Preface

I'm going to preface this with: I do not like the current housing system. It is expensive, exclusionary and broken. Players should not be fighting over basic housing; this being the ability to place your own furniture, plant some veggies and give your chocobo a place to call home. Yes, there are free company housing personal chambers, and that's great, but it's not the solution to this issue. Lastly, the following are my opinions and you're welcome to dispute them, criticise them or agree with them at your own discretion.

How do we solve the issue of availability?

It is ridiculous to think that the current system would be able to provide decent housing to the vast majority of the player-base. There is no possible way, within current technology, to actually have that many houses within its own zone. The only possible way to make enough available housing is for the base housing model to be fully instanced. So, my proposal is to add a fourth housing "size", which would be similar to a free company chamber, but made available to those who prefer to play solo.

These personal rooms would be made available from any of the three adventurer's guilds in the three main cities. It would function, in essence, like the current inn rooms that are available in the game right now, but would have the functionality of personal chambers in that you would be able to modify the layout of the room.

What about chocobos and gardening?

Whilst I am not going to pretend that I know anything in the slightest about game development or Square Enix's server structures or development methods, I will say that they need to put some development effort into making gardening and chocobo raising available to the masses.

There have been many ideas floating around for gardening: in-room potted plants, community gardens etc. These are all valid ideas and the development team should definitely be looking into ways (and if I remember correctly, they are) to make this available to players.

As for chocobos, there have again been ideas for how to implement chocobo raising for the masses. One idea was to have a community stables near your grand company. Another was to have chocobo porters make training available in their menus. Both are great ideas, again. If the idea I expressed above about personal rooms being made available from the adventurer's guilds were to come to fruition, a community chocobo stable could be made available outside each of the buildings (or at the least, nearby) so those who own a room would be able to stable their chocobo and take part in that area of content.

What about the pricing?

As I said in the preface, I do not agree with the current pricing model for personal housing, and I think it was ridiculous to implement the exact same system that is in place for free companies, especially the pricing.

Pricing for the personal room idea should be similar to (if not the same as) personal chambers in the Free Company housing. Simple and affordable for those who want their own slice of Eorzea.

For those who want to spend a bit more and have something more to show off, the current housing system would work, but in its own wards, with different pricing (70,000,000 is a lot of money for one person to make!). I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert when it comes to the economy of FFXIV, so I'm not going to comment on what I think the specific pricing of the current housing should be, just that I think it should be more affordable.

Conclusion

To conclude this rather lengthy post (I apologise) I just want to say, the development team has the ability to do amazing things, as documented from the complete turn-around that happened from version 1 to version 2 of the game. Yes, they'll make some bad decisions (first implementation of The Hunt and now personal housing) but I'm sure they'll work their hardest to fix the problems that people are having with this current system.

Exclusive systems shouldn't even be considered for MMOs, in this day and age. They're not fun, and (as it says in the name) exclude a vast majority of the player-base and only generate bad feelings towards each other and the development team.

Please feel free to agree, disagree, feel indifferent, like, love, bash, get angry at or just plain hate me for my ideas expressed above, as is your right. Thanks for reading!