Suggestion: Housing system overhaul

[Aetharon]

While the current housing system is 'workable' when it isn't being abused by the greedy minority, there are several flaws which if addressed could eliminate the problem and make housing more accessible. In my opinion the following steps, if implemented, will help in a big way.

1. Separate housing types: By this I mean create two plot lists in each housing area; One specifically for FC estates, the other specifically for personal housing, with personal housing having a significantly cheaper pricing scheme compared to the FC estates. Provide free relocations to get houses into the designated areas.

2. Housing restrictions: This restriction would work similar to the way character slots work, and track housing ownership on the service account by flagging your character in-game as a house owner. The restriction would be one personal house per server, that is shared by all alts on that server. House sharing would count toward this limit, and be unavailable to those who already own property on a server. It would also be restricted to three people max.

FC housing would also be tracked, but ability to purchase a house would only be permitted for the FC leader, and the second in command - again the FC would be limited to one estate, and regardless of who bought it, the Leader would be flagged as the owner.

3. Physical representation of ownership: When purchasing land, instead of having a mostly unseen mark of ownership (aside from the placard, and the plot list on the residential aethernet), generate a deed of ownership when the purchase is complete. This deed should be a key item, so that it doesn't contribute to the issues with inventory space.

4. Remove some limitations on items: I refer, of course to the items that are marked as "cannot be retrieved once placed". Remove the "cannot be removed" restriction, and instead have the items bind to the character, like all the other housing items. This restriction is archaic, and with some of the items being limited in availablility due to being from events, it promotes over pricing. The removal of that restriction will help alleviate some of this.

5. House/land reselling: I understand that this is currently against the ToS, but it really doesn't have to be. In addition to the above suggestions, reselling could be a viable business opportunity that doesn't fall down to being a form of griefing.

The way I see it working, is to first, allow houses to be sold 'as is', instead of having everything removed/demolished. This will create an opportunity for people to let loose with their creative side and try to design houses that people may want, and add a new flair to the housing market that was lacking before.

In addition to this, add a new function to one of the housing NPC's to allow them to manage housing trades - both public (first come, first served), and private - limited to a specific individual. The trade would make use of the deed mentioned in point 3, which would be used to transfer ownership in its entirety, provided of course, the recipient doesn't already own a house. Pricing would be calculated from the server defined worth of the base plot, with the average market value of the items on the plot calculated and added to generate the gross price. This would then suffer a 15% reduction as a listing fee/tax (it will help to reduce some of the bloat from the overpriced items, until such time as that is addressed). The player making the listing would, of course have the option of manually entering a price up to the upper ceiling provided by the automatic price calculation, but be unable to go above it, thus enabling them to adhere to previously agreed pricing.

Quality of life tweaks:

i. Aethernet improvement - Allow return from the housing area to the main plaza of the local city state (access to the housing area is already possible from aetheryte plaza, so it makes sense that a return journey should be possible).

ii. Add storage facilities to items such as the wardrobes and foot lockers/chests (possibly even the crate item?), and make it possible to store anything of a certain type inside. Armour/Clothes for the wardrobe (up to a maximum of 10 complete outfits), crafting supplies in the crate, etc. The list of items stored would be specific to the item, and the storage item can only be removed when empty.

Of course, these ideas are merely a rough draft, and I welcome input from other players, and suggestions that will refine and improve on these ideas.

[StouterTaru]

Yes, they never should have put personal housing in the FC wards, but it's a little late to change that now without upsetting a lot of paying customers.

The restriction would be one personal house per server

Why is it always 1 per server when people say this? With shared housing, a collaboration of 8 people on 8 different servers could lead to each pseudo-owning 8 houses each on their own server with the cheaper subscription option.

[Aetharon]

Heh.. I did say it was a rough draft.

I didn't take shared housing into account in my suggestion, but they could easily limit the shared housing option to bonded pairs provided one party in the bond doesn't already own a personal house, thereby reducing the impact.I'll give it some thought and see if I can tweak it. Thank you for pointing out that hole in my suggestion.

As for upsetting a lot of people if they made the 'split housing' change, you're right, a lot of people who paid over the odds would most likely be upset. Unfortunately, it's impossible to please everybody all of the time, unless you have some ideas that might please the majority?

I was looking more toward addressing the flaws when I came up with these, so I welcome other perspectives.

[Aetharon]

Added a section for quality of life tweaks relating to the housing areas. All suggestions welcome, so please don't hesitate to jot down your ideas!

[Risvertasashi]

Yes, they never should have put personal housing in the FC wards, but it's a little late to change that now without upsetting a lot of paying customers.


Why is it always 1 per server when people say this? With shared housing, a collaboration of 8 people on 8 different servers could lead to each pseudo-owning 8 houses each on their own server with the cheaper subscription option.

Would still be better than the current, where 999,999,999 gil crafters can just buy as many plots as they like (given availability).

[StouterTaru]

Would still be better than the current, where 999,999,999 gil crafters can just buy as many plots as they like (given availability).

They would still be able to. Adding the "per server" is like adding "unless you really, really want more." If they are going to go that far, why not take the full step, or the next couple steps of removing personal housing from the FC wards and requiring FCs to be of a decent size/activity to buy and keep a house?

[Aetharon]

They would still be able to. Adding the "per server" is like adding "unless you really, really want more." If they are going to go that far, why not take the full step, or the next couple steps of removing personal housing from the FC wards and requiring FCs to be of a decent size/activity to buy and keep a house?

The only decent alternative that I can see to the 'per server' limitation would be to turn the housing areas into instanced content that could be accessed from all servers and limit ownership of a house to one house per FC (no restrictions based on FC size/activity, as this would be somewhat unfair to those with limited time to play) and one personal house per account. However, this kind of step would probably severely limit the housing availablility unless both the size of the wards, and the number of available wards was increased exponentially.

[Nyghtmarerobu]

1. Separate housing types: By this I mean create two plot lists in each housing area; One specifically for FC estates, the other specifically for personal housing, with personal housing having a significantly cheaper pricing scheme compared to the FC estates. Provide free relocations to get houses into the designated areas.

This should have happened with the release of personal housing, but it didn't. I feel they don't have the resources to do this, simply because if they did, they'd have released more wards already.

2. Housing restrictions: This restriction would work similar to the way character slots work, and track housing ownership on the service account by flagging your character in-game as a house owner. The restriction would be one personal house per server, that is shared by all alts on that server. House sharing would count toward this limit, and be unavailable to those who already own property on a server. It would also be restricted to three people max.

This should have also been implemented. Simply to keep people from buying propertys and selling them back for profit.

3. Physical representation of ownership: When purchasing land, instead of having a mostly unseen mark of ownership (aside from the placard, and the plot list on the residential aethernet), generate a deed of ownership when the purchase is complete. This deed should be a key item, so that it doesn't contribute to the issues with inventory space.

This is dumb. What purpose does this serve but to take up a slot in an inventory or key item?

4. Remove some limitations on items: I refer, of course to the items that are marked as "cannot be retrieved once placed". Remove the "cannot be removed" restriction, and instead have the items bind to the character, like all the other housing items. This restriction is archaic, and with some of the items being limited in availablility due to being from events, it promotes over pricing. The removal of that restriction will help alleviate some of this.

No. Items may be high priced on yours, but that is not for all servers. This helps retain item value if they are lost upon removal, since you need to buy a new one when the old one is lost.

5. House/land reselling: I understand that this is currently against the ToS, but it really doesn't have to be. In addition to the above suggestions, reselling could be a viable business opportunity that doesn't fall down to being a form of griefing.

Just like up above, this shouldn't be a thing. Property shouldn't be able to be bought, only to be re-sold again for profit.

i. Aethernet improvement - Allow return from the housing area to the main plaza of the local city state (access to the housing area is already possible from aetheryte plaza, so it makes sense that a return journey should be possible).

You can set a city as your return point, or just plain teleport there. If you want to save that little bit of gil, each housing district has an NPC that will take you to the city.

ii. Add storage facilities to items such as the wardrobes and foot lockers/chests (possibly even the crate item?), and make it possible to store anything of a certain type inside. Armour/Clothes for the wardrobe (up to a maximum of 10 complete outfits), crafting supplies in the crate, etc. The list of items stored would be specific to the item, and the storage item can only be removed when empty.

Anything to help with invetory and retainer space I'm all for.

[Aetharon]

This should have happened with the release of personal housing, but it didn't. I feel they don't have the resources to do this, simply because if they did, they'd have released more wards already.

While they may not have had the resources at the time that personal housing was implemented, surely that is unlikely to be the case now, with more people subscribing, and more people buying from the mog station. I know they have to pay wages and maintain the current servers, but there should theoretically be more than enough funds available to improve their available resources.

This should have also been implemented. Simply to keep people from buying propertys and selling them back for profit.

I agree with this statement to an extent. However, buying and selling for a profit is how an economy works, and within that there are restrictions in place to prevent companies having a monopoly. There is nothing inherently wrong with buying land, doing it up and reselling it, provided they allow land to be sold with the buildings intact, and people aren't able to mass buy.

This is dumb. What purpose does this serve but to take up a slot in an inventory or key item?

It would only be dumb if reselling houses isn't implemented - the whole purpose of this suggestion is to turn the ownership of land into a physical item that is used in a game controlled escrow situation, in other words "Player A has a house to sell. He goes to the NPC that handles housing sales, and puts the house up for his chosen price - the Deed is listed on the Housing Market, along with the information of seller and price. Player B wants a house, and goes to see what he'll be buying. Likes what he sees, pays the price, gets the deed, which transfers ownership. Player A receives a notification of the sale, and retreives money from NPC" Also, if it's a key item, it won't cause much of an issue at all. As you can see, the system i propose later in my original post creates a structure that ensures a player only pays once, whether the land is already owned or not.

Sure, there is nothing to stop people from trying to make you pay for them to list the house, but those people, you report.

No. Items may be high priced on yours, but that is not for all servers. This helps retain item value if they are lost upon removal, since you need to buy a new one when the old one is lost.

You're entitled to your opinion, of course, and I would be fine with this not being implemented, it was, afterall, just a suggestion. I have heard that some of the event related housing furniture was cannot be retrived once placed, which prompted this suggestion. If I was misinformed, the suggestion can be removed.

Just like up above, this shouldn't be a thing. Property shouldn't be able to be bought, only to be re-sold again for profit.

Why? This is a perfectly legal and viable option in the real world, so why shouldn't a more formalized and controlled version of it be in-game?
There is nothing inherently wrong with buying property and selling for a profit - especially when the same thing is done with items on the market board every single day - so if there were controls in place to prevent scalping, would it be such a problem to allow?

You can set a city as your return point, or just plain teleport there.

True, but why on earth would you want to waste a return spell to go from say, The Goblet to Ul'dah?

If you want to save that little bit of gil, each housing district has an NPC that will take you to the city.

This, I did not know. However, why use a middle man at all? A lot of people would most likely use the aethernet system to get as close to the NPC as possible, wouldn't they?

Anything to help with invetory and retainer space I'm all for.

Finally something we agree on.