This needs to be fixed. Posting solutions too.

[Kosmos992k]

if the Japanese players are happy with Housing plots we won't have a fix/solution/BASIC INFORMATION for months if not years.

This is the sad truth that I feel that most people are unaware of or refuse to acknowledge.

No, it's borderline xenophobic nonsense (as is your reply), and is an over dramatic response to an annoying situation.

You chances a slim because the odds are like 720 out of 2mil on snagging a property.

Your math is so wrong, it discredits your argument. The number of plots per server is currently 2,232 (12 wards with 2 subdivisions each in 3 zones each with 31 plots; 12x2x3x31=2232) and not 720. I'm not aware of any server with an active population much larger than about 20, 000. IIRC there are 64 servers which translates to 142,848 possible housing plots available to the active subscription base. The last estimate of active players I can remember was far short of the total number of accounts and characters, i believe the number was about 600,000 active accounts, but it could be as many as a million or more, especially around patches. That means that there is approximatelty a 15%-25% chance that any given account could have a home. Of course things are more spread out than that and some servers morepopulous than others, but even on a crowded server you are still loking at greater than a 1 in 10 ratio of plots to active players.

Absolutely it's not enough yet, I agree, but please dom throw silly numbers up when debating easily quantified information.

Btw, the instanced apartments should add approximately 36,000 'housing' slots per server, and when the Ishgardian zone opens 744 more plots will be added, and another 12,000 or so apartment instances. That's asuming 512 instanced apartments per ward/subdivision. If it's only 256 each, the number of aparyment instances would be halved. Sti;l this will mean each server will ultimately have about 3,000 housing plots (assuming they add no more wards/subdivisions) and either 24,000 or 48,000 potential apartment instances.

[Nayout]

World of Warcraft took more than 10 years to implement a system of Phasing(http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Phasing) when other games already had at the time.
The problem was how this system is implemented to the game and it is too late to change without harming the community.

[CookieMonsta]

Prolly an architectural issue on the SE hardware end. The way they're doing it implies everything is permanently loaded to RAM or at least cached to fast storage (e.g. a high iops SSD). This means they can only expand so much. Instancing the housing would imply outsourcing the housing to an auxiliary server but I cannot see a clean way for them to reprogram the existing wards.

[Snugglebutt]

I've seen few people try to use the idea of limiting housing to free companies whether completely or whether housing within wards. Firstly personal housing was promised to players of this game prior to realm reborn and before FC housing even was a concept...FC housing was the fall back plan they came up with after realized they would struggle to support personal housing on their old infrastructure.

Also keep in mind anyone can set up a free company and a free company can have as little as just one person as a member. It might be called free company house but it would still be a lot of individuals running those free companies without members just to get the house if personal housing was not an option or was not on offer.

On the Ishgard apartments I think it will just be a single room like when purchase a room in an FC or the single room you got in FFXI...so I think it is dubious to equate/call that 'housing' or 'plot' as though it is anything like owning an actual house or like owning a housing plot currently in FFXIV which includes multiple rooms inside and outside ownership of a fair amount of land on your property. Some people might be happy with apartments, some people might not but lets not pretend owning a house currently and owning an apartment are going to be equal.

[Roegadyn_Bear]

No, it's borderline xenophobic nonsense (as is your reply), and is an over dramatic response to an annoying situation.

Oh ho, really now?

Tell me why Au Ra got changed? Or why the Japanese player base got a region locked event all for themselves. Square-Enix would not be the first, nor last, Japanese game developer that does special events for their Japanese playerbase while excluding those of other regions.

Suppose it is far easier to label such statements pointing out what appears to be Japanese favoritism as xenophobia though, isn't it?

[Waterdeep]

The biggest mistake was to introduce personal housing in areas that should only be for FC housing. But the damage is done and I doubt much will change in that regard. LotR style housing with growing wards to accomodate the housing needs would be great but require a server investment on SE's side. Especially overpopulated servers like Balmung would easily go to 100+ wards in Mist alone.

Now, how to solve the problem? Make the Ishgardian housing simply better than the exsisting one. It needs to have better atmosphere and the appartments need to be bigger than the traditional housing. Make that is has standart, big and luxury appartments, with Luxury having several rooms, a big balcony and possibly a little instanced garden along with a chocobo parking lot. To get the neighborhood feeling, you could simply make it that a certain amount of appartments are on Ishgardian streets and that a new street is opened whenever the appartment limit on one has been reached. It would be a nice touch of things like items that you set on your windowstill could be visible from outside. Basically mini-wards that are not too data intense.

Appartments should also fully count as personal housing, meaning you can not have an abode in the Goblet and Ishgard, just to make exsisting plots less attractive in the overall picture.

[Roegadyn_Bear]

Now, how to solve the problem? Make the Ishgardian housing simply better than the exsisting one. It needs to have better atmosphere and the apartments need to be bigger than the traditional housing. Make it so that it has standard, big and luxury apartments, with Luxury having several rooms, a big balcony and possibly a little instanced garden along with a chocobo parking lot. To get the neighborhood feeling, you could simply make it that a certain amount of apartments are on Ishgardian streets and that a new street is opened whenever the apartment limit on one has been reached. It would be a nice touch of things like items that you set on your windowsill could be visible from outside. Basically mini-wards that are not too data intense.

Apartments should also fully count as personal housing, meaning you can not have an abode in the Goblet, Lavender Beds, and the Mists, just to make existing plots less attractive in the overall picture.

I do agree with this idea.

Unfortunately, it makes too much sense and therefore it'll never come to pass.

[Kosmos992k]

Oh ho, really now?

Tell me why Au Ra got changed? Or why the Japanese player base got a region locked event all for themselves. Square-Enix would not be the first, nor last, Japanese game developer that does special events for their Japanese playerbase while excluding those of other regions.

Suppose it is far easier to label such statements pointing out what appears to be Japanese favoritism as xenophobia though, isn't it?

Xenophobia is easy to spot, just as other forms of prejudice are. You are the one making distinctions and drawing conclusions based on assumption and distinction. This topic has been discussed before and many examples of SE responding directly to the NA and/or EU player community have been put forward. As is typical they were dismissed about as glibly as you dismiss the assessment of xenophobia by those wishing to portray SE as an entity that ignores it's non-japanese customers. Engaging in further debate is pointless, there are myriad examples of companies running special rpromotions in their home markets whether American, Japanese, German, British or whatever. Market specific promotions are not an indication of bias, unles you happen to fel entitled to everything anyone else has of course. But let's not bring entitlement into this yet, someone else may wantto have that fun.

[Roegadyn_Bear]

Xenophobia is easy to spot, just as other forms of prejudice are. You are the one making distinctions and drawing conclusions based on assumption and distinction.

I guess you figured me out, Nancy Drew.

Of course I'm drawing conclusions based on my observations. Are they true? Who knows really, but I've seen enough cases of Japanese and Korean game developers favoring their own demographic to go with my gut on this.

I will give you that I could have worded my previous statement better, however.

This topic has been discussed before and many examples of SE responding directly to the NA and/or EU player community have been put forward. As is typical they were dismissed about as glibly as you dismiss the assessment of xenophobia by those wishing to portray SE as an entity that ignores it's non-japanese customers.

For the record, I don't believe that they completely ignore their non-Japanese playerbase.

I do believe, however, that we hold considerably less influence on their design decisions and that our input means less to them than that of their Japanese playerbase.

Engaging in further debate is pointless

True.

You're not changing my thoughts about this and I'm certainly not going to change yours.

Market specific promotions are not an indication of bias

Of course not, unless that particular market keeps getting said promotions.

[Gun-Cat]

Let's not go into a xenophobia discussion and keep things on track. My suggestion for housing for everyone:

Sky Housing:
Just like the Vundu, Player can get a floating rock to build things uppon. Be it a little hut, garden or anything like that. You can aquire more 'land' and build bridges inbetween, even building an instanced house on it. While those rocks float in a seperate, instanced skybox you can 'link' your islands with a friends so that their islands appear in the distance and you can fly over there. This can be done 4 times for each cardinal direction. That way people can build their neighborhoods themselves or stay private. Being basically just a big skybox and a few rocks, data management should be pretty easy as well. You could even incorporate getting new land into beastmens quests, making people work for it along with it costing a lot of money to have a constant drain of gil from the economy. Rich people can get big sky fortresses pretty quick while poorer people have something to work for.