Thread: In Regard to Housing in Patch 4.1

After missing out on our chance at a Shirogane plot on Tuesday due to lobby errors, my FC and I were extremely disheartened, and not expecting a response, especially not in such a timely manner. We’re quite surprised now, and cautiously optimistic. Given this opportunity, I would like to express some of our thoughts and possible solutions (which agree with many already proposed):

- One FC house and one personal house per server/account. This should have been implemented from the start, and needs to be now. Simply adding more wards and calling it a day is an insulting band-aid fix; very temporary, and won’t solve the underlying problems.Implement this system, and then a week or so before 4.2, give current players with multiple homes the time to choose which one to keep, and refund the others. Will that upset some players? Of course, but those houses shouldn’t be owned by one person, and people are already enraged. This is the most important fix, I think, and one many others echo. If this sort of system is not implemented, and all we get are more wards, I can’t even imagine the backlash you will likely receive.

- Update apartments - make them a little bigger (so they don’t just feel like a glorified FC room), give an instanced balcony, allow cross-breeding gardening, etc. Right now, apartments aren’t much of an option for players interested in housing. Make them so.

- Increase the amount of tenants allowed per house, make it so we can share our homes with alts, and allow the demo timer to be reset by tenants. This should be an easy, no-brainer fix, and ease some of the housing strain. Players may be more open to sharing houses if they have more options available.

- Give some priority to FCs, and I don’t mean one-man FCs. I saw one player's proposal was to allow two different housing ward instances - one player housing, one FC housing. That might not be a bad idea. Maybe make it so that a plot cannot be purchased by an FC with less than three or five members? I don’t think it should be as high as ten, as some FCs are genuinely smaller. You need three signatures to even create an FC, so maybe four should be the minimum limit? Just some thoughts - it won’t stop every “fake” FC, but it’s something at least.

- Make it harder for house flippers. Limiting housing to one fc/one personal per server/account won’t solve this issue completely (though it should tremendously help), so another solution will need to be layered with it. I’ve seen some propose that, once a house is relinquished, it should not be allowed to be reclaimed for X-amount of time; maybe make this a random amount of time, between 24 and 48 hours? Or, an idea I find interesting, implement a housing market board. When a house is demolished or relinquished, the original owner receives 80% of the purchase price back, and the house goes up for “auction” sale on the marketboard (it CANNOT be purchased immediately at the placard). For 24-72hrs afterward, players may “bid” on the house (I am not proposing a free auction - rather, that interested players may offer the houses price, determined by the system), and at the end of the “auction”, a random player among the bidders is accepted (and then, of course, all other bidders receive their gil back). This should essentially kill the housing market as we know it now.

- (My bf just proposed this one, wanted to add it in) Edit the wards so that every plot of land is the same size, and when you purchase said plot, you can choose what size house to build. So, every plot would cost the same amount, and then you pay an additional amount per the size of the house, and you can upgrade later if you need/want to start small. I thought this was genius (and I believe I've seen a few others here echo this solution) - then anyone can have whatever size house they want on a plot, thus eliminating this arbitrary limitation on larger houses. Adding onto this thought, make it so we can change a plot between personal and FC, and vice versa, without first having to demolish and repurchase. I'm not even sure why that one wasn't implemented from the start.

I am apprehensive to learn what manner of changes are to come, but will remain hopeful. I do love the wards and neighborhoods, and would not like to see instanced housing, but that would at least also be a solution. I hope we don’t see a “free” auction system either - that would simply promote RMT and leave many genuine players out of luck. Regardless, I hope this issue is being taken seriously, and that we can all look forward to the coming months.

Thats awesome, if i also may make a suggestion in addition to adding more wards to current places. Would it make sense to add housing to Ishguard as well? I'd love a snow themed area to live in along with many others that have suggested it. Would really hit a corner with limited housing too.

Also limiting housing to 1 per account may help.

~Minny

Originally Posted by Minerva-Redwater

Thats awesome, if i also may make a suggestion in addition to adding more wards to current places. Would it make sense to add housing to Ishguard as well? I'd love a snow themed area to live in along with many others that have suggested it. Would really hit a corner with limited housing too.

Also limiting housing to 1 per account may help.

~Minny

this! I've been waiting for Ishgard housing patiently for awhile now. Even before SB was even announced. To have a house in the snowing mountains would be excellent. One of the skins you could craft might be a log cabin type exterior, as well. You could definitely make a warm household.

Hi everyone.

I'm very happy to hear this as some of my FC members missed out too. Just in case I decided to check the Japanese post from Yoshi P earlier on this subject and share any missing nuances with my FC so that they have the same understanding as Japanese speakers. I felt there were some important bits of information that were missing in the English post so I decided to share that with the community here too. I hope this answers some of your questions following the annoucement.

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Hello, everyone. This is FFXIV Producer and Director, Naoki Yoshida.

Patch 4.1 saw the introduction of the new residential area, Shirogane, and though we are pleased to see so many players enjoying the housing feature even more, we also received a great deal of feedback regarding lack of plots on congested servers and faults related to housing.

Adding to the fact that a great number of you were interested in either purchasing or relocating to a plot in Shirogane, we failed to prepare sufficient plots for players particularly in high population servers, and I deeply apologize for not being able to meet 100% of everyone’s expectations.

The concentrated login that occurred immediately after the patch 4.1 maintenance increased the stress and load on the servers and as a result, when the relocation feature was simultaneously exectuted by multiple players, this caused a fault on the lock function. For example there have been several dozen reports of rare cases where the relocation could not be completed due to the lock function not being released and again we apologize for the inconvenience caused. This issue will be addressed and fixed in today’s Hot Fix.

Furthermore, in recognition of everyone’s great patronage and in light of the feedback we have received so far, we aim to make additional investments on our infrastructure in time for patch 4.2 and address the fundamental issue of the plot shortages by creating additional wards in Lavender Beds, the Goblet, the Mist, and Shirogane.

We have received various feedback from players worldwide with regard to how they should be added and after we have taken these into consideration, we will make an announcement at a later date, outlining the number of new wards and details such as how they will be sold.

In order to prevent speculative purchases, we will probably refrain from releasing information regarding the plot purchasing feature until the very last minute. We kindly ask for your understanding and patience on this until we can provide you with these details.

I hope you will all continue to enjoy the various new content added in patch 4.1!
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