This is getting silly, just create instanced housing already...

[worldofneil]

If it'd stayed FCs only, then there'd be open houses and people wouldn't be abusing their system. (Which I admit is rather poorly put together.)

They would though, people already level up multiple characters (each with their own FC) so they can get multiple FC houses and give each the same short tag (so they can brag about it?). I used to think that was a lot of hassle, but I've since realised it's really not since you only need to level *1* character to 50 (to initially buy each house). After that the FC is "transferred" to a level 1 alt and then that person would leave and start a new FC to rank that up to rank 6 and repeat.

Sure getting rank 6 takes some effort, but for someone who actively plays, that's happening in the background with a lot of things they do and I'm sure there's things you can do to accelerate it (focus on company hand ins or GC levequests perhaps?). If you have a few people in the same group who do this then it'd be even faster to level them up (although then obviously it's not a single person owning the houses, but an FC owning multiple houses if that makes any difference?).

I do appreciate what you're saying, but when a system lets people do something, you can bet people will do it, especially since it's not against any rules. SE let's us have 8 separate characters per server on the normal account and if they only wanted us to be a single character, they'd only let us have 1 per account.