will obviously just log on to keep their house fresh.

Ensuring they keep their house and SE gets to keep their subscription fee.

This isn't even in any players best interest, it's only motivated by holding a players experience hostage if they leave the game to encourage subscriptions from even non-active players. I really do hope SE does something proper about the housing situation but at this point why would they if people are willing to pay them extra to keep the system broken?

[Alex_Lenderson]

Actually as a paying customer the idea of people paying (money to game makers) and not taxing server bandwidth by actually playing is a plus for me.

[Jynx]

Actually as a paying customer the idea of people paying (money to game makers) and not taxing server bandwidth by actually playing is a plus for me.

Instead of fixing a broken system?

Some people...

[Syrei]

A point I made on another thread: One of the concerns I have with this housing reclamation initiative is it doesn't really solve anything and could even make it worse.

Right now SE has no real safeguards against land barons/gil sellers/buyers; and with the Heavensward economy they're in an even better position to snatch up available plots then they were when housing first released. Now I'm willing to bet that 45 days after 3.1 launches they will be camping the housing districts. So, while you might be lucky enough to get one of the freed plots the bulk of them will go to these unsavory types and then we are right back where we started.

[Morningstar1337]

@Jynx to fix a broken system SE needs better servers, to get better servers they need to be shaken away from their complacently.

the Bottom line is that SE took the wrong lesson from ARR's success. Instead of thinking "you know we fixed the game once, it might be profitable to focus on this market for a while?" they instead went "Great! now we have MORE resources to focus on out new blockbuster title that will surely win over all the fans this time, This time XV will succeed where XIII failed and unify our customers." But then again XIII shows them not to be good students lately

This also applies to Dragon Quest XI and Kingdom Hearts III but since XIV and XV are part of the same franchise with it own development issues and that it is connected to XIII during the initial phases of development, I'm gonna say that XV will be just as polarizing as XIII and that their gamble will fail.

Basically XIV even after its rebirth sees to be neglected by the company at large, sorta like the ignored chile whose parents focus too much on their younger sibling because they think the ignored kid can fend for themself.