We need a statement from the developers

[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.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

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.

She never said otherwise. Nonetheless, FFXIV is often held to similar acclaim yet uses archaic systems and constantly defaults onto the "server" excuse. Forget housing for a moment. WoW has a glamour system that spits on FFXIV. Free to play MMOs like Black Desert, ESO and Wildstar all have immensely better systems. Why is it XIV gets defended when virtually every other MMO does a better job on housing and glamour?

[MistakeNot]

Why is it XIV gets defended when virtually every other MMO does a better job on housing and glamour?

Because most people posting here still prefers FFXIV over those other MMOs, and people tend to defend that which they like.

[BlairYS]

Because most people posting here still prefers FFXIV over those other MMOs, and people tend to defend that which they like.

People who defend this game also has their right to defend their complaints about what they lack of, such as enjoyment in their game and difference of gameplay style from a person such as yourself.

[hydralus]

Free to play MMOs like Black Desert, ESO and Wildstar all have immensely better systems. Why is it XIV gets defended when virtually every other MMO does a better job on housing and glamour?

Because if it mattered that much I'd be playing one of those F2P MMOs.

[CatfishCassie]

She never said otherwise. Nonetheless, FFXIV is often held to similar acclaim yet uses archaic systems and constantly defaults onto the "server" excuse. Forget housing for a moment. WoW has a glamour system that spits on FFXIV. Free to play MMOs like Black Desert, ESO and Wildstar all have immensely better systems. Why is it XIV gets defended when virtually every other MMO does a better job on housing and glamour?

Definitely no one does a better job on Glamour. Black Desert does costumes... full-body, no customization. Most other MMOs do as well. Maybe the costumes look nice, but they're not your combination... your expression. They're something you bought from the cash shop with no ability to use it to uniquely express your character's personality. At best, other MMOs do *as well as* FFXIV... games like Rift have a nearly identical system where you pick individual pieces to show on your character, but even then, that's your character's outfit... you can't have multiple outfits saved for multiple different looks that you can swap between.

As for housing... instanced housing isn't a better system, it's a different system. It has different requirements and different results. ESO's houses look amazing... much better than anything in FFXIV. But they all exist in some pocket dimension that no one will ever see unless they're explicitly invited. FFXIV wanted to do something different. They wanted to create a world that felt like your character lived there, and they've gone to a lot of effort to do so. But they also have the technology to greatly expand the current housing availability, and they continually choose not to. My desktop can hold the data for every asset in every ward on every server... so if they're having issues with stability from adding more wards, someone should be fired over that... either they're not adequately compressing the data so the client can unpack it when they load into the zone, or they just have zero idea what they're doing. Anyone running similar services on a cloud could just spin up or shut down Virtual Machines as-needed. If Amazon was running FFXIV, it'd take them maybe half an hour to change the one UI screen per housing district that matters and test it, and then a couple microseconds to spin up the VMs required to run it.