We need a statement from the developers

[LunaTsukihime]

Regarding the housing.

The state the system is in right now is not in the least tolerable.

Yes, we have 12 wards, thats 2880 plots i think.

But a server has way more than that in players.

This doesnt work anymore.
SE has to seriously change this system or there will be a lot of upset players.
Already seeing threads popping up abut players leaving the game because of this.

The Ward idea worked for a while but it got rapidly worse with each influx of new players.

Adding more wards wont change anything imho.
It's high time they switched housing to instanced, so every player who has saved up can get their house, something ALOT have looked forward to with this patch, only to be betrayed by the launcher and other factors.

It cannot be in the sense of the game to have all plots gone after 3 minutes the game went live.

If someone from SE reads this, please, we all are in love with the game, but it hurts to see things like this hurt the playerbase.


A sad Miqo.

[CatfishCassie]

They have instanced housing and it's called apartments. The wards exist for a reason, however, and that reason is to inspire a sense of community. No one cares how cool your house is when it exists in a pocket dimension that only you and your close friends know or care about, but being able to see other people's houses as you walk by to your own creates a difficult-to-quantify yet important aspect of community awareness. It's one of the big reasons I've stuck with FFXIV for so long... the fact that they put a lot of effort into little things that really make it feel like you're living in a world instead of just playing a game.

That said... a lot of their caps are pretty ridiculous, and a relic of when the game was much smaller in terms of server population. 12 wards isn't enough, and certainly the cap on apartments makes no sense either. The amount of profit they're churning through in FFXIV is enough to almost entirely fund the development of other games like FFXV, and they promised that now that FFXV is done, that money would be reinvested back into the game that actually earned it. So my question is: why not reinvest it into the game by standing up more housing servers or, perhaps, even just more NA/EU servers in general? And why spit on the FCs that keep the game going by letting individuals overwhelm the housing market to the point that FCs that didn't have a house before Housingpocalypse probably still don't have one now.

And for the love of all that is holy, get rid of the ridiculous 1000 character cap on messages!

[Tridus]

They have instanced housing and it's called apartments. The wards exist for a reason, however, and that reason is to inspire a sense of community. No one cares how cool your house is when it exists in a pocket dimension that only you and your close friends know or care about, but being able to see other people's houses as you walk by to your own creates a difficult-to-quantify yet important aspect of community awareness. It's one of the big reasons I've stuck with FFXIV for so long... the fact that they put a lot of effort into little things that really make it feel like you're living in a world instead of just playing a game.

The communities work exactly the same if there's 24 wards instead of 12, except that doubles the amount of people who can get a house. Scaling outward like that is something that modern server clusters do really, really easily. The problem is SE's mentality.

[CatfishCassie]

The communities work exactly the same if there's 24 wards instead of 12, except that doubles the amount of people who can get a house. Scaling outward like that is something that modern server clusters do really, really easily. The problem is SE's mentality.

I'm not arguing with you at all... even with SE controlling their own server cluster, the resources they'd spend opening up a new ward would be paid back in a week's worth of subscriptions from the people in that ward. My desktop could hold all the resources required for every housing ward on the server... it's not like we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars here. I mean... *maybe* SE is like the only 10-million-plus user network on the planet that hasn't moved to a cloud architecture yet, in which case *maybe* it requires more than a weekend's worth of rearchitecturing to make that happen. But for anyone else, it's as easy as changing a single UI window and spinning up some new VMs.

[Inuk9]

No we don't. I played this game for 2 years without a house just fine.

[HyoMinPark]

Apartments are not an adequate substitute for instanced housing. I am so tired of seeing that excuse. This current housing system is absolutely unacceptable; and what is even more unacceptable than that is the fact that one's chance of getting a house is royally screwed if you land a 2002 Lobby Error, or get thrown into a 1,000+ player queue, or if your launcher is completely non-responsive.

The only real solution is to shift completely to instanced housing. People don't care about these neighborhoods, which are dead on even the most popular of servers, when they have a higher chance of their pets learning how to fly than getting a house. Free-to-play MMOs have better housing systems than a subscription-based game that is supposed to be on-par with the likes of games like WoW. Utterly unacceptable.

[Kohdo]

Apartments are not an adequate substitute for instanced housing...The only real solution is to shift completely to instanced housing. People don't care about these neighborhoods...

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Apartments are the instanced housing you're demanding. People do care about the sense of community that wards bring. Stop demanding SE uproot the entire damn system just to please people who will only find something else to whine about later.

[Spirlia]

People do care about community, including me. I hang out with my neighbors, and many times I have perused the houses in my housing area. It gives a sense of, "This is mine. I own this, nobody else does." It's something to be proud of and invest in. Instanced housing does not give that same feeling.

I would be okay with apartments being the instanced form of housing, especially if they made "suites" (small house sized), "lofts" (medium house sized), or "penthouse" (large sized). Obviously those names are not mandatory. Make those available to only player characters, and leave the houses to free companies. Increase the cap on apartments, and up the prices. I think that would solve a lot.

[MistakeNot]

is supposed to be on-par with the likes of games like WoW.

You do know that WoW doesn't really have any housing system at all? (Unless you count garrisons, which few people do).
So in at least that regard FFXIV is not only on-par with the likes of WoW, but actually much better.

[Kilyua]

Complain about it in Forum and others will not change anything. The only thing that could impact SE is a financial impact. The only way would be to have a large majority of players suspending their account at the same time to impact them financially for them to start listening. But that would never happen and as such, they will never do anything about it.