[Suggestion] Solving the "Housing Problem"

[Dustytome]

1. Not going to happen. Square shot themselves in the foot with how they made fc housing, decided to double down and mix in personal housing with that and then went for the swiss cheese look by adding on to it.
2. Might work for personal housing, but FC + House sales are unaffected and that loophole is where the problem will be continue on.
3. Again, that will help in one way, but people will still continue to hold houses with personal FCs.

With that out of the way, how does this ideal housing market supposedly work?

[Okita]

Well, just brainstorming here: I was thinking about something like an an auction house where a player enters his/her house for sale and players can bid for the houses. The starting price of the house is capped so players can't start selling their houses at ridiculously high prices. Once the house is sold, only then will it be relinquished and automatically transferred to the purchaser. If a player gets booted however (due to inactivity), the property will appear on the aetheryte as usual.

Example:
I own a 4th class cottage I bought for 4 mil. If I auction it, the price would start at 1 mil and players can bid on it. Since the property is "up in the air", players wont pay for relinquishment, as there is a risk that someone else will outbid him (hence why you can't have a max amount which resulting in the property being automatically sold.)

[Dustytome]

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.

[Okita]

It would be pointless since you still need to beat the bids. At the very least, it cuts of the "Pay first -> Relinquish -> Check Aetheryte and hope no one stole he house".

And for people with truckloads of Gil, the real question i how far are you willing to push? The prices of houses are pretty much stable atm, fluttering around numbers that most people know. Problem is, they need to pay the "relinquishing fees" and the land price. Ultimately, I feel like an auction house is still cheaper.

E.g with the auction system, I could buy a mansion for 80mil (maybe 50mil over the starting price). Atm, the same house would prolly cost around 80mil anyway but i also have to pay the land price on the aetheryte.

[Dustytome]

I guess I just don't like auctioning systems. It locks a lot of people out and they lowered the pricing on houses to ensure it was a more viable purchase for a wider audience. They seem to want to let more people have access to housing, they just can't keep up with the demand due to the initial housing structure that they continued with. If I remember correctly they also didn't want to limit housing per account for rp reasons? I think that was from a live letter but it was quite awhile ago.

[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.