"Vacate Chambers" without Estate Access

[Syrehn]

It blows my mind that this happened and there has been 0 GM response. The in-game GM support is horrendous at the best of times (gotta love the canned responses) but their ineptitude with this situation blows my mind. This player (hostage taker) should get hit with a perma ban hammer. >.<

[ExKage]

It truly boggles my mind that there had been a similar situation A YEAR AGO and the devs and GMs still can't do anything about it.

It's possible they didn't realize that Guess Access was also denied and hence didn't see that issue.

[Shofie]

It's possible they didn't realize that Guess Access was also denied and hence didn't see that issue.

I am willing to bet this is entirely the issue. I'm not sure anyone realized that was the key to all of this.

[D-chan]

Not even the first time this happened. Wow.

Also, I don't think the issue here is the option to lock FC members out of the house. I think the issue is having to manually empty your room of furniture to be able to demolish it. It's altogether inconvenient, and there's not even a reason it needs to be that way, since it happens automatically if you're kicked from the FC instead of leaving on your own. Since the option to lock FC members out of the FC house is based on their respective rank, I can understand locking out new probationary members or maybe members who are being punished for something. It's not something I would ever do, or consider useful, but that doesn't mean no one else can find it useful. I don't think the option needs to be removed. If it--understandably--bothers you, then don't join an FC that utilizes it.

[AnnietheCat]

snip

I get why you feel that way, but that's not the case. We've had members join up AFTER my co-leader and I spent all our gil purchasing the house and then decide to stick around to get permissions and take things. People who show up after we've purchased our house aren't entitled to the estate just because it belongs to the FC. Sure, if they had a hand in helping to purchase the plot and the permit they do. But I'm talking people who either don't contribute anything(be it gil or mats or even helping lower level players within the fc) or join up after the estate is there. People can't steal or plan to steal what they can't see, and they'll get tired of waiting within a few days. Not to mention, I don't enjoy having members who just intend to use us for housing features; I've had people ask to join up to use our stables and chocobo food and then leave when their bird is the color they want, or people who said, in all honesty, that they don't care about the fc and they just want a room of their own. Restricting access to the estate discourages these types of "members". That isn't the problem.

The problem is that this feature can be used to abuse others all because the devs won't allow people to vacate furnished rooms from the lawn. All features in this game can be used to abuse and/or harass others. voting to kick a member from a dungeon/trial/raid, the rank system in FCs, even Linkshells and the MB if a person is popular enough. However, all of those systems have the means for players to remove themselves or protect themselves from harassment. This case did not have that. Because you cannot vacate from the lawn, these players could not protect themselves or their items. Everything in game has potential for exploitation. That's why almost everything has a backup plan or a way out. This situation could have been avoided had the devs allowed for people to vacate furnished rooms. It's that simple.

[szalkerous]

Really odd there has been ZERO comment from anyone at Square on this.

[aerolol]

GMs will usually say "rest assured that people from our staff are reading the forums" in canned responses, but seeing this kind of issue going unanswered proves that those are HUGE LIES.

[Chaotic_Darkfae]

I'm going to add my two gil to this.

When I first got our FC Hall set up, and was setting rank privileges, and I saw that Estate Access was a privilege...my first thought was "...no good can come from this...", just right away.

I used to GM for EverQuest (the original one), so my mind often immediately thinks of the worst case scenarios for everything that I run across in a video game. And the first thing I thought of is someone locking up their FC house and not letting members in - and this was before private rooms were added. When they added private rooms, with all the restrictions on them, I really thought bad things could happen. Stuff exactly like this where an FC leader just locked up the house and prevented anyone from getting to their rooms because they got salty over something. And it's happened because the coding exists for it to happen, and it's absolutely horrifying that the loophole exists, because unfortunately not everyone is nice, and people will be abusive as hell when given the chance if they feel "justified" - even if they are wrong for doing so.

The simplest solution to this is to just make the "Vacate Chambers" function work as it apparently was intended - click the button, have your stuff that's in the room go to the sutler, and have the chambers demolish. A second solution would be to have the "Leave FC" button tied to the same set of functions that the "Kick Member" function is tied to, so that when a person confirms they wish to leave an FC, their room is demolished and all of their items go to the sutler. These would keep situations like the one that just occurred on Balmung - the very situation that I expected to happen when I saw that Estate Access could be removed or added as a rank priveledge and the specifics of Private Rooms were released - in check, as members could still get the items from their rooms, many of which can only be obtained through quests or exceptionally hard work, and leave the free company when a leader loses their minds and locks everyone out of the FC hall.

Another solution would simply be to have it so that the "Purchase Private Room" right voids the "Estate Access" being removed from a FC member. Essentially tie the two together in a fashion so that when you grant the right to purchase a private room to a rank, it makes it so you cannot remove the right to estate access from that rank, and make it extremely obvious so the FC leader knows that this is a thing. That way they can't complain about it later.

So yes. This needs to be fixed. There are some solutions for you, Squeenix. I realise that many FC leaders want to limit access to the FC hall to some ranks, but I think it's harmful after a certain point to have it...as this all has proven.

[Lurial]

I wonder if the folks who had trouble with this a year ago also tried making a thread and attempted to get SE's attention? People are right - just having someone at SE confirm that somebody has seen this and that they're looking into it would be more of a comfort than silence. Especially since as of now, GMs are unable to help people who are unfortunate enough to go through something like this.

[The_NPC]

As just finally reading this senario (herd about it 2 months ago in Linkshell/party chat a few times) & being a FC leader, even if I don't plan to rebuild it after its "colapse" a year ago, this sounds/is a problem bad enouf that I'd ahve to find a dictionary just to have the proper words to express how bad it is since I don't think "obsurdly horrible form of harrasment" quite covers what I'd wanna say about it fully... to Square-Enix: "PLEASE FIX ASAP!!"