[Suggestion] Solving the "Housing Problem"

[Dustytome]

With the server upgrades and PS3 going the way of the dodo, we already know Stormblood's main city is twice the size of our current ones (because its not split in two). Maybe this improvements would also allow this idea to work. While its not "infinite" wards, it would quadruple the number of houses available on every server.

What if the map for a single ward looked something like this?:

That would be nice, but they've already stated they're struggling to allow more outdoor furniture slots to the existing wards even with ps3 being removed from the picture. I don't imagine they'd be able to just multiply that by 2-4 (not sure if subdivisions are part of the same "zone" since you can shout between subdivisions and the main ward).

[Naunet]

Honestly there's so much wrong with housing beyond just the limited supply that they need to just admit they were wrong and start over with instanced plots. Everyone gets one, and we all win with FAR greater item limits and customization abilities possible.

[worldofneil]

I'm a little at a loss as to why infinite wards is infeasible?

It's because the housing wards are zones (insides houses are instances, but the wards themselves are equivalent to zones). Each server has 3 areas, each with 24 wards (12 + 12), so 72 different zones which totals considerably more than every other zone combined.

But then if you multiply it by 64 servers, that's 4,608 zones, just for the current housing, each of which has to run all the time.

Unfortunately this design does appear to have made it hard for SE to scale up/add more housing (it took just over 2 years to add wards 9-12, they know we want more housing so if they could have added sooner I feel fairly sure they would have).

[Makeda]

Just add an entry to the marketboard called 'housing plot' and you go there, pay the price, and get the plot.

Then limit housing plots to 2 per entire account - 1 personal, and 1 that is from a free company one of your characters is in. So if you have 3 characters in 3 different free companies... only 1 of them will have access to their FC's house... and you can only change which one once per month. 1 character (the same or a different one) could then get a house. If you happen to have 3 characters that all own 3 different FCs... then only one of those FCs would be able to have a FC house.

And then for apartments - spin up new ones everytime the current units are full in ALL shards of that city's housing. When full... the first shard adds another 'row' of units. When that fills, the second shard adds another row, etc...

[Penthea]

Just add an entry to the marketboard called 'housing plot' and you go there, pay the price, and get the plot.

I'm really not sure what this would fix. That's still house flipping. That still lets players set an insane price for plots. That still tempts players to get gil from RMT instead of facing many months of grinding to afford a plot sold by a player. The only difference is SE would be allowing it. Unless you mean the plots are sold at a fixed price. But even so players could still house flip like they are now. Even if you could only buy from the market board all you would have to do is coordinate with the seller while you are at the market board.

[Acilith]

I don't even think anyone would be angry if they left the existing wards in, then made new housing that's instanced and available for everybody. Like mog houses in FFXI. I don't know about other servers, but a while back on Balmung there was an issue where if you were in your house or in your private room and tried to leave.. or even just enter the house from outdoors, it would give you an error. Not like a game crashing error but you'd have to keep trying just to enter/leave.

Aaand just as an afterthought, I'm pretty sure the subdivision is still on the same physical map as the main ward. I want to say people who can get out of bounds have run to the subdivision before? Maybe? It's not something I've actively looked into but I heard about it once.

[Millen1]

The idea of allowing all your chars on your account to use one house would be nice. Barring that change, players should still be able to buy housing on an alt if they are really into it.

As for housing, they should have an option to give up your house, receive the purchase price back. You don't lose your gil, that way if you plan on a long break or other such things. SE now has the plot and can set a random timer as to when the plot will go back up for sale so you can't sell it to one person. It gives everyone a shot at it. If a house is lost to the 45 day demolish timer, same applies and random timer for when it goes up for sale by SE. This prevents a player from selling a house to a person by just not entering the house for 45 days and knowing very close to when the buyer would have to be there to buy the plot.

This is not perfect by any means but it would create a more fair system and prevent players from selling to others. As it would only allow for housing to go back to SE and no one else.

As for high population servers. If housing is that big of an issue, transfer servers. Maybe SE could help out with free transfers to servers with “X” amount of open housing plots. With cross server PF and the other cross server chat plans SE has talked about this shouldn't be the big issue it use to be with losing touch with all your friends.

[Acilith]

I don't really like the look of those screenshots. :x What is that, Wildstar?

[Solarra]

I see what you are saying Nettle, but Garrisons were nothing like housing. I hated mine, too. No customisation of buildings, no choice regarding npcs, no actual house or even a bed for your character to sleep on, and so much busy-work connected to it, you could easily fill a play session there on your own, just doing 'chores'. Player choice was limited pretty much to,
'You can put your barn here or you can put it over there. And no, you can't change the look of the buidings.'
Horde were stuck with spikes and no roofs in the snow while Alliance had their pretty Disney-style fort in the forest. The farm in Pandaria was closer to instanced housing and the response to that was very positive IIRC.

In FFXIV wards were originally designed for FCs and that makes sense. I go to my personal house every day, but I rarely see anyone whereas our FC house usually has a few people inside using the crafting room and a bunch of people in the garden waiting for instances, training chocos etc. It's a nice social place to hang out and we often see members of other FCs at the market boards or bells.

If instanced housing was offered to individuals and the wards went back to being for FCs, I think we'd get much more community feeling than we will by sticking to the system we have. But instanced housing has to be attractive; it has to have advantages over what we have now. Apartments are a step in the right direction, but since they are basically a more expensive FC room, with the same limitations and no opportunity to garden, they aren't terribly popular.
If instanced housing offered people say, interesting locations (town house in Ishgard, desert island near Mist etc.), the opportunity to upgrade to a bigger house, more outdoor furniture and wasn't subject to the timer, I think quite a few of us would be tempted to swap to it from our personal houses.

[Penthea]

I see what you are saying Nettle, but Garrisons were nothing like housing. I hated mine, too. No customisation of buildings, no choice regarding npcs, no actual house or even a bed for your character to sleep on, and so much busy-work connected to it, you could easily fill a play session there on your own, just doing 'chores'. Player choice was limited pretty much to, 'You can put your barn here or you can put it over there. And no, you can't change the look of the buidings.'

Even if garrisons had actual customisation half as good as FFXIV they still would have gotten a lot of hate because the main gripe seemed to be the isolation it caused. Of course the garrison had too much functionality which decreased the likelihood of players idling elsewhere, but there is no doubt that a huge part of the isolation happened because of the instancing itself. WoW's biggest mistake with garrisons was letting only individuals own it. I'm sure they would have been at least moderately successful if they belonged to guilds instead.

If instanced housing was offered to individuals and the wards went back to being for FCs, I think we'd get much more community feeling than we will by sticking to the system we have. But instanced housing has to be attractive; it has to have advantages over what we have now.

If instanced housing offered people say, interesting locations (town house in Ishgard, desert island near Mist etc.), the opportunity to upgrade to a bigger house, more outdoor furniture and wasn't subject to the timer, I think quite a few of us would be tempted to swap to it from our personal houses.

I would be okay with instanced housing if it was in addition to what we have now. To make this work wards would need to be more attractive to fcs than individuals, and instanced housing would have to be more attractive to individuals than fcs. Let players choose what they want but have one be the obvious better choice depending on their situation.

I would not be okay with instanced housing if everything else was scrapped and that's all we were left with. I'm totally against forcing players to isolate themselves or their fc from the rest of the game.