Instanced housing? Why not BETTER APARTMENTS?

[VanSanity91]

Get a Job at SE and patch that In for us will ya?

[JCharms]

My idea would be to use the system that is currently in place.
Everything as it is now stays in place, but somewhere within the wards, have a garden path with a gate, clicking on that gate would bring up the same type of interface as the apartments, and you select your plot then go into the instance which is a plot of land and build your house the same as you would in the housing wards.
You could have 3 such gates in each ward with small, med and large.

[-BlueGreen-]

While my #1 gripe with 4.1 is the return of crafting specialization lockouts of the new 2-star recipes, the ongoing housing problems are also part of the reasons I'm seriously considering quitting by the end of this expansion if SE doesn't start fixing things.

Personally, I own a small house in the Mists, and I even helped my wife and my brother to each get small houses. Our FC (which has about a dozen+ active members) has a small house in the Goblet. We were hoping to move the FC to a large house and figured Shirogane was our best bet to do so with 72 larges becoming available at once and no guarantees that anyone that already had a large would attempt to move. Sadly, our leader forgot /busy and you can guess what happened. Anyway, we still have our existing small FC house, so we at least continue to have access to a workshop, garden, stable, and FC member rooms.

That said, I'm not very good at decorating a house, and I'm surrounded by other personal houses, so the "neighborhood" is basically dead. I maintain my house mainly for 3 reasons: A garden which I let a tenant from the FC use to extend our FC gardening efforts since smalls are restricted to one garden plot, the 3 level 50 striking dummies I have set up because the FC house doesn't have space/decoration capacity to set up dummies for aoe practice, and the cheap teleport to Limsa Lominsa. Of that, an apartment could only grant me the 1/3 of the benefits. When I want the feel of community, I don't hang out at my house, I hang out at our FC house.

Based on the feedback I've read from this thread, I have some ideas on how to further fine-tune the suggestions here:

1. Make apartments able to be upgrade-able to different sizes likely mimicking the layout and such of our existing room, small house, medium house, and large house.
2. Where the doorway would be in an FC house to a workshop/FC rooms, instead make it a doorway to a balcony where players can place outdoor furnishings except aetheryte and chocobo stables as those two items are automatic benefits of being in the apartment. (probably limit to a single garden plot)
3. Make it possible to have tenants with apartments to appeal to couples/good friends who wish to share housing spaces.
4. (Please read the following points before raging on this one) Evict everyone (including FCs) from the existing housing wards, reimbursing everyone evicted for the price of the plot. For personal houses, this should move everything into their apartment storeroom (even if they don't currently own an apartment). For FC houses, everything gets moved to the store room and workshop/FC rooms are remembered to be re-instated once the FC has a house again. I say evicting all because that's probably the only way to be fair and put everyone on equal footing for the following points.
5. Redesign all housing wards. Place the apartment building in a more central location with attractive outdoor decorations and space to encourage social activity. Also make all plots capable of having a large house.
6. Restrict houses to FCs only. If someone has so much desire to own an actual house and is willing to give up being in a real FC to have a solo FC to own it, so be it. I suspect that while there are players willing to go that distance, it's a relatively small fraction.
7. Redesign the housing system so that when you first get the plot and pay for the housing permit, you get a small house for your FC. The house itself would act like a special exterior decoration which would allow placing it anywhere within the construction zone (which is the size and location of a large house). Once placed, a house cannot be moved like a regular housing object as the space it's not taking up would then become available for regular decorations. In order to place a new house, all exterior decorations must be placed in the store room, when placing the new house, the old house would disappear and you would have to place it within the boundaries of the construction zone. Large houses can't be arbitrarily placed as they take up the entire construction zone.
8. Have a FC workshop recipe for building the next house up/down (so an FC with a small house can build the medium house, and an FC with a medium house can build either the small or large, and an FC with a large can build the medium). Want to make this less appealing for solo FCs? Make it a requirement that members in the team to advance stages be all FC members of the same FC. Perhaps even require more than 4 people for the large house recipe.
9. Remove the per-item limits that are based on the size of a house/apartment. Allow small houses to have 3 garden plots for instance so that they don't feel compelled to push up to a large for functionality purposes if they would otherwise prefer the look and feel of a small/medium. If someone wants to cram all 8 crafting tables + 6 (or whatever the large limit is) merchants in a space the size of an FC room... let them!
10. Make the limit of place-able outdoor furnishings based on the size of the house, but make the limit so that smaller houses can have the most decorations. For instance, small/medium/large would be 30/20/10. After all, with the space of a large plot, a small house would otherwise look bare if there weren't many decorations. This would also allow FCs the freedom to choose the house size depending on if they prefer to hang out indoors or outdoors.
11. Make some minor changes to FC rooms. First, they remain the current size without the sizing capabilities or balconies of apartments. Second, let the FC leader set the price of FC rooms and which ranks can buy rooms. Third, remove the level 50/GC rank requirement to buy an FC room (even down to 0 if they desire). Finally, (optional), divert the funds used to buy a room to the FC chest. This gives FCs more freedom to control how the rooms are used, opening up the possibility that they would serve as starter homes for low level players as well as creating a small fund-raiser of sorts if FCs choose to set a price on the rooms. Maybe at the time of these changes also deposit 300k for each currently occupied FC room to the FC chest to reimburse for rooms already bought (this isn't strictly necessary, but would help ease the transition a little bit. Let's face it, the balance of gil sources/sinks is broken anyway so this probably wouldn't make that much of an impact. In fact, you could try to give FCs something to spend the money on, like make some mats for the FC house recipes come exclusively from NPC vendors who charge quite a bit for them).

This doesn't even have to happen all at once, it could be done in stages:

1. Implement #1-3 above first. This would probably be some of the easiest to implement and would probably benefit the greatest number of players with little risk. This would also give time for players to give feedback on the improved apartments. Also, encourage individual players to give up their existing lots by giving them gil for the lot (the idea is that they could use the gil to buy/upgrade the apartment)
2. After about 6 months or so, lock out the ability for players to purchase personal houses. Players currently with personal houses aren't evicted, but as the auto-demolition timer reclaims houses, FCs would then be able to move in. Doing this and letting it be the state of affairs for a long while (6 months+) would give time for people to get adjusted to the changes that have happened at this point and the ones that could be coming. If the community feels at this point things to be settled, then we could even stop here, but I suspect the number of FCs forced to live with small houses due to the limited number of larges would mean a lot of unhappy FCs as well as a lot of empty small lots.
3. Implement #4-11 all at once. Possibly reduce the number of wards if FCs can't fill the current number on a server (they can be re-added of FCs fill the smaller number up, but the idea is to keep a healthy ratio of filled/available lots to encourage an active community around these FC houses. Adjust the number of available wards based on each server's individual needs. We don't want to see small servers with ghost towns.

Given the timeline, stage 3 could be implemented as part of the next expansion.

TLDR; the basic goals of all this would be that:

1. Everybody, regardless of FC status would have access to all the interior space of any of the existing room/house sizes as well as garden, tenants, stables, aetheryte and outdoor decorations that current small housing provides through the improved apartments.
2. FCs would no longer have to fight personal houses for lots so that they can have a house, airship and FC rooms on top of the interior/exterior decorating space.
3. The wards feel like real neighborhoods with hopefully more activity around the apartment buildings as well as activity around each FC house depending on where members prefer to hang out at. Since the wards would be FC-only, it would even open up the possibility of reducing the number of wards to ensure that they are more densely populated. Of course, that would come with the challenge of relocating apartments which happen to be in the wards that disappear.
4. End the fight for specific-sized (large in particular) plots.
5. Strongly discourage, perhaps even completely eliminate house-flipping. There's still the "location, location, location" aspect to housing, but I suspect that by eliminating housing demand by individual players would also significantly diminish the appeal of house-flipping. At any rate, I suspect that, as long as all FCs have access to lots that want them, any house-flipping that still would occur would only be for the sake of getting "prime" locations and might even be largely overlooked by the community at that point if it accounts for a very small amount of lot transactions.