possible solutions

[not_ya_wify]

regarding your comments about member requirements: your fc has 25, I'd think it be really easy for you to maintain 8 active players per week.

My FC has 125 members and there have been times where I was the only person logging in for a month or two. I don't think I've ever seen more than 10 members log in at the same time even at the time my FC was at it's largest. And honestly, as an FC leader I don't want to constantly care for new people to make sure they log on and stay active. It's exhausting and I want to spend my time doing things I like and just have casual conversation with the 3 or 4 people that I'm familiar with and enjoy talking to. Just because it works that way in your FC doesn't mean other people want to play that way.

[Svaltus]

My FC has 125 members and there have been times where I was the only person logging in for a month or two. I don't think I've ever seen more than 10 members log in at the same time even at the time my FC was at it's largest. And honestly, as an FC leader I don't want to constantly care for new people to make sure they log on and stay active. It's exhausting and I want to spend my time doing things I like and just have casual conversation with the 3 or 4 people that I'm familiar with and enjoy talking to. Just because it works that way in your FC doesn't mean other people want to play that way.

FC Districts
separate districts for FC USE ONLY meaning you can only purchase a house there if your the leader of an FC and the size of the house you can buy is determined by the average amount of active FC members.(active meaning they just log in once every 2 months) this would be to prevent a dieing FC with 1 member left from keeping a plot to himself, when an alive FC would love to have it.

Your probably referring to things that where said after the original post. I have since then updated the original post(quite a few days before you posted this reply) and as you can see above it says "active meaning they just log in once every 2 months".

[Solarra]

Possible Solutions - my 10 cents

Auctions - No, I don't like this idea. It might favour long-term players like me, but it's going to squeeze out new players and encourage RMT

Reverse Auctions - We actually have this system already. House prices start high and drop over time. I would agree the present system is deeply flawed though and starting prices are so low that it doesn't feel like the drop is significant. However, raise the starting price and you're back to excluding newer players (especially on a busy server) and encouraging RMT.

Lottery - Unfair and potentially frustrating. You could get the situation where a large, active FC could be waiting years to get a FC house, while Johnny-new-player comes along and gets a personal house first try.

Premium Housing Wards - No way! Please, stop trying to give a large and profitable company more cash so they can solve a problem entirely of their own making. They made this system, they are stubbornly sticking to it. In my opinion, it's their responsibility to make it work.

FC Apartments - Done right, this could be an attractive option. However a couple of small rooms, no workshop access or crossing plants plus a strict limit on utilities like bells, vendors, crafting stations isn't going to please anyone. So yes, this is a possible solution, but they'll have to come up with something far better than the personal apartments on offer right now.

FC Districts - I was going to say 'take my gil' until I read the bit about the number of active members. No. You're just going to get unscrupulous FC leaders spamming mass invites to keep their FC at the right size for their mansion. I saw something similar happen in WoW where more members used to mean more gold, it was an abusive mess and put a lot of people off joining guilds at all.

Instanced Housing - Honestly the only solution I could really get behind because everyone who wants a house could get one and we could do away with the demolition timer. It makes a lot of sense. I would leave the wards running for those people who love them and wouldn't like the change, though. Personally, I hardly ever see anyone else in my ward so it would make no difference to me. More houses sharing communal facilities like the MB would probably seem more social than what we have.

Fix Transfers - Seems fair, but it's not a solution really, just a more equitable way of spreading the misery.

Achievement based housing - This could be an interesting system for FCs and personal housing. I'd tie it to an instanced system with the achievements buying upgrades to your basic plot.

[Nalien]

My one and only hesitation with this is I would be concerned about what would happen to those of us who already have houses. I fought hard for the plot I have, both for gil and to snag it before someone else did, and I'm very proud of my premium plot. I wouldn't want all that effort lost.

To clarify, I see it working like this;

We'd have one version of the housing zones.
All current plots would be moved, as they are ideally, into an instanced version.
The order plots are displayed in the list of instances (similar to the list for apartments/wards) would be based off what ward/subdivision you were in.
So lets take plot 3, everyone who currently owns that plot is now in an instanced, which they access at the placard.
Whoever owned it on ward 1 is first in the list, subdivision 1 second on the list, ward 2 third, and so on.
This would give us 36 versions of every plot currently, while allowing for more to be purchased on top of that since it's instanced.

Whether SE would implement it like this, however, I'm not sure... There are a couple other ways to work it, I believe a NPC holds onto all your furniture if you lose a plot currently anyway? So worst case that would be used to prevent any major loss of furniture. Given the new system is instanced, there shouldn't be any scarcity that results in a situation where you actually lose a plot, I'd hope anyway. Another way they could work it is just setting up a "transfer" period, where we have the current wards and instanced wards, anyone who currently owns a plot can transfer over for free (much like how moving to Shirogane worked?) and then after the deadline the old wards are deleted.

I really don't see any sense in keeping the current system at all. It's just far too wasteful. You've got what, 30 plots, 20 small (20 garden spaces each), 7 medium (30), 3 large (40)? That might just be Lavender Beds, too lazy to check all, but that comes to 730 pieces of furniture that can be placed in gardens, furniture which is always loaded because gardens currently are not instanced, that's a persistent strain on the servers, and that's just one ward, throw in the other 17 + subdivisions and that's a whooping 26,280 pieces of furniture for Lavender Beds alone (105,120 for all zones (lets not even touch on that being per server, of which there are over 60), the interior of a mansion caps out at 400, that's 262 additional mansion instances we could have instead?). And this is assuming fixtures don't add to this as well, which they almost certainly do (30 plots, 8 fixtures each? I forget)... Again, this is all a constant strain on the servers because it's not instanced... It just doesn't make sense to me to keep such a wasteful system, when it doesn't really provide any benefits...

Collapse all the wards into one area with instanced plots, and you've got benefits. Instantly you have 36 people who own each plot hanging around outside that plot, a much more lively area than what we currently see. Going and visiting other players plots becomes significantly easier as a result too, don't have to faff around going through wards and subdivisions anymore. Since it's now instanced, the garden area can potentially see an expansion to the number of furniture placed in it, something that is desperately needed, IMO. All that I see being lost is the ability to jump over the fence to leave, and perhaps some plot specific design details (bridges going over the fence, that sort of thing), which I'll gladly take if it means everyone can have a plot and the zones themselves are finally lively...

Yeah, no... That's not really compensation. If they want to implement instanced housing *from now on*, that's fine - I can support that. What I won't support is scrapping the current ward system in order to do it.

What exactly is worth keeping about the current ward system exactly? What benefits are there that can excuse such a grossly wasteful system? What benefit is there from keeping your garden, and every other garden in the ward, constantly loaded up, even when nobody is looking at them?

[Feronar]

How I would do instanced housing:

Instanced plots would be in rural areas, surrounded by wilderness, and be purchased and accessed via a "rural housing office" or something like that, basically functioning similar to apartments. You can purchase a small, medium, or large plot for a fixed price, and build a house on it and landscape it just like in the housing districts. The currently existing wards would still exist and continue to function as before, however the availability of rural housing would significantly reduce the competition in the wards for players who prefer them over rural housing. In addition, instanced rural housing would produce significantly less server load, as houses would only need to be loaded when a player is present, as opposed to the wards which have to be loaded 24/7.

[Alyanna_Elingval]

1) Not for auctions, it would just encourage people to buy gil.

2) They don't need to do reverse auctions, they just need to have housing prices reflect the current market. That would reduce the demand immediately.

3) I'm probably in the minority, but I would pay a sub for my house if it meant that housing got constant updates. At the end of the day SE has finite resources for the game, and they're going to use those for story and endgame content before they do housing. I'm on a committee at my job that goes over our roadmap every month, and every month the CEO says the same thing. I have this many projects and this many balls. I'm going place these balls on projects I think will have the biggest impact. You want more balls, get me more revenue. If you ask players would they rather have story and endgame content or housing, housing isn't going to win.

4) FC apartment, this could work.

5) I've thrown out the idea of FC exclusive wards before. While I think that there should be a minimum member count to get a medium and a large, I don't agree with snatching a house from a FC if they fall below a certain threshold. They just need a way to stop FC from padding their ranks with lvl 1 players that are never going to be active members just to reach the thresholds.

6) Instanced Housing is fine as long people who have plots get to keep them. I craft as much as I do anything else in the game, maybe more, and I do it in a spot I made in my front yard. I bought plot 45 in the Mist just so I can do this and look out on the water, especially at sunset.

7) When they add more wards everyone should have the same chance at it. They shouldn't add new Wards and give transfers early access.

They also need to improve apartments. Maybe make some multiple floors, some penthouses, etc. Just like you have small, medium and Large plots. This would reduce the demand for actual houses as well.