The State of Housing is Attrocious

[Moonlite]

Sorry but any system that makes you stay up to 3am at night, with a window of under 1 minute to get a in high demand feature, is attrocious. Other MMO's that have housing, even the ones that have turned to garbage in recent years like lotro, still had better systems in place, than what we have right now. This is a design problem, not a corporate one. Corporate has it's own issues yes, but the design of the system as it is right now, is a major problem that needs to be addressed.

Honestly, this comes up every housing addition. I just can't see it as evil, I see it as they don't care to fix it and we have to suffer or else. I have complained every patch FC/Personal/added wards/private rooms. As have others, nothing changes. They don't even make an effort to make the bad system they have a little better. To many people defend this team since 2.0, I don't see them changing.

Honestly if you get anything more then a vague answer and a move on from the dev team. You guys deserve credit.

[Insainbutterfly]

Just because things are done a certain way for a certain time, does not mean that it should continue to be done this way. I implore the Devs to change this system. For all of us that love your game and want to continue playing it and enjoying content, you *must* change the way that the housing system works. If you cannot do anything with the current ward system, then make something new so that people can own an instanced area like a manor with just one house and one inside and outside. You need to make an actual space with indoor and outdoor facilities that can be decorated available to all players in this game. Because I love this game and I want to continue playing it with my friends and my FC, I want to see housing improved so that *everyone* has access to something they love. For the sake of this games continued success and popularity, especially among RPers, please address this issue. Please acknowledge this issue.

[RaidPanties]

It's all the frustration of non-instanced housing without the special feeling of owning your own land, because there's 74 copies of the same house.

Literally the worst of both worlds.

[PSDuckie]

I have to agree with OP. Housing currently is extremely frustrating.

Personally, I think you should look to EQ2 as an example of how to do housing. Although there are houses in the game world (example: 1 Compassion Road in Freeport) the actual housing itself is instanced. This means that, for example, I and OP could both have houses at the same game-world location, but the inside of my house and the inside of her house could be different.

[Blackweaver]

There's been a lot of talk about instanced housing. Unfortunately I don't see them scrapping this system they got. So I'd shoot for actually fixing it. Create new special wards and remake existing wards so only FC's can have houses in them, new wards for personal houses. And any current personal house, gets moved to the personal house wards. Then, just do what lotro once did. Set the housing server to see how much land remains, and make it auto-generate a new ward/subward or two and keep doing it till the housing market settles down.

I'd also restrict housing to 1 personal house per account. That would put a stop to the rich folk who use multiple characters to buy up houses, and resell them on the black market. Also strive to get more aggressive on the housing black market. Even though that is a symptom of the problem, it is also a major contributer.

[Kacho_Nacho]

Instanced housing would go a long way toward correcting the current situation but it would involve scrapping the existing housing system. Creating additional wards as needed would work. In addition, SE might consider allowing multiple stories for the houses with different tenants for each story. These stories would have outdoor terraces for outdoor furnishings and be larger on the inside than the outside.

[JCharms]

Instanced housing would go a long way toward correcting the current situation but it would involve scrapping the existing housing system.

There's been a lot of talk about instanced housing. Unfortunately I don't see them scrapping this system they got.

There is already an instanced housing system in place, so nothing needs to be scrapped, altered or changed as far as what is already in place.
Instanced housing would work the same as the apartments do, but instead of walking up to the door of the apartment block, it would be a gate to a path somewhere in the current housing zones, which would lead to a block of land to build your house.

[Mesarthim]

Leviathan had every plot in Shirogane or otherwise taken within 4-5 minutes after the servers came up. I find it hysterical that there's actually a feature in the game that lowers the price of the plot if no one buys it after a certain amount of time. Has that ever been used on any plot on any server ever?

I can relate. I snagged a medium (smalls ended up being too cramped for my designs and I don't need a large). Let me explain how it ended up for me:

While enduring extreme paranoia and stress (both of which shouldn't be even conceivable for VIRTUAL HOUSING) I logged on as fast as I possibly could. Login queue of 43. By the time I got on the medium I sought after was already taken, as well as the second and third I looked at by sheer dumb luck. I have a notepad of the location of every medium in Shirogane and I managed to finally use the relocation feature on the fourth medium I checked. I live in Hawaii so servers came up at midnight for me but mainlanders have 3-6 AM for North America and that is awful.

I mean sure I'm happy with my new house but even I am not happy about this housing system. I started in 3.2 and I barely even got a house in the start of 3.4 (two patches to get a house?). The whole concept of plots decreasing in value is silly when there's no possibility of that ever happening. There just isn't enough housing.

People are yelling at Square Enix that they didn't get a personal or FC house (both of which should be available when desired) and as far as I am concerned their anger is justified. I just don't know when or if this is ever going to change considering how long they've dragged this flawed housing system on for. I should not have to endure THAT kind of server up ever again, nor should anyone.