[Suggestion] Solving the "Housing Problem"

[Okita]

We can agree on one thing though, the current system is flawed.

[Penthea]

Unless the owner receives at most the purchase price (full refund) then it still creates a problem of people flipping for a profit. In addition, having to outbid people with truckloads of gil only discourages players/leads them towards the path of RMT.

That's an excellent point actually. The tiny amount of plots allows house flippers to demand insane prices for even a cottage. Often the amount of money they ask for is simply unattainable for most players unless they plan on not purchasing anytime soon. We can certainly assume many players opted for RMT instead of facing a gil grind that would last many months.

[Endeleon]

I'm a little at a loss as to why infinite wards is infeasible? It doesn't seem like it would be THAT much of a size/hardware constraint but I definitely know nothing about making games so perhaps it is? It's not like the houses stay while you log out anyway, they are like dungeons where you get kicked out if you log out in them...

I mean, I'm on a world that has tons of open housing anyway but it seems this is a huge problem for most players...

[Rymm]

It's not like the houses stay while you log out anyway, they are like dungeons where you get kicked out if you log out in them...

It's not the house interiors that cause the problem, its the housing wards. They are also individual instances for every. single. ward. Someone a while back did the math that translated into thousands of zones across all the servers that are always up and running. I will have to look for that post again, but as they basically said, the wards on their own don't seem like much but when you add them all up, every world has far more housing wards than all the rest of the regular zones in the game, put together.

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

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?:



It quadruples the number of houses without actually adding new wards, assuming the Stormblood improvements could make it feasible. Couple this change with a restriction of owning one house per account per server, and it would probably do a lot to make housing available to people while also preventing those drowning in gil from monopolizing all the land.

[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).

[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.