When will you really address the housing availability problem?

[Ryel]

Ex primal mats - Required a team.
Coil mats - Required a team.
Treasure maps - Need a gather to get the maps unless you're spending money to buy them which in some cases you would just lose more money than you got.
Content sales - Usually supplemented by RMTs also required a team.

It doesn't matter if the content needs a team or not, prior to 3.1 Kingly whiskers on my server were going for 15mil each split by 8 is still a profit that doesn't require a crafter or gatherer. Additionally there are many content buyers who have legitimately made their gil via crafting or gathering, you don't get to just blanket it with "Supplemented by RMT" and ignore it as a viable source of income for those capable. Especially when that income can very well rack up hundreds of millions in gil over time.

Also if you play the odds on treasure maps you more often come out ahead over multiple maps even if you have poor drops due to the selling of crafting mats and the occasional high price items. when 3.0 hit Thav silks were going for 7mil+ on my server and selling consistently we had a map party going and had people drop multiples of them over time which is easily enough to cover the cost of the maps with a healthy profit.

Before Heavensward we had more than a few bluebirds and nutkins drop to cover multiple maps and profit for people.

RNG? Sure but income is income.

Daily/Weekly challenges - That's not a lot gil and especially not enough for the millions you need.
Retainer Ventures - You'd have to get super freaking lucky to consistently find mats that would get you the millions you need instead of the standard fish they bring back.

Free income is still income whether it's through luck or not, if you only look at income in terms of large gains your wallet isn't going to fill very quickly, and it's not as if I've suggest these as a SOLE source of revenue, the idea is that you are acquiring gil through multiple avenues so that it adds up over time.

Playing the marketboard - Maybe, but without a good supply I can't see how you can play the marketboard without your own injections.
Spiritbonding / Materia sales - You'd have to keep buying the gear to spiritbond with and hope that the money you spent on the gear was less than the materia you got.

I took out the others because they didn't exist prior to our current problem so I can't comment on them today. These were the only way to get money before Heavensward when all the houses became sold out.

Another poster broke down the marketboard bit so i'll skip that.

Spiritbonding was actually a huge money maker for a large number of players in my FC without crafting classes, they actually went out and FOUND other crafters to make the gear for them at near cost of mats and a percentage cut of the materia profits, this was more than enough during the relic boom for players to hit 10 to 20 mil in a few weeks of doing brayflox (hard) casually with bonus gil if they got a Baby Opo-opo to drop since those were selling for 2mil at the time.

Nobody is saying any of this is easy, but it's more than possible for the casual player.

[Voltyblast]

A noble thought, to be certain. But the game desperately needs what few gilsinks it has; how would you redistribute the 300k cost of the Private Chambers in order to make them free?

If you need a gilsink, how about giving us proper gilsink? Let me give you a couple and more of good gilsinks that they should and could have added.

Glamours: 5k an item. On rp servers, that's a big gilsink alright.
Chocobo Dye: 20k a color. You can do it for free but, for those like me who don't care enough for spending hours on the food, I would rather buy it instantly.
Decorations: price variable depending on the item. You can craft them for cheap but not everyone has a crafter in their sleeves, and sometimes the items can be expensive
Special Dye: 50k-150k. We can't sell them, so why not allow us to buy with ingame gold? I'm not going to use real money on a dye (unless it's a f2p that is), so this could be a good alternative.
Glamour items (like the taffeta): 1m. You can buy it or craft it or make it yourself. This would also stabilize the insane prices of the glamour items. I think any price would work, just enough to sink. It's debatable though.
Repairs: I never, ever, ever, ever, ever,ever,ever spent more than 1k for repairing my equipment, and I'm a tank. How about adding a zero to that?

I'm sure we can add more sinks to the list. I don't mean these choices as the only choices though: make it optional. Either craft it, work it, or buy it with gold. Lots of gil will sink this way, because right now gil isn't going away (the houses were meant as gilsink, but without any plots to sell, what's there to sink?).

And really...do we need to add a needless fee of 300k for the sake of needlessness? Do we need to make some items overly priced for gilsinking, when some items could be much better on that regard?
But sure, alright: make it double but only a one time purchase, so you can have a free room in every FC. Done.

I don't think there's anything really wrong with housing that can't be fixed by providing more instances of the neighborhoods. However, I do agree FC private chambers should be free, or at least only hit you with a one-time unlock fee per character. That said, even free private chambers at the FC house isn't going to enable access to housing related features (like gardening) for everyone.

One time purchase is perfectly fine in my opinion as well: I'd spend double or triple if it means having a free room in every fc. As it is, the private chambers isn't worth it unless you're super-duper-uber friends with the entire company and don't leave, or it's your own FC with your own housing. I lost nearly 1m in private chambers. Why? Because. Don't have to have a reason: things happen, things go bad or right, and eventually things go bad: my previous fc died out badly, with one of its members being quite upset because she lost over 5m in decorating both her private room and house. That's 5m gone to the toilet and she's quite demoralized to keep playing as well. I suppose it's working as intended?

However...I don't know how you can fix the gardening. Maybe give us terrain vases in the inn room or something? I'm sure they could fix it somehow (if they care enough to fix it, that is) but I suppose the best plan would be to make a player able to keep vases (like 2 or 3) for themselves so they can grow their crops. I know that there's also the ranking issues and the fact that many only join fcs for growing crops or coloring chocobos (hence my gilsink idea up here), so I really don't know how you can really fix this way without some additional detail.

[Twilite]

Why not just add more wards? Or is the "servers might crash" the excuse?

[Gyson]

It doesn't matter if the content needs a team or not, prior to 3.1 Kingly whiskers on my server were going for 15mil each split by 8 is still a profit that doesn't require a crafter or gatherer.

At the risk of further inflaming the debate on how money is made, I think it's important to point out that while people may be making gil "legitimately", a big part of why they're able to sell items for so much gil in the first place is because someone, somewhere down the line *is* buying gil from RMTs. It just keeps changing hands as people marvel over the fact that they can get away with (to use your example) charging 15 million gil for a Kingly Whisker. I mean.. do you really think all the money moving around in the economy is from non RMT sources?

Anyway, that's a different topic entirely.

The data for those zones requires hardly any storage, imagine 50+ or even 100+ just small houses crammed into a zone and the sheer amount of stored data it takes. If it wasnt much, SE would have created larger instances with much more houses already. No one knows the numbers but server populations are numbers we CAN look at. If you think it will be possible on a legacy server without transfers away from... not very likely at all. Thats just considering one server.

That's speculation. Of course, we're all just speculating until SE gets completely honest with us and starts addressing this topic without the PR spin. There was a time when the the developers were very open and honest with the players (i.e. back when they were trying to save this game), but now we seem to be slipping back to that kind of dialogue exchange where we get strung along with just enough information and empty promises to keep us interested. That's very unfortunate (and annoying).

I will say this - Lord of the Rings Online has a very similar housing system: 4 regions with 30 houses per neighborhood. There's a 250 neighborhood limit per region. That's *30,000* homes compared to FFXIV's 1,440.. and LotRO is free-to-play and going on 7 years old now. Like I said.. when there's a will there's a way, and for SE the will just doesn't seem to be there on this matter. Why is that?

[Saint_Angeles]

As someone who owns a personal mansion, I am indifferent.

[Twilite]

As someone who owns a personal mansion, I am indifferent.

And you're pretty much forced to keep playing just to keep it. :P

[Miah_G]

I really don't think the time they give players to use a house before its reclaimed is a ploy to get them to re-sub. It might serve that purpose as well in some cases, but I don't think its the intent.

Sometimes people run into money issues and cant pay a sub, or other real world issues keep them from logging in (moving, job, school projects, family, tragedies and so on). For example, if I had something come up IRL and I couldn't pay a sub for a month, I'd feel really cheated if I were to lose something as large as a my FF14 house and knowing that its gone... well, it may serve as a deterrent for me returning at all.

People shouldn't be able to be un-subbed or inactive for long periods of time and still be able to retain their house, however. The houses need maintenance and housing plots are limited in supply (thats just the way it is at the moment). It would be unfair if once bought, the plot belongs to its owner until the end of time no matter what. Thank goodness there's a month and a half of inactivity allowed before the house is placed on the market again.

The current system isn't perfect, but its the step in the right direction, I feel.

[Gyson]

I really don't think the time they give players to use a house before its reclaimed is a ploy to get them to re-sub. It might serve that purpose as well in some cases, but I don't think its the intent.

While I don't know how it's working in FFXI now, it's worth pointing out that for several years following FFXI's launch SE only guaranteed keeping your character data intact for 90 days following the lapse of your subscription (which is a *lot* worse than losing your house). My friends and I all lost our FFXI characters during a one year hiatus we took from the game (and I doubt my newest character even exists there anymore). So, this is not the first time they've used this tactic to encourage subscription payments from inactive players.

[Mycow8me]

A 7 year old game is going to have an entirely different set of limitations than a for the most part new one. Im sorry but if the reason characters cant get to creative is cause of memory limitations... that just makes you wonder even more about those kinds of limitations for something like housing. Im not saying its never going to happen but the idea of personal housing for all in an actual zone is highly unlikely at any time soon or at all. This could have been done sooner possibly with an extra monthly fee similar to retainer or even player hosted instances that cost immensely less gil than the public zone counterparts. Theres alot of other possibilities that wont involve memory or even server usage. SE though likes to keep everything server side to avoid hacks etc. I dont blame them but either way housing for everyone aint gonna change anytime soon.

Im all for a general situation outlook message from the devs though, they know theres alot of disappointed folks by now im sure

[Gyson]

A 7 year old game is going to have an entirely different set of limitations than a for the most part new one. Im sorry but if the reason characters cant get to creative is cause of memory limitations... that just makes you wonder even more about those kinds of limitations for something like housing.

Only a single instance is loaded into your computer's/Playstation's memory at any given moment. So, whether you have 8 instanced neighborhoods or 5920 of them on the servers makes no difference memory-wise. I don't have to upgrade my memory every time the developers decide to add an additional zone to the game.

I agree that a 7 year old game is going to have a different set of limitations - one would think much more restrictive limits than a more modern game like FFXIV.