I must be missing something...

[Ignacius]

Okay, so, there are 60 plots in each ward, 8 wards, in all 3 districts. That means 1,440 plots to cover every player and guild on the server. This isn't enough, obviously (maybe Square didn't really anticipate their own success or how stacked the servers get). I understand that, though I think that's stunningly poor design given the quality of the rest of the game.

But buying and selling plots between players is also illegal according to the terms of service. Unless one is spending their time sitting on a housing list just scrolling around and waiting for a plot to go blank, how is someone supposed to get a plot? I'm not understanding how Square envisioned newer players getting a housing plot.

I really hope this gets fixed. I'm really ready to commit to this game, but I feel like this huge chunk of it is off limits, especially if I want to play with my family on Gilgamesh.

[Judah_Brandt]

Oh boy. You must be new here. As a survivor of the Great Housing Catastrophe of Jenova where a bunch of plots got demolished and left us sitting on them for four days over the Christmas Holiday due to a glitch making them un-purchasable, I just want you to know that you've started yet another of many threads about this problem. Unless you did it on purpose, in which case I'm just gonna sit and watch.

[MomomiMomi]

But buying and selling plots between players is also illegal according to the terms of service. Unless one is spending their time sitting on a housing list just scrolling around and waiting for a plot to go blank, how is someone supposed to get a plot? I'm not understanding how Square envisioned newer players getting a housing plot.

Luck. I guess.

[ToniRomo]

I got mine by checking for plots twice a day. It took about 2 months.

But yeah, the whole situation sucks. I think the apartments are coming and 3.3 and more wards in a patch after that. It sounds like they are working on it, just super slowly.

[Neira]

The bad news is, they are adding one of the most in-demand features at an incredibly slow pace, and not in large enough quantity to make housing something accessible by every player. The whole housing situation, and how it has been handled from basically day one, has managed to upset almost every player, with or without a house, and it continues to be a source of frustration for those who are just coming to realize the issue.

The good news is, enough players are giving up on the game, so eventually there will be plenty of houses for those who are left. Since the internet lacks voice inflection, I just want to clarify that this second statement was intended as satire.

[Kakure]

I sympathize with your situation.

Housing, as they've implemented it in this game, is terrifically resource-intensive. SE knew that all along, but they also knew that players really wanted housing and so they rolled out a limited feature they could iterate and expand, all while trying to get a better handle on the associated technical issues.

The first housing was limited to free companies. Players had been asking for individual housing since forever, but they told us they simply didn't have the resources to pull it off. There were originally five wards and no subdivisions, and these sold out over a period of some months. Players responded positively, but everyone wanted to know when individual housing was coming. They added a sixth ward of free company plots a couple patch cycles later, as well as personal rooms in the free company houses. Everyone continued to ask after individual housing. It wasn't until the patch after that that they opened up housing to individuals, adding two more wards at first, and then subdivisions shortly after that (doubling the amount of available land). I wasn't playing at the time but I am sure there was a feeding frenzy the moment the servers went live, leaving us more or less where we are today.

The simple fact is that they cannot implement housing (in its current form) for everyone who wants it. Square Enix had an overly ambitious vision for what housing should be, and they are committed enough now that they don't really have any choice but to keep applying band-aids to the problem: providing players with alternative points of access into the housing system (personal rooms, "mansion" housing), reclaiming unused houses, and adding new housing as they can. Ishgardian housing will increase the number of available houses by fully a third, or even more if they couple it with any sort of expansion to the existing districts. Everyone knows that isn't going to solve the housing crisis, but it's something.

Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight they would have done it differently. I cannot say. I do know that the prohibition against buying and selling housing is meant to protect us, not to lock new players out of the system; they are unsupported transactions based on unenforceable agreements, and they put SE in the position of arbitrating "he said, she said" disputes including agreements that might have been made outside the game (and they probably open the door to RMT transactions as well). Take that for what you will.

[Neira]

Square Enix almost literally copied a housing system that exists already in a free to play MMO. The F2P MMO can sustain it and offer houses to everyone, but SE can't. It's really hard to give any credit to an argument about technical difficulties when such a fact exists.

[dejiko_san]

Well, there's still a lot of housing on the smaller servers.

The problem is that people are all going to the larger servers but the housing doesn't get any bigger to compensate. This makes a more people fight for houses like what happened on legacy servers.

There should be Ishgard housing eventually so you could give that a shot when they announce it.

[CatfishCassie]

Square Enix almost literally copied a housing system that exists already in a free to play MMO. The F2P MMO can sustain it and offer houses to everyone, but SE can't. It's really hard to give any credit to an argument about technical difficulties when such a fact exists.

Which F2P MMO was that? Every F2P MMO I've played has entirely instanced houses instead of an actual housing zone with all the houses existing in more or less the same place. That's a much easier technical problem to solve, and a much less resource-intensive problem than housing zones, because housing zones run into performance issues (particularly on the still-supported PS3) since it has to load every external item, every structural component, every dye color, etc. for every house in the zone every time someone loads into the zone. Instanced housing just has to load one house for one player at a time. If you have 64 people loading into the housing zone at once, with instanced housing you have to load 64 houses. With Final Fantasy's housing zones, you have to load 1,920 houses... 30 houses per player x 64 players.

The quote in your signature line is interesting... I played Ultima Online, and housing was far more of an issue than it is in Final Fantasy. I remember when their oriental expansion came out... every housing plot was taken within 2 days of launch. There weren't caps on how many houses a single character could own, and there wasn't scaling of housing prices based on the amount of gold in the economy. So in UO, the only way to actually get a house was to get lucky and plop your house down within hours of a new expansion launch, or pay someone hundreds of real-life dollars to vacate their house and give you the plot and hope they didn't just take your money and run.

[Ignacius]

Okay, thanks a lot for the replies explaining. And SE, I know it's resource intensive, but make the effort. You can make it cost a lot, make it available at level cap, but make it available to every player who works for it. Make each plot their own instance and let them buy neighborhoods if you'd like. I give SE more credit than NCSoft, and even Wildstar made it work. Housing in other games has proven that you can retain subs forever by giving player-made houses, then giving them a ton of things in those houses to waste their time on.

But whatever you do, it has to be more than putting in enough plots for a few hundred more people. If it's literally only available to less than two thousand people+guilds per server then your development of housing is literally going to earn you zero new subscribers and retain less than two-thousand. That's just not economically feasible for something you're spending design money and system resources on.