Housing and FCs...

[Vidu]

There probably needs to be a way to elegantly move the time and financial commitment of one FC that is having it's swan song into a pool that is transferable. They are doing a lot to fix the issues of one person owning too many houses, but the core of the housing crisis is the lack of good liquidation. The current system encourages hoarding and there are people that just log on for a day or two a week keeping a sub just to make sure that housing commitment isn't put into default.

Nope, I still dont understand your problem - "lack of good liquidation"?
After 45 days a house will get auto-demolished while the FC-leader (or private person) is getting a refund on their gil - and yes, there should be a system in place to resell your house to the server instead of having to wait it out, but thats about it.
What would "good liquidation" be in your book?
People who are staying subbed and making sure there house isnt getting demolished are having a clear intrest in keeping that house - and at least for myself I can tell you that thats not only because I'd worry to not get my dream-plot again but also because I like the way I've decorated my house and dont want to do that again. Is it so weird that someone wants to keep something they've build up? I feel you're missing that point - people might keep houses not only because they're worried they wont get another again but also because they actually really like what they did with their house.
Of course they dont want to see their housing commitment go to waste - but that doesnt only include cmaping before a spot and snatching it but also the hours and hours they put into decorating., which you seem to miss completly. We're not having that many people "hoarding" houses anymore - we do have people holding on to houses because they want to or because those houses mean something to them.

Ideally we would get instanced housing and they said they would expand on apartments, if I recall correctly.

For FC-merges, we most likely only need a re-sell function - problem solved, 80% of gil refunded. But I doubt that many people are that attached to their gil and more to their time spend with and in the house. Gil is easy to come by, houses are cheap - I doubt anyone is against a merger because they'd lose 4, 18 or even 50 million (or rather a farction of that) by giving up their FC-house but rather because of "emotional attatchment" to the place. And thats nothing that SE can fix.

Let me ask you: what would your solution be?

...honestly, currently it seems that your problem is that people are attached to their houses - thats nothing SE can fix, because the reason for that isnt only "I got a house, cant let it go" but most likely also "I got a house, I've made this my home, I decorated it nicely, I like it - I dont wanna lose this place".

[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.

[Colt47]

I am not saying by any means that the housing system is perfect, but few things are designed to work even in poor conditions. They're designed to work in normal conditions...Balmung's population isn't a normal condition.

I'm not convinced the problem is the population, though. There are plenty of people to group together and do content with, just that the population is fragmented since the primary guild organization system got tied into the old housing system. There are other issues such as new players not being able to come into the server, but I'm just hoping they can get a system in that makes liquidating their extra housing more appealing. If that doesn't work the only real solution will be doing a culling of sorts.

I agree with the above poster that merging existing FCs is a complex task. If SE were to allow the merging of assets, than the two sides would likely have to merge their assets under a single account of whom the ownership would need to be determined. The truth is breaking up a long standing guild is a messy process regardless of the game since even with a single guild, there's often going to be members left floating around. If the guild worked off a communal system where funds from running people through dungeons were pooled into a central repository, the Guild Master and those in charge would have to figure out how to deal with that since technically no one person is in ownership of that fund, at least from a purely political standpoint. There were numerous tales in World of Warcraft of wealthy guild leaders running off with the treasury, usually with a name change, followed by a dozen or more angry people doing detective work to figure out where that person ran off to.

[Colt47]

Vidu, people aren't allowing the auto demolish to happen because the amount they get from the default of the house is paltry in comparison to the sum of time and gil used in the purchase of the house. Good liquidation should not involve property value in this case because the amount of gil needed is going to change based on server and the point in time that the house went into default. The best option would be a housing token based on the size of the plot, which can be used to purchase a plot of the same size upon returning to the game. Additionally, all assets that were in the home as decorations should be permanently stored and accredited to the proper FC owner. Probably a tab that the FC owner and permitted associates have access to.

That's my own take on it, but it beats the heck out of gil.

[Vidu]

Vidu, people aren't allowing the auto demolish to happen because the amount they get from the default of the house is paltry in comparison to the sum of time and gil used in the purchase of the house. Good liquidation should not involve property value in this case because the amount of gil needed is going to change based on server and the point in time that the house went into default. The best option would be a housing token based on the size of the plot, which can be used to purchase a plot of the same size upon returning to the game. Additionally, all assets that were in the home as decorations should be permanently stored and accredited to the proper FC owner. Probably a tab that the FC owner and permitted associates have access to.

That's my own take on it, but it beats the heck out of gil.

There are a few things you've got wrong here - or at least not up to date:

1) You'll always get a refund of 80% of the gil you've paid for the plot (so if you've paid the full 20 million for a premimum-class medium plot, you'll get 16 million back)
2) Prices are actually the same across all servers now

In regards to the token-system... I dont think thats a good idea, because it would require that there are always plots open of any size - with the gil-refund you could at least say "Oh well, screw this house, I'll buy something else for the money!". Same goes for housing-owners who specifally dont want a house anymore but would like to get some gil back.

If an FC-house gets demolished, that means that a whole FC didnt log in for over 45 days - that FC is dead. Whoever comes back is probably better off looking for a new FC or starting from scratch, but thats a personal opinion, obviously.

I agree that furniture and gil should be stored permanently and not only for 30 days after demolition, but thats about it.

I dont think a token-system would work better than the gil-refund, because it would limit you to actually only get that one plotsize back, while gil would allow you to do whatever you want (thats why I prefer cash over giftcards as gift! ...but I disgress)
You'll lose 20% of what you paid, but honestly: Gil is so, so easy to come by. For small plots the 20% are barely noticeable - and if you've made 50 million (max amount you can pay for a mansion currently), you can make 10 million to make up for the loss.
Gil is easy to earn but hard to spend in this game - the only real concern would time invested in making the house and FC a home. And thats nothing SE can compensate 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...