Housing and FCs...

[Talraen]

I don't think anyone on this thread has actually addressed the point being made here yet. Which is too bad, because it's a very interesting point. And it doesn't only affect servers without available housing.

Do you have any suggestions on how to solve this problem? Because you're right, if your FC dies, you're probably going to stick with it so as not to lose the housing. It's going to be very difficult to convince two dead FCs with housing to merge into one. Maybe if there was a way to keep the stuff associated with the housing, not only furniture and such but things like FC workshop progress. I don't know how you'd merge FCs even in that case, though.

[BillyKaplan]

Maybe if there was a way to keep the stuff associated with the housing, not only furniture and such but things like FC workshop progress

Two things that would be amazing -
1. breaking workshops out of housing. FCs need to be affiliated with a certain GC, I'd like to see public, instanced workshops made available to FCs that hit a certain rank, instead of tying them to houses. Make the workshop log also tied to the FC rather than the house. Two things you get from this: a lot more FCs become viable as they no longer NEED a house, 2. you remove the incentive to owning a house from people who are in it just for the workshop.

2. FC merge. I can see why this doesn't exist as it's too much of a headache, but at the same time it can be very simplified and will give smaller FCs a chance to merge and grow without either FC losing things by virtue of abandoning their original FCs. And suddenly from needing two houses, you also need just the one.

[Talraen]

Two things that would be amazing -
1. breaking workshops out of housing. FCs need to be affiliated with a certain GC, I'd like to see public, instanced workshops made available to FCs that hit a certain rank, instead of tying them to houses. Make the workshop log also tied to the FC rather than the house. Two things you get from this: a lot more FCs become viable as they no longer NEED a house, 2. you remove the incentive to owning a house from people who are in it just for the workshop.

2. FC merge. I can see why this doesn't exist as it's too much of a headache, but at the same time it can be very simplified and will give smaller FCs a chance to merge and grow without either FC losing things by virtue of abandoning their original FCs. And suddenly from needing two houses, you also need just the one.

I agree with point 1, that you should be able to have a free company workshop without housing. I don't know if that addresses the issue the OP brought up, though. If the workshop is still tied to the FC, I'm still going to hesitate to leave my FC (and lose all that work) to merge with someone else's. So the FC merge you propose would need to take workshops into account. I'm not sure of a clean way to do that, but that's a problem that needs to be solved.

[BillyKaplan]

So the FC merge you propose would need to take workshops into account.

Some things are easier than others. For instance, the construction log, and areas discovered by submarines and airships. If one FC has it, the merged FC will, too. Other things will be trickier - do you have, combined, too many airships and submarines? Are your FC chests too full? Stuff like that. Which is why I said it can be very simple - you can't merge the FCs until you have few enough vehicles. This can be selected as late as the actual merge process. "You have 5 airships. A possible 4 are allowed per fc. Please select which is to be discarded" and it's up to the the players to decide together which airship to give up on, and to strip it for parts prior to doing so.
Ultimately there won't be a situation where nothing is lost, that would be unfair to people who don't merge FCs, and will make it prone to abuse. You leave an fc, you lose something. You want to merge FCs, the end result is still a single, regular FC, so despite all your hard work, it's just not fair for you to keep two FC's worth of anything.

[Vidu]

I don't think anyone on this thread has actually addressed the point being made here yet. Which is too bad, because it's a very interesting point. And it doesn't only affect servers without available housing.
Do you have any suggestions on how to solve this problem? Because you're right, if your FC dies, you're probably going to stick with it so as not to lose the housing. It's going to be very difficult to convince two dead FCs with housing to merge into one. Maybe if there was a way to keep the stuff associated with the housing, not only furniture and such but things like FC workshop progress. I don't know how you'd merge FCs even in that case, though.

I dont believe that housing is the only thing to consider during a merger - and specifically not with the focus on workshop and airship-progress.
There are many things to consider and most of them arent really in SEs hand or are related to ingame systems like housing:

- Who is going to be the FC-master of the new FC?
- Which FC-name is being kept? Which tag?
- Hierachie-structers can be different - how do you deal with that? Do you agree on one system or do you create a new one? Even if the two FC-masters are friends, they might have different styles of managing their FCs.
- What are the common rules on chest, FC-buffs and if you have them: garden and vessels?
- If you have different GC-affiliations: Which one do you pick?
- Is everyone actually onboard with merging? Or do you have people in your FC who'd prefer to stay smaller or maybe dont like someone from the other FC?
- ...and now for housing: Which house do you keep? Even if we untie the workshop and airship progress from it: Do you keep the medium one in the Goblet from FC A or do you settle for the small one in Shirogane that FC B got? Who is going to decorate it? The furniture isnt lost when you give up the house - the FC-leader of the FC thats being "absorbed" will get all the furniture (or maybe you even have to remove it beforehand... I'm not sure right now). You only need to agree on how to decorate the house afterwards, which is normal FC-buisness (at least if you have mutliple people caring about the look of the house)
For workshop and airship progress the answer should actually be the easiestes: you keep the FC with more progress - having an FC own two houses is obviously out of the question or we'd start seeing FCs owning multiple houses like people used to do. If you have two FCs merging and one has more progress than the other one, no one loses anything (it only gets tricky when the FCs have different kind of progress on the airship-map, for example.)

Housing, even with the workshop-progress, is only one factor in a list of difficult questions that one has to ask when merging FCs - I dont believe that "but our house!" is the only reason people dont merge, but also things like certain rights attached to their rank that they dont wanna lose, being used to a certain structur within the current FC and, specially for masters and highranking officers, a headache included in having to deal with the merger.
Even if we'd have an easy way to merge FCs by both FC-leaders hitting a "merge us, please!"-button all of those questions I've just listed would still stand and would have to be dealt with. And thats nothing SE can help anyone with or can create a system for.

[Okamimaru]

There is no real incentive to merge 2 small fc if both have housing... you don't gain anything really from having more people other than more gc seals and more chat to sift through... in fact with limited gardening space and such it could be detrimental...

[BreyVoreas93]

There is no real incentive to merge 2 small fc if both have housing... you don't gain anything really from having more people other than more gc seals and more chat to sift through... in fact with limited gardening space and such it could be detrimental...

Couldn’t agree more. I wish there were actual options for merging smalls like that, and obviously benefits. Hell I wish we had more content for FC’s in general, outside of crafting something together in the workshop and going to diadem they offer nothing to FC’s to do together.

[Enla]

Couldn’t agree more. I wish there were actual options for merging smalls like that, and obviously benefits. Hell I wish we had more content for FC’s in general, outside of crafting something together in the workshop and going to diadem they offer nothing to FC’s to do together.

Not going to lie I'd love it if FC's could share housing. Or if one FC could 'rent' out the house to another and have them share the facilities until the other FC can secure their own. Or just FC alliances in general...

[Mikhaill]

Did they add the "Everyone gets 1" House thing yet?
Meaning, 1 PER SERVER at the very least...