Suggestion: Do not allow multiple service accounts all own houses.

[Penthea]

I don't disagree that one person with several accounts with houses on each is an issue...however is it even possible for SE to determine, without any shred of doubt, that the same person owns multiple accounts?

Sure there are some signs that can point to a person owning several accounts, but that sort of activity isn't unique to it. SE can't use the below criteria to hunt down players with several accounts hoarding houses without the risk of punishing innocent legitimate players.

• It's not unusual for more than one person to play XIV in a single home so looking at the IP address won't work.
• It's not unusual for a person to be paying for subs for more than just themselves, so checking the payment info won't work.
• It's not unusual for several people to use the same gaming devices, so checking that won't work.
• It's not unusual for a group of people to be tenants in one anothers houses, so checking tenancy across suspected accounts won't work.

So what's left then? The ToS? Well as far as I know running multiple XIV applications on pc isn't against the ToS. So as long as the player isn't multi-boxing this doesn't count as an offence.

It's clear an automated system won't work, which means SE would have to get staff to personally inspect the activity of suspected accounts. This would cost a lot of time and money. I don't see SE ever doing this.

I think the only things SE could do to reduce the impact of this issue, without huge changes to the housing system, is to reintroduce the limit of fc houses per server back to one and remove grandfathering for both private and fc homes, and reduce the incentive to hoard houses by allowing all characters in the same server have access to the same private home. But that's not a proper fix because a player with several accounts would still have access to a far larger amount of housing than most players.

The only real fix for housing availability issues is some serious change throughout the housing system, if not an actual overhaul.