When will you really address the housing availability problem?

[Blim]

SE stuffed up big time on housing by combining personal housing with FC housing. I'm on Tonberry server where ALL plots in all 3 locations are sold out. Yet, it seems like the only people alive in the area are the people from my FC. We don't see anybody else hanging around. It's just our FC members. We don't see anybody else, no other FCs no other people other than the random individual who happens to just pass by or a hopeful property speculator once in a blue moon. Wasn't the concept of a neighbourhood meant to encourage more people to hang out in the area and interact with each other? It feels like a dead town, or a retirement village where everybody else in the area has passed on and no next of kin to pass on the property to.

[Youkulm]

When they can fix their server limitations by adding housing plots to the cash shop just like they did with retainers.

I also see them doing this.

They go on and on about how they have limited server resources which I do believe.

But then.... they're willing to charge for more retainers? First four, ok. Now six?

Soon you too can have a house! Just 10 an extra dollars a month! Please look forward to it.

The sad thing is that FCs are so desperate for housing and to be included in exclusive content that they would pay for it.

[Solarra]

The sad thing is that FCs are so desperate for housing and to be included in exclusive content that they would pay for it.

As far as I am concerned I am already paying for it.

Player housing is promoted heavily as a feature on the New Player Information pages. Nowhere does it say that it is extremely limited or available to only a small percentage of the playerbase.

If Square introduced paid housing in the Cash-shop, I would lose all respect for them.
As it is, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to remain patient when they seem unwilling to address the issue.

[Youkulm]

I can't agree with you more Solarra. We are all paying for it ( and it is an incredibly unethical business model to advertise it to new players like some holy grail that they don't realize, until later, they're likely to never get their hands on )... but truth is because of how poorly implemented it is, it is currently exclusive. The sad fact remains no matter how many wards they put in, it will always be exclusive because of how much limited space there is + personal housing.

They could easy still charge for housing and say "Well if you want it so bad, wait for a house to reclaim or buy it in the CS" only less harsh of course lol. This is much what they did for people begging for more inventory space by offering more and more extra retainers. I understand the situation isn't exactly the same as retainers but it is slightly comparable in that you're paying for special privileges denied to others because they only wish to pay a monthly fee vs the extra 2 to 12 dollars ( 1 - 6 retainers ).

[Waeksyn]

The problem is, SE has designed a housing system that fundamentally CANNOT scale to meet the demand. Coupled with that, SE are notorious for not admitting mistakes and trying to fix things with bandaids when the only real solution is to cap the current housing and introduce a parallel system that will actually work.

Don't hold your breath.

[Kiara]

Yes, Yoshida blames it on "limited server resources". These are the same "limited server resources" that prevent us from having more storage space, a problem that amazingly goes away as long as you're willing to pay extra retainer fees each month. And these are the same "limited server resources" that the development team managed to overcome when adding an expansion pack's worth of content to the game.

What the developers never explain is why server resources are "limited". Is it a funding issue? Are they unable to invest enough of our subscription payments back into the game to fix problems like housing, or just unwilling? Your guess is as good as mine, because I can't remember the last time we received a very frank explanation devoid of any PR-spin on precisely why housing has not been fixed yet (or whether it ever will be in a reasonable period of time).

Even if every plot of land goes back on the market, that's only 1,440 houses. 1,440! That's the *absolute best case scenario* for current non-homeowners and it's still not enough houses.. not even close to enough plots to satisfy demand. We'll be right back to where we are now, with a small percentage of active players owning a house and the rest of us being annoyed that we can't.

Understanding that, what's the next stage of this plan? Do they even have a next stage, or is this it? If there is a plan, please share it, because I'm pretty sure most players would like nothing more than to hear that immediately following the first wave of land reclamation in December we'll be receiving a ton of new additional wards as soon as the reclaimed ones fill up.

Otherwise.. what was the point of all this? To make somewhere between 0-1,440 players per server happy and call it done? Because that's a crap plan.

To: Dev Team,

Please read Gyson's post above and let us know what's going on. This housing shortage is absurd.

If you think about it, if you had enough houses available for all players, the Housing System would serve as a great *Gameplay / Time Sink / Activity* to keep players busy, building, making furniture, spending time invested in the game for MONTHS (and it would be constant upgrading / changing out decorations, layouts, etc.).

This is a good thing, as it means less stress on the Dev Team to constantly create brand-new other content.

Instead, you create this system and it's WASTED. Only a small % of the player population can own a House with this shortage.

Please fix this soon.

[Alberel]

They would have to make it a player hosted instance. There's no way in hell they are going to have servers capable of supporting that many houses even small ones. They know it, we know it, everyone knows it. They just wont admitt it. White knight chronicles did this system the best way. They can keep their server instances, those houses can be more expensive for it. I just want to be able to host my own instanced house.

As a last alternative, the only way they could do this for everyone "who really wants it," they would have to charge a monthly fee similar to retainers which many people would fuss worse over.
Ultimately best possible scenario is player hosted... if you have terrible internet or live in a third world country, its your problem then.

Sorry but this just isn't true.

There are MANY MMOs on the market that offer fully instanced, server-hosted housing for EVERY player. Hell FFXI gave every player their own instanced house. The entire point of instancing is that the server resources are freed up when no one is in the house as it doesn't keep the house loaded. The entire PROBLEM with the neighborhoods is that they are loaded as persistent zones and thus any further houses added are permanent drains on the server.

They CAN give us instanced personal housing, they just won't for some reason. It's honestly pretty disgusting how little money is clearly being spent on development for this game at the moment. People have been leaving the game left,right and center since 3.0 and 3.1 did little at all to reignite interest in the game since the majority of the new content was redundant as soon as it released thanks to the diadem. Throw in the growing delays between patches and it looks like FFXIV is falling into the same rut that WoW did before it started bleeding subs.

The lack of attention to the extremely obvious housing problems is part of a much more serious problem within the dev team. For some reason they have either had funding cuts or something has happened to make them incredibly inefficient in the last six months.

[BreathlessTao]

Player housing is promoted heavily as a feature on the New Player Information pages. Nowhere does it say that it is extremely limited or available to only a small percentage of the playerbase.

THIS SO MUCH. The whole housing debacle gets me mad and demotivates me so much when it comes to playing in general, but this took it to a whole new level. Simply infuriating seeing something that's virtually unavailable to even the old players put next to features like crafting or free companies.

[MistyMew]

the neighborhoods should be demolished.

instanced housing was always the way to go. se made a very bad decision with the current housing design.
it not only limits the actual number of available homes but also has given us an amateurish housing interface allowing for 0 creativity at all...shameful

[Catwho]

XI's instanced housing was more closely analogous to the FC rooms, in terms of size and customization. Later on, they added personal Mog Gardens, but those couldn't really be customized at all, just upgraded in very pre-defined ways.

The big advantage that XI's instanced Mog House had over the FC rooms in XIV was that you could garden in pots there. In fact, that was the ONLY way to garden for nearly a decade.

If SE added gardening pots and a means of dying chocobos to an instanced room, it'd be a great bridge solution. But ultimately the only way they're going to fix the housing problem long term is more housing.

it not only limits the actual number of available homes but also has given us an amateurish housing interface allowing for 0 creativity at all...shameful

I will disagree with this statement. I find the creativity displayed in the houses to be outstanding - some of the things people have done within the limited interface is amazing.

That's why it's imperative that more people be allowed to have access to this.