Housing is just so broken

[Indefiinable]

Interesting idea. My head says paying an in game housing sub for a game that has rm sub is icky. But....I’m a housing enthusiast I spend quite a lot of my time checking out other peoples houses for ideas and to let them know they have done an awesome job etc and the amount of empty houses I see is heartbreaking so perhaps this would work

[dinnertime]

Just implement a TAX for a house paid each month for a house ownership, if someone is not able to pay then he loses his house in a week.

I guarantee you there would be a ton of plots left empty with this small change, people wouldnt want to own a house if it costed them for example 400k for small, 800k for medium and 1.2k for large plot.

Or....you know...make instanced housing.

[Hunky]

I don't know how they're going to fix this in the future. Technically, we already have instanced housing, which is the apartments.

I think, at least for now, the most feasible solution is to change the rules of the timer.

Make people transferring their plots wait for the timer, and allow first-time buyers to skip the timer.

I posted this idea a long time ago in another thread, and somebody responded that this would only make people upset because they would have waited a long time to buy a specific plot (but had to buy one that's available so they could transfer to their desired plot later).

I understand that, but at the same time, there are players who've never owned a house at all and want to. To me, it makes more sense to give priority to players who've never gotten the chance to obtain a house than those who already have and want to transfer somewhere else. And I'm saying this as someone who has a house in this game.

If they made this change, I think a lot more people would be satisfied. First-time buyers wouldn't have to wait for hours at a plot, only for it to be taken by someone who already had a house.

There'd still be shortage problems on more populated servers, though. At that point, you'd have to make a hard decision: move to a less populated server and get a house there, or stay on your populated server and struggle to find a house.

[dinnertime]

Technically, we already have instanced housing, which is the apartments.=

Except that's not what most people want. People want instanced housing with gardens, a customizable exterior and yard like what you'd have access to in normal housing.
Apartments are also incredibly small. They're not even small plot in size, it's just the same model as an FC room. People want something larger than that.

[DigbyCaesar]

In a way, we all want our own houses, most of us want neighbourhoods, and most of us also see instanced housing as a solution.

I don't know what it costs SE in terms of server load to have these wards up per server, but if there was a way, maybe rework it into some sort of neighbourhood for FCs?

Not that it should just be free for having an FC. Give it a rank requirement, a large sum of gil just to open up your own FC ward, and there you get your own instanced ward.

I'm not saying the idea doesn't come with its own flaws, like what happens if you kick someone who owns a house in your FC ward, and again I don't know what it would take for SE to operate something like that.

But these are things they can look into (assuming we even get heard here).

Ultimately, it would be nice to just know if SE were trying to come up with a solution to the current ongoing monopoly that was supposedly sought against, rather than inflating the issue with more wards in Ishgard.

[Barraind]

In a way, we all want our own houses, most of us want neighbourhoods, and most of us also see instanced housing as a solution ... maybe rework it into some sort of neighbourhood for FCs?

The solution I've been suggesting if they still want to keep wards relevant but move to instanced housing options:

Keep one of each housing ward (Mist, Goblet, Beds, Shiro, Foundation, Crystaria, Eulemore Slums, whatever, ect). Set it up similar to now, only you remove about half the houses. Goblet example: Large overlooking the Hot Springs, Large in the town square, large looking out over the cliffs. Medium and small at the hotsprings base, medium and small on the opposite hill of the hot springs medium and small on the hill, medium and small at the outer ring near the entrance, medium and small on the opposite edge, small by the waterfall.

Now empty plots replaced by vendors. Beast tribe vendors, traveling merchants with vendor-buyable stuff from the cities (grenade ash, the couple things only at the alchemist guild, ect), tomestone vendors, the works. Make the housing wards a hub city.

Each plot is an entrance point for an instanced house of that size in that spot.

Clicking on a signboard opens a list of everyone on that server with a house in that spot, and lets you buy a house in that spot. Clicking someones name replaces a default view of the plot with the outdoor setup of that person.

[Enkidoh]

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.

Except the Moghouse in FFXI wasn't a house at all but simply a single room. Although it was guaranteed (everyone got one by default upon starting the game), but the whole point of that was not to give you a nice place for your character to live in and decorate, it was actually for technical reasons - it was a clever way by SE to actually balance server population by having a place that a player character could be taken off the server while still being logged into the game.

This is why a lot of gameplay functions were actually restricted to the Moghouse (the ability to change Jobs only being accessible from inside the Moghouse being the big one), and you were able to change the furnishings as a carrot, and that of course for a significant portion of FFXI's life you couldn't even invite another person into your Moghouse, only you could access it (after determining server populations had stabilised enough, this was eventually relaxed slightly in 2007 when you could invite others inside, but only if they were currently in a party/alliance with you).

Yes there have been further expansions on it (a second floor being added that is really just a glorified attic, and the Moggarden system), it is still very limited (you can't change the flooring/walls etc, and the furnishing placement system is very restrictive) so it's really not the best thing to compare with FFXIV's housing system - it's more equivelant to FFXIV's apartments rather than housing, which FFXI has no equivelant for, and even the FFXIV apartments are better than the Moghouse was.

[Eldevern]

All the problems with wards mainly come from the gardens and the items in them. Each ward is unique because of gardens and it is most liekely a plague for dynamic server memory. Wards are probably more or less persistent to avoid too many data requests but it make a lot of dynamic memory is kept active.

It is the only reason I see that can explain their system is capable to handle one player in Eureka but they are that limited for housing.

The only solution is to change the system a way that replaces the "real" neighborood by a virtualized one or to make a full instancied system.