Company Housing VS Personal Housing

[thunderbreak]

Now that demolishing is here, and condos are just around the corner. Maybe SE can take this opportunity and make FC housing and personal housing the way they were meant to be.

Once condos are introduced, FC (Personal) houses are no longer available for individual players to be purchased. People who already have a house will be able to keep them of course, but that will be grandfathered. Once you lose your house due to demolishing, or if you demolish it and give up the land rights, you'll never be able to purchase FC house as a personal house again.

And most of the housing efforts in the future should be focused on condo (personal housing). Since everything is instanced, give player an instanced chocobo stable like a parking spot in condos. And for gardening, have an instanced roof or belcony like some of the modern condo/appartment concepts. Eventually as PS3 gets phased out, and hardware/software limitations gets upgraded, start introducing room upgrades where players can spend gil and add rooms to their house, or make existing rooms bigger.

I feel FC housing turning into personal housing is a band-aid fix, especially consider an FC needs to be rank 6 before FC housing is available, and a player can potentially be level 1, pay RMT money, and go buy a house right away. And speaking from personal experience FC bank don't have nearly as much funds compare to a dedicated player who spend most of their time making money. So technically it takes more time to earn the rights to buy a house as a FC, it takes more effort to collect the money to buy a house as a FC. So clearly the original design of FC housing is not meant to be personal housing.

I hope this time the Mansion (condo) Yoshi P mentioned is exactly what he say it is, because there is some good potential where it can go.

[MihaelB]

I agree on this idea and also perhaps add a member minimum requirement on FC housing, e.g 30 members+

Personal FCs with 5-10 members should not be incorporated into the equation in my personal opinion as housing is so 'limited' and a burden on server limitations, you might as well limit it to 'active' FCs to attempt a community in the current housing areas. Having 500+ FCs on a server with the majoral being small and individually owned FCs does not help alleviate the housing problem if you're incorporating small FCs into the equation.

Private housing with perhaps 10-20+ tenants as a formed party/alliance purchase feature should be an option for people who don't want to be a guild but want a house together, perhaps link shell housing to finally be a realisation?

[ServerCollaps]

I agree on this idea and also perhaps add a member minimum requirement on FC housing, e.g 30 members+

Personal FCs with 5-10 members should not be incorporated into the equation in my personal opinion as housing is so 'limited' and a burden on server limitations, you might as well limit it to 'active' FCs to attempt a community in the current housing areas.

Private housing with perhaps 10-20+ tenants as a party/alliance feature should be an option for people who don't want to be a guild but want a house together, perhaps link shell housing to finally be a realisation?

that wont work, people would just invite tons of twinks and alts then and the situation would remain the same

once there are apartements and new wards there wont be anything like that needed anyway

[Ashkendor]

I feel FC housing turning into personal housing is a band-aid fix,

I honestly feel it's where they went terribly wrong and broke the housing system, ending up with the mess we have now.

I agree on this idea and also perhaps add a member minimum requirement on FC housing, e.g 30 members+

Personal FCs with 5-10 members should not be incorporated into the equation in my personal opinion

5-10 members isn't a "personal" FC, though. My own FC is a good example. Myself and several friends broke off from a previous FC and formed our own due to not getting along with a couple of members. With only 5 members when we founded it, we ground up the FC points to reach rank 6 and we got the money together for a Medium house. I really see no need for a membership requirement just for house ownership. Add to that the fact that a house is a huge selling point for recruitment. With so many FC's out there that already have houses and all the benefits that go with them, it'd be quite silly to expect people to stay for long in one that doesn't.

Show me a big FC and I'll show you an FC that was small at one point. Everyone starts somewhere. Over time we've picked up more members and now have around 30. It may not seem like much, but I personally don't believe in standing in town inviting random sprouts or shouting my head off every 2 minutes just to achieve some arbitrary number. I'd rather stick with our tight-knit core of good friends and the wonderful new people we've met along the way that join us by choice. I put up a PF once in awhile and leave recruitment open and that's about it. I get that you want to discourage single-person FC's from house ownership, but there's got to be a better way to do that than to completely bar small but 100% legitimate groups of people from it.

[MihaelB]

5-10 members isn't a "personal" FC, though. My own FC is a good example. Myself and several friends broke off from a previous FC and formed our own due to not getting along with a couple of members. With only 5 members when we founded it, we ground up the FC points to reach rank 6 and we got the money together for a Medium house. I really see no need for a membership requirement just for house ownership. Add to that the fact that a house is a huge selling point for recruitment. With so many FC's out there that already have houses and all the benefits that go with them, it'd be quite silly to expect people to stay for long in one that doesn't.

Show me a big FC and I'll show you an FC that was small at one point. Everyone starts somewhere. Over time we've picked up more members and now have around 30. It may not seem like much, but I personally don't believe in standing in town inviting random sprouts or shouting my head off every 2 minutes just to achieve some arbitrary number. I'd rather stick with our tight-knit core of good friends and the wonderful new people we've met along the way that join us by choice. I put up a PF once in awhile and leave recruitment open and that's about it. I get that you want to discourage single-person FC's from house ownership, but there's got to be a better way to do that than to completely bar small but 100% legitimate groups of people from it.

It's about occupancy and changing the system, not sentimental reasoning. If you're not going to add a member limit or login requirement then it is a useless idea in the first place and more selfish reasoning to add more wards/ housing.

The current system is 1 personal house + 1 FC house per account. 6 alts can be used to hold a FC house each with no level requirement, this will essentially do nothing if the system does get changed to FC housing only and has absolutely no impact. People can still buy up whole wards with alts + personal FCs, nothing gets changed, people will still have no housing and no way to deter the current problem.

Same with 1 account per service account, people will buy housing with $5 codes, it's not difficult to get access.

[Ashkendor]

It's about occupancy and changing the system, not sentimental reasoning. If you're not going to add a member limit or login requirement then it is a useless idea in the first place and more selfish reasoning to add more wards/ housing.

With 5 members we'd be able to make enough lame sprout alts to bypass the arbitrary number, so it achieves nothing anyway.

People shouldn't have to be forced into big FC's just to get the benefit of FC housing.

The current system is 1 personal house + 1 FC house per account. 6 alts can be used to hold a FC house each with no level requirement, this will essentially do nothing if the system does get changed to FC housing only and has absolutely no impact. People can still buy up whole wards with alts + personal FCs, nothing gets changed, people will still have no housing and no way to deter the current problem.

Part of the current problem is that you aren't limited to 1 personal house and 1 FC house per account, but I honestly think it should be. Right now it's on a per character basis but there's no real reason to have several alts with houses. It'd be better if they set it up so that all of your alts could share the same house and only allowed one of each type per account, period.

Same with 1 account per service account, people will buy housing with $5 codes, it's not difficult to get access.

Can trial accounts or accounts in their first 30 days actually buy housing? I wouldn't think they'd be able to.

You should at least have to pay a sub to purchase housing.

[MihaelB]

With 5 members we'd be able to make enough lame sprout alts to bypass the arbitrary number, so it achieves nothing anyway.

People shouldn't have to be forced into big FC's just to get the benefit of FC housing.

That's the problem in a nutshell isn't it? We have housing for enough people on most servers (I wouldn't know about high popularity ones like Gilgamesh) but people want their OWN housing for their OWN group of friends. People come and go in their small friendship groups but still demand a house for their period of game time.

It's the same as the problem in real life, we want our own needs and our own desired fulfilled whilst stepping on everyone else around us as long as we're satisfied and feeling entitled.

There are so many houses on my server with individual FCs/ private housing and the wards are essentially dead leaving it only to be used as a silent crafting area.

[Jinxie]

plus it's hard to recruit members sometimes, and I'd feel even worse for the low pop realms. There'd be no way for them to differentiate between private personal FCs and not. An FC is an FC. Membership shouldn't be a determining factor on an FC's value. You're alienating the smaller FCs when you do that.

[MihaelB]

that wont work, people would just invite tons of twinks and alts then and the situation would remain the same
once there are apartements and new wards there wont be anything like that needed anyway

At least then it'll reduce the amount of alts holding houses & require more time/resources to people to create/invite alts, limiting their account house holding capability.

plus it's hard to recruit members sometimes, and I'd feel even worse for the low pop realms. There'd be no way for them to differentiate between private personal FCs and not. An FC is an FC. Membership shouldn't be a determining factor on an FC's value. You're alienating the smaller FCs when you do that.

Alienation is the purpose for the change. You're alienating personal house owners who don't want to be part of a FC with this change in which case, apartment housing is available.

There's no purpose to change if people can just easily circumvent it with a method that takes very little time. (Creating a personal FC)

I'd rather an active ward in a small server personally than several dead plots/wards in the server which is the case on Lamia.

[Jinxie]

Well hows about I create a few trial accounts, and pop a few dozen members into a tiny FC and falsely bloat the numbers? This change you're proposing isn't viable, even if it was an option. They have no way to detect which FC is private and which is not, and even if they did they cannot penalize the FC for having droves of inactive members.