A suggestion for housing problems

[Malious_Lux]

so after sitting on the phone with Square Enix support on the customer service line i was told specifically that this RNG system was created specifically to prevent people from buying multiple plots, and to prevent people from camping in the housing areas to try to get a house... which... is way counter-intuitive.

I spent 11+ hours last night attempting to get a house for my free company only to have 2 places snatched up right from under me, people who are in free companies, with free company houses, but they bought it for themselves. So in both cases square missed the mark here.

Simple solution: If your free company owns a house, you cannot own an individual house because you already have one in your free company. OR better yet, get an apartment for your individual owned home. The fact that there is an RNG timer makes it an incentive for people to camp. more so now. Or as an alternative. Make it so specific districts can be ONLY bought by free companies. and another for individual owners

The fact that i can look at a residential listing in the ward and find only 7 of 60 houses owned by free companies is absolutely ridiculous and often times some of those individual homes are owned by people who also have a free company house. this is in no way fair to the rest of the player base and honestly sitting there for hours on end and not being able to play the game to try to get a house is absurd.

so in summation options are as follows:

A: code in that if your free company owns a house, you cannot buy an individual home.

B: Same as above but allow personal apartments.

or C: Make a section of wards where you can only buy a house if you are buying as a free company, and a section where you can buy as an individual buyer.

In doing those you can easily stem the flow of camping because you just made a whole bunch of homes available to everyone, and the limiting factor involved in either separation or outright stopping multiple homes also makes it so that it would stem purchases by RMT.

At this juncture I cant give my free company a place to settle in and display any of our hard work because of this housing issue. Its downright unfair.

[Kidria]

The problem with A is that an FC is a group of people that have differing tastes, decoration ideas and plans for what they want a house to look like. The bigger the FC the more that applies, and not everyone wants to share a decorating space, which is arguably just fine. Not only that, what happens if your FC leader, who the house is under, just disappears or kicks everyone out of the FC and keeps the house? It honestly doesn't fix anything because the requirements to reach the correct FC rank to get an FC house is not difficult to reach, so people would just do what they do now--make alts, get FCs, power level it and get houses. People want their own house for yards and obviously, bigger decorating space vs an apartment.

Now, unless you're proposing you can buy apartments that can be upgraded or bought with the same interior size as a given ward house, that may work. But again, outside furnishings and garden functionalities are desired things even for individual housing.

C maybe. They kinda sorta did this with the new wards in that only FCs may purchase first, and a week later the ward was opened to individual buyers. The ward I bought my FC house was empty for weeks even once you could buy individual housing. If you do something like C though, you'd have to most likely make FC wards much, much smaller. From what I remember when housing first came out, it was only for FCs, but wards were very much empty because of it, most likely because of the differing ideas and the very limited item cap at the time making it un-ideal to share. Once more, housing is touted as a premium and limited thing, and that's part of the issue. It's not meant to be fair. They'll have to redo the system, at least partially, and that'll be a long time because housing is so little of the game content.

But keep in mind Yoshi-P has said they will look at the situation some time after launch of ShB, most likely after savage tier and the first class rebalancing. Keep trying for a house if you'd like, but don't make it to where you no longer enjoy the game.

[Alyanna_Elingval]

I don't agree with this at all. You're only keeping honest players from getting their own house. You're basically saying since some players are creating fake FCs and getting houses for individual use, honest players that own FC shouldn't be allowed to have their own individual house. I said it in another thread, I keep hearing about all these FCs that need houses, but when they added wards before and let FC and relocators have the first crack before new individual homeowners, my ward looked like this all the way to the end of the initial period.

[Jojoya]

snip

Free Companies had a 3 week period when 4.2 came out and the wards were increased from 12 to 18 to be the only new purchasers of houses. Only a small percentage of the new houses added ended up getting purchased. Many wards remained completely empty. It wasn't until after the moratorium on private purchases ended so individual players could become owners that wards started filling up.

There isn't the huge FC demand for houses that you're implying while there is definitely a huge demand for personal ownership. There's no reason to take away houses from individual players who fairly purchased their homes after FCs were given their chance to purchase but didn't bother to do so.

If SE chooses to expand the ward system, I do see them repeating what they did in 4.2 and giving FCs first chance at the added plots before individual players can purchase but I don't see them being more restrictive than that.

I'm also curious what "hard work" you think your FC has already done that can only be displayed by owning a house.