Getting a New House Feels Impossible

[TwistedTea]

The other option is to wait patiently for Ishgard and the new wards there. I suspect we'll get additional wards in all areas when Ishgard goes live. One has to hope that the FC first mantra will be very short of removed altogether when that happens.

FCs are not the major problem though regarding housing. Data shows that majority of houses are owned as personals at least on NA DCs.

The persistent ward system, combined with player population and the low gil cost to get a house are the major problems.

More wards is only kicking the can down the road, as long as SE sticks to the persistent ward system.

At this point, the most feasible thing for SE to do, would be to improve upon apartments, so that they can be upgraded all the way to large penthouses for gil and balconies for gardening.

Also delink the FC workshop from housing and make it accessible from the GC or something.

[LaylaTsarra]

FCs are not the major problem though regarding housing..

Yes they are when SE allows them 3 months to buy a FC house. That happened with the last ward addition and many wards were all sold out on many servers even BEFORE PRIVATE sales were allowed. That is completely unacceptable and unfair to those looking for a private home. I think we all know that many of those FC who purchased homes were nothing more than private sales with a owner and a few alts. That's not what the intent was or should be when it comes to FC sales.

It doesn't take established FC's more than a week to buy a plot anything more than that is simply ridiculous and unfair to all those private sales many are clamoring for.

[TwistedTea]

Yes they are when SE allows them 3 months to buy a FC house. That happened with the last ward addition and many wards were all sold out on many servers even BEFORE PRIVATE sales were allowed. That is completely unacceptable and unfair to those looking for a private home. I think we all know that many of those FC who purchased homes were nothing more than private sales with a owner and a few alts. That's not what the intent was or should be when it comes to FC sales.

It doesn't take established FC's more than a week to buy a plot anything more than that is simply ridiculous and unfair to all those private sales many are clamoring for.

This doesn't seem to be accurate.

On Crystal, on the low pop servers like Malboro and Zalera, there were plenty of small plots on max deval mostly in the Goblet, right up to the day of the autodemo freeze announcement.

Unless you mean,that the mediums and larges were sold out. But let's not forget these were open for relocation by individual owners as well. I myself got Goblet 49,poolside medium, on Malboro ,2-3 weeks after the new wards dropped and it wasn't the only poolside medium available.

Again FCs are not the major problem when ~70% of the houses are owned as personals.

[CycloneFox]

I'm frustrated with how this system currently is, but at the same time I don't want the instanced system that many other MMOs are using. I like the way how you have a fixed neighborhood with a ton of other players you might only get to know because your houses happen to be in the same ward and you meet them in your daily routines to go to the market-board or retainer bell. I also like the way you can tell someone in which ward you live and they might know players or houses of that ward. You can just delve among fixed wards, which are still instances, but it feels more real to me.
What I don't like is the fact the market eventually gets full depending on which server you are playing on. You get punished for creating your character on an older server, because maybe your friends have been there and now it's impossible to get into housing when you get to that level. I'm frustrated with the purchase-timer which is supposed to eliminate monopolies, which is totally valid and necessary. It should make things fairer, but it actually makes things even more frustrating than they already are.

So I have the following suggestion:

Instead of always having 21 wards for each city, why not just make it dynamic? There is a lot of unused room in new servers where only few people can even buy a house yet. So these slots could go to the busier servers instead. Eventually a server gets so full that this whole limitation only hinders players who would normally want to do housing. That can't be in Square Enix' best interest. I'm not speaking of unlimited housing wards taking up more and more server resources; I would still keep systems like the auto-demolishing, so there are no unnecessary unused wards. But if there is much demand, there are also a lot of players on that server who pay and should get a fair chance to get houses.
In detail, I would make it so that if all wards of a city are at least 95% full, so you can't even get a small house in any of the wards even after auto-demolishing, let's say, at the server-maintenance then this system could just add a ward. A new server could start with a lower number of wards and plots could still be demolished for inactive players. But over time the list of wards would eventually stabilize a bit higher than it is now in cities like Shirogane and a bit lower in The Goblet as the server itself gets full eventually. So we would still have a fix/known number of wards for each city, just that this list is a little shorter or longer for each city of a server.

I know if there are a lot of rich players on older servers, those lists (especially in Shirogane) will not be "just a little longer". They will be way longer, leading to more server costs. But if there are so many long time players, that also means that there are so many paying accounts which are also likely spending a lot in the FFXIV store, so the extra server costs are mainly covered by those servers to begin with.

[Shahi]

Poor console players can't even use bots...

[Sauteed]

So I'm on Hyperion, and we get several plots opening up during the week here and there from people transferring away I assume. But, today was special in that, my friend happened to get a house this morning! Yay!

Someone tried really getting under my skin because i was there supporting my friend, and that escalated into some silliness but was dealt with. I came across their lover tho, at another plot that was open. I went to that plot to congratulate the FC that won it and stumbled across the other person's lover (their search comments say it all XD) using an automating program clicking away happily at the placard well after it has been purchased. I gave the person who won that house for their FC some gifts to help them get deco'd and made sure to report all the other offenders there.. but I guess what I'm saying is..
It isn't impossible to get a house. And yes people are gonna do everything they can to make it seem like it's ok to use automating programs to get them but they are wrong. People will lie about the TOS in order to get you to say something crazy so they CAN report you for violating the TOS, (which happened to back fire for someone today), and yes these people are usually all the same kind of people. Extremely disrespectful, can't see for the world what's wrong with their behavior, and lie constantly.

Just wanted to say it isn't impossible to get a house being a legitimate player. Did get some good laughs while out supporting my friends tho. And fun screen shots

[Draven2]

So I'm on Hyperion, and we get several plots opening up during the week here and there from people transferring away I assume. But, today was special in that, my friend happened to get a house this morning! Yay!

Someone tried really getting under my skin because i was there supporting my friend, and that escalated into some silliness but was dealt with. I came across their lover tho, at another plot that was open. I went to that plot to congratulate the FC that won it and stumbled across the other person's lover (their search comments say it all XD) using an automating program clicking away happily at the placard well after it has been purchased. I gave the person who won that house for their FC some gifts to help them get deco'd and made sure to report all the other offenders there.. but I guess what I'm saying is..
It isn't impossible to get a house. And yes people are gonna do everything they can to make it seem like it's ok to use automating programs to get them but they are wrong. People will lie about the TOS in order to get you to say something crazy so they CAN report you for violating the TOS, (which happened to back fire for someone today), and yes these people are usually all the same kind of people. Extremely disrespectful, can't see for the world what's wrong with their behavior, and lie constantly.

Just wanted to say it isn't impossible to get a house being a legitimate player. Did get some good laughs while out supporting my friends tho. And fun screen shots

People have jobs, school, and other responsibilities. I've wasted about 6 hours clicking on housing placards so far, and I'm not going to waste any more of my time doing it. The current lot buying system is repetitive, inane, and requires zero skill or thought from the player... its literally 0,0,0,4,0 over and over and over in a battle against an invisible timer. Its a system literally designed to be automated. Asking people to pointlessly click against a hidden timer is disrespectful of players time, don't forget someone can come in at any moment and relocate making all your past hours of clicking pointless. Everyone should be MACROing this pile of shit lot buying system until its changed.

Honestly, as someone who thinks SE has done a very good job with FF14 overall the housing system is a huge let-down. I like the idea of finding or crafting furniture and decorating a place over time. I'd like to try the gardening system as well. I know neither of these systems is particularly important to the game itself, but every time my retainers bring me back furniture or I find seeds it just annoys me that this part of the game is locked away from me behind a TERRIBLY designed system. A system that's been terribly designed for years... There is no excuse for the way housing works in the game at the moment.

[Sauteed]

People have jobs, school, and other responsibilities. I've wasted about 6 hours clicking on housing placards so far, and I'm not going to waste any more of my time doing it.

We all do. Well most of us. I'm into construction and industrial electrical work. I stay busy. I've won several houses in my XIV time so far, and not once have I automated a bit of it. I stand firm on the belief people that do are a large problem regardless of their excuses. It is a clear violation of the terms of service we all agreed to upon signing up for the game in the first place, regardless of how skim through we scroll through it and confusing and somewhat nuanced insanity that is in there, but it's there. I play XIV passionately, I enjoy it, is a thing I set aside time for and I play by the rules. This offends some people that want their stuff their way, and they throw their fits, but the go right on my blist where I feel the belong and I move on. I don't try to just rat people out but when someone decides to accuse me of violating the TOS, lie, and then proceed to do the very things they accuse me of all while automating their gameplay, the do get a good reporting, and I blist them and enjoy the rest of my day in the game. But coming on here advocating that "everyone should be automating this" is actually the exact opposite of real talk and I mean that in no disrespectful way at all.

I do hate people have to sit there and struggle through the purchasing process, I've done it. Once for an FC, my personal house twice because I lost it when I quit, but someone else took stewardship of the FC. I am well aware of that grind. For the record, it sucked and I hated it about 10 seconds into it. But I enjoy the housing aspect of the game enough to tolerate it, and understand why it is implemented in the way it is. I can see if Square Enix decided to allot funds to address it in a different way that they should CLEARLY address this different than they have but time will tell.

[Draven2]

We all do. Well most of us. I'm into construction and industrial electrical work. I stay busy. I've won several houses in my XIV time so far, and not once have I automated a bit of it. I stand firm on the belief people that do are a large problem regardless of their excuses. It is a clear violation of the terms of service we all agreed to upon signing up for the game in the first place, regardless of how skim through we scroll through it and confusing and somewhat nuanced insanity that is in there, but it's there. I play XIV passionately, I enjoy it, is a thing I set aside time for and I play by the rules. This offends some people that want their stuff their way, and they throw their fits, but the go right on my blist where I feel the belong and I move on. I don't try to just rat people out but when someone decides to accuse me of violating the TOS, lie, and then proceed to do the very things they accuse me of all while automating their gameplay, the do get a good reporting, and I blist them and enjoy the rest of my day in the game. But coming on here advocating that "everyone should be automating this" is actually the exact opposite of real talk and I mean that in no disrespectful way at all.

I do hate people have to sit there and struggle through the purchasing process, I've done it. Once for an FC, my personal house twice because I lost it when I quit, but someone else took stewardship of the FC. I am well aware of that grind. For the record, it sucked and I hated it about 10 seconds into it. But I enjoy the housing aspect of the game enough to tolerate it, and understand why it is implemented in the way it is. I can see if Square Enix decided to allot funds to address it in a different way that they should CLEARLY address this different than they have but time will tell.

I spend a lot of my free time playing FF14 as well. I just recently started trying to buy a housing lot, and I have to say I was very disappointed when I learned how unpolished the entire system is. There is no excuse for the lot buying system to have stayed the way it is for over a year. I don't condone cheating in any game either, but asking a player of your game to stand in one spot doing nothing but clicking 0,0,0,4,0 over and over for up to 24 hours is completely ridiculous. The current lot buying system is the epitome of bad design; SE is basically encouraging people to macro the placard spamming.

We can debate the advantages and disadvantages of increasing the number/quantity of housing lots available but this placard spamming lot buying system is something that should never have been implemented as it is. There are fair ways of selling vacant lots that don't involve wasting hours of multiple players time that could be implemented without significant development time.

[Awha]

I mean FC priority makes sense, since in theory an FC gets fsr more value for having a house so would make sense for them to be given priority.

Though legit this crusade people have against single FC, plots that go unused, or mulptie plot owners is getting silly.