Housing is just so broken

[Avidria]

Yeah I've kind of just resigned myself to it always being limited and lacking. I think I spent 18 hours and tried 3 or 4 different houses before I got one on my new server. One of them was snatched by someone who waited for a few hours, left for a bit, then relocated in front of us (or got absolutely ungodly lucky with when they got back). I'm pretty sure I only got mine when I did because the other people waiting went afk... some of them stayed standing there for hours after I bought it.

I have a medium house now, but I don't have nearly enough furniture slots to fully customize it. I want a large, but the odds of me getting one are extraordinarily low, and to even have a chance at all I'll need to be up at the crack of patch hours whenever we get Ishgard housing - assuming they don't decide to change things up and make it so you can't relocate day one. There are nowhere near enough slots in the yard for me to decorate it the way I want to, and I can't even fully use the housing storage because you can't relocate if you have more than a certain number of items totaled between placed furniture and storage. You have to use glitches and excruciating microadjustments to get items close to walls or otherwise in locations that let you make things interesting, levitating items and aligning things can be a nightmare, and you need to glitch-levitate to even put most things on lofts at all.

I like decorating, and I'm glad we can do as much as we can, but there is definitely a lot of room for improvement.

[EaMett]

While I understand and even appreciate the steps the game has taken to prevent house flipping and hoarding, I hate the auto timer system with a passion that burns with the fierceness of a thousand suns!

I literally just spent 14 hours straight camping at a small plot to lose said plot to a player who turned up 10 minutes ago.

I don’t think I would have been this incensed had I lost it to the other poor player who was with me for around 12 hours of my marathon vigil. But to loose it to someone who just rocked up is soul destroying absolutely soul destroying.

There has to be a better way without drowning the space on the server or loosing that neighbourhood feel that only exists in YP’s head

Soul destroying

I'm not going to defend the system because placard spamming is a horrible mechanic. I still maintain that at least giving us tiny windows to spam would be a better and cheap option. Say plots unlocked every 20mn on the hour at least people could camp without getting carpal tunnel.

With that out of the way I will say. It's double edged. It's necessary from a design standpoint that someone could walk up and snipe the house from people camping. If there wasn't a little bit of luck involved, anyone with a job, school, irl obligations would be locked out of housing, bottom line. Obtaining a house is a measure of how much time you can spend hunting one. Sure there will be people who get super lucky and get it in 10mn but statistically it will still benefit those with the most time. All that without completely locking out people with a life.
In that sense it's working as intended.

Also worth noting that 10mn person might be on his 50th hour of camping and just got lucky.

[lolicon09]

Personally, i think they should give some enhancements to apartments instead, like give them a second floor or a basement; or maybe some kind of indoor garden to place exterior furnishing. While houses are indeed in shortage, there's an awful lot of available apartments that most people keep ignoring for some reason. And i belive the interest could grow if those were more than just a single small room. Obviously, if they make them bigger, price should also be increased (500k would be too cheap for all those changes)

[Edax]

I always laugh that in 2002 SE provided a FREE house to every level 1 in FFXI yet in 2014 they were incapable of doing the same thing in a vastly more sophisticated game engine and server system.

Yes, FFXI's houses were a tad crude compared to FFXIV's, yet in a game where it was GUARANTEED that a large proportion of the players would want a house SE designed something totally broken from the start .. better a crude one that's available than a more sophisticated one that isn't.

The apartments are crude but I think apart from one server, are available to everyone that had 500k in their pocket.

[Missbone]

The main reason i want a FC house is that i finally can use a workshop. This wouldn't be necessary in the first place, if these damm workshop wouldn't be limited to FC Housing and we could use them also in our own house.

[RyuSaarva]

you are on phoenix, just log in the week when they add more houses and you will get a medium house, unless you are one of those people who only consider mansions to be the only houses which exist.

[Saccharin]

vastly more sophisticated game engine and server system.

If only... I think the sophistication went into the cash shop... oh, Mogstation.

Mustn't call it what it is.

[VirusChris]

I honestly would like if the added a "Airship House" which is sort of instance housing tied to the player. Like what Wildstar did for housing in a way (sadly, never tried it or saw what it was like).

We can keep the "default" housing as is, but having a personal house that doubles as an airship--seeing as we're adventurers--would help a lot of migate a lot of the stress people have with the housing system. I had a house before, lost it because of the damn timer and got demolished when I had it at Limsa Lominsa I was so mad. Then I got a second house since Kugane housing release... then a few months ago, because I was taking a break from the game, it got demolished.

Now what ticked me off with that as, I logged in like within 2 weeks when I did it and before that too and I was in my housing area. Now the part confused me is it looked like I didn't NEED to enter my house and the timer would be fine as I double-checked and no alerts on losing my house.

But, sadly it looked like I did needed to go inside my house to keep it from being destroyed. So, when I logged in and saw my house area looked different I found out someone bought my land when it got demolished. It is so de-moralizing to have wasted all that time and effort making your house the way you wanted for it to be destroyed, because you slipped up on how to prevent the demolition timer. I REALLY hate the housing system in FFXIV. I like having a house and using my house items so I have free inventory space, but this is getting tiresome.

Let me have an Airship House which I can upgrade to allow bigger spaces and added features. And allowing friends to come visitor or even let random strangers visitor with an port for airship and randomly sends people my way. Something, I don't think I can go through the process of buying a third house with the chance of losing it again. It hurts.

[DigbyCaesar]

I was about to make my own thread regarding this until I saw this, may as well add this here.

Firstly I know how horrible it is to have to buy a house for the first time, me and my FC leader spent weeks trying to get a small for our FC and ended up getting it after camping a whole weekend away, suffering the rigorous spamming of the placard for hours on end.

I feel it should be wrong to say that there were 5 people competing for the plot and I still considered myself lucky throughout that process because no one was relocating, not because of the former.

The relocation alone kind of breaks the game in a way. Relocating should have no timer if you're moving up to bigger houses, not if you just bought a random plot to relocate and steal away the one that everyone else is going for.

My biggest issue (my reason for actually writing this) is to do with house flipping. To put it simply, I raised up 20mil for my FC some time in January/February, since then I've been putting in my time to find a medium house on my server (Zodiark).

Over the months I did loads of research, the funniest thing I found was the fact that there's actually a subreddit, dedicated to the flipping of these houses.

As far as I was concerned, SE are supposed to be against that. At least, as quoted from Yoshi-P "Our fundamental stance toward housing prices was that we wanted to ensure that plots would be evenly distributed, avoiding a situation in which the wealthiest players could easily buy up all available plots of land."

There is currently a community of players out there who thrive on manipulating in-game mechanics to find themselves owning as many houses as possible, and selling them to people who will only continue to flip the houses for triple the price.

In all the research I've done, I've found that some of the most common ways these people obtain houses are to join partially inactive FCs with housing with an alt character, waiting for the FCs to finally become fully inactive, and through waiting, end up getting control over the FC and the house.

They then sell the FC and the house by passing on leadership to the buyer. Effectively leaving the plot to never be up for purchasing.

What makes me sad, is that there isn't just a subreddit on this, these houses are actively advertised on the in-game party finder, I would say right under SE's noses, but it's blatant and in their face.

It's very clear that little will be done when reporting, as I've seen several cases in the past where a GM's response to these reports have been "it's not RMT so it's okay" (paraphrasing), but they're ignoring one fundamental rule which stands in SE's rules & policies, you are not allowed to interfere or disrupt another player's game experience.

Putting together Yoshi-P's intentions with this policy clearly shows that the market was designed to be a free-for-all, and that people holding these houses "hostage" are interfering with the natural game experience.

I had a horrible experience recently as I decided to take things into my own hands, where I had found a house being sold, did my research and attempted to swoop in to try to buy the house when the placard was available (was player-owned and required relinquishing first).

Needless to say, it was not successful, however my complaint is with the fact that I met these people who flip houses, and I met the uglier side of the FF community. The very greedy, association of house flippers.

As I stood by that placard, I was met by the two people who didn't even greet me, they started by /slapping me continuously before telling me to go away. I mean, sure, I get that I wasn't welcome, but I didn't interact.

Over the hours of waiting (just as you would for a regular house in-game these days), more and more people showed up, surrounding me, harassing me, watching me from afar. I'm not going to name the 7 individuals who did this as I've already made my report with SE and can only hope something will be done (and I'm sure there's some rule against that too), but what really upset me about the entire ordeal, was that I wasn't allowed to purchase the house the way SE had intended it to be done.

It's worth noting that I had made several reports about a player who I noticed acted as an actual "virtual real estate agent" and all I'd been told was it was being investigated. They're currently advertising a new house on the party finder in Zodiark as I type this.

I understand that SE do not act as much on this, mostly because they never act on this before, but it's still wrong. What's happened here is like dominoes, where one or a few GMs set the tone from the very beginning, disregarding the fundamentals of the game, and since then every report follows the same response. Maybe I'm wrong but that's how it looks when you correlate the policies with the developer's intentions.

Personally, I think it's not so hard to look into a party finder and find people who are actively indulging in these transactions.

If the moderation actively sought out to prevent this activity, it could've been done a long time ago, but unfortunately what's done is done. That doesn't mean that nothing should ever be done though. Something needs to change.

The sad truth is that Ishgard will not help solve this problem, more wards means more to monopolise. There are large communities out there just in this game for the flipping, and making it harder on other players to at least have an attempt at buying houses at the prices SE set.

I do apologise if my rant was a bit too rant-y, I had a lot of ambition for this game and really do appreciate it, as well as its community, but this is all taking a huge blow to my motivation.

Also my first post so, hello! o/

TL;DR

- Skipping timer on relocation should only be if you're upgrading from a small house.
- House flippers publicly flip these houses and most GMs have condoned this, disregarding the developer's intentions and game policies (3.2 in rules & policies). SE needs to step up and act on this.
- Ishgard will be amazing, but will only fan the flames and open up more opportunity for flipping if SE do nothing about flipping.

Also ty @Edax for the tip, hope this tidies it up!

[Edax]

Again, apologies for the multiple posts, there was a character limit and I had to split it into 3

Just editing your post lets you circumvent the character limit.