Dead from Plot hunting and I ask YOU a Question

[Yshtola]

To understand the current housing situation, we must go back to much simpler times.

Patch 2.0 In the beginning, there was no housing. And for a time, it was good…

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Free Company housing was released with the introduction of patch 2.1 on December 14, 2013. 5 wards were introduced per city-state (Gridania, Limsa Lominsa, and Ul’dah) for a total of 450 plots per server.

Wealthy legacy servers had extremely high prices due to having more Gil in circulation compared to the servers introduced with the release of A Realm Reborn, but it could be argued that the prices across the board were insanely high if you take into consideration the amount of Gil in circulation on every server.

After all, the game was just relaunched and being able to amass anything close to a billion was a pure fantasy on non-legacy servers. Not so much nowadays…



The community wasn’t certainly ecstatic with the announced prices, but there was a consensus that obtaining a Free Company house was the pinnacle of teamwork and therefore required a lot of effort. Despite the little number of available plots in comparison to what we currently have, there was no shortage of houses. But patch 2.38 was on the horizon…


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Patch 2.3 (July 7, 2014) added the sixth ward to every city-state, increasing the total amount of plots per server to 540. A modest increase. If anything, the sole purpose of the sixth wards was to set the stage for patch 2.38 (set to release on September 19, 2014).

Also present on the menu, the first of two price reductions/consolidations which would also set the stage for patch 2.38, but we’re not quite there yet...



Square Enix promised that personal housing would be different than Free Company housing. Naoki Yoshida’s translation specifically told us that the prices would be above 850,000 Gil. Implying much cheaper prices than Free Company housing. We didn’t see the writing on the wall…

They planned to use the new price chart as a reference for personal housing and Free Company housing alike. Players looking forward to purchasing a personal house didn’t know it at the time, but they were about to be as upset as some Free Companies who had purchased a house before this new price chart.

Let’s take Excalibur for this example. A Free Company that had purchased a small grade 1 plot for 25,000,000 Gil a few months prior suddenly saw their plot’s value drop down to 5,000,000 Gil. Talk about getting bent over by the system.

To make this even more infuriating, with the help of the devaluation timer, the same house in another world could eventually be purchased for 2,500,000 Gil. I know it was 2014, but you can’t tell me the Flint water crisis trickled into the aqueduct of Eorzea to cause certain houses to be worth a tenth of what they were valued for only 7 months ago. I get it, Square Enix needed to do something about the excess of Gil present on certain servers (world visit wouldn’t exist today with it). Especially with the Legacy servers.


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Patch 2.38 added ward 7 and ward 8 to each city-state. Bumping the total amount of plots per server to 720. It also allowed players to purchase a personal house for each of their characters meeting level 50 requirements. The catch? Well, the prices were the same as the Free Company prices. The plots would also be the same as the Free Companies. Just like the middle finger Square Enix had given to the Free Companies that had already purchased a house before patch 2,3, now it was the turn of every player who expected the houses to be affordable and/or separated.

https://youtu.be/DdnvZcB1WRA

Naturally, the newly available plots didn’t sell like hotcakes right away on every server. The game had been out for less than a year and therefore, players were poor. On top of that, Square Enix managed to remove a truckload of Gil from the players’ hands with the original housing price chart.

Despite the backslash, Square Enix did not budge. The more resilient players did the only thing they could do to obtain a personal house… grind. Thankfully, the devaluation timer did it’s job well. But that was a double-edged sword. Less fortunate players were now fighting Free Companies for the same pieces of land and it wasn’t particularly pretty on populated servers.


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Patch 2.4 quickly followed on October 27, 2014. It doubled the number of plots per server (1,440), providing greatly needed relief on populated servers. Not only was the demand for housing was met, but it was also greatly exceeded. For some time, it was good…


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Patch 3.1, November 9, 2015. This patch did not add more plots, but it became clear by that point that a large portion of the houses on every server was owned by inactive players. That situation led to a shortage of housing for the players who were really playing the game. As a result, the auto-demolition system was brought up to reclaim houses that were stuck in limbo for many many months.


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Patch 3.3 was released on June 6, 2016. More than a year and a half after patch 2.4 and added ward 9 through 12. Despite the auto-demolition’s introduction 7 months earlier, there were still not enough plots to meet the demand. As a result, the total amount of houses per server was raised to 2,160. Oddly enough, Square Enix decided to consolidate every server together and lower the prices again. We’ll get back to that later…



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Patch 4.1 came out on the October 10, 2017 and inaugurated Shirogane.


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Patch 4.2 followed on Janurary 29, 2018. The total amount of houses was raised to 4,320 with the addition of ward 13 through 18.


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Patch 5.0, July 2019. No significant updates have been made to the housing system in nearly 2 years.



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NOW THAT WAS A LOT OF INFORMATION!
Let’s switch over to some charts for a little so you don’t fall asleep…

Before going over these charts, I would like to point out that I have included Spriggan and Twintania (5.X) as the inauguration of their respective housing districts is imminent. Don’t burn me at the stake for displaying foresight!



Well, that was a fairly easy one. If you decided to skip the gigantic wall of text above, congratulations, you got nearly half of the information in just a few seconds!

https://i.imgur.com/CMGrGBT.png

As you can see, the amount of available plots per server is more than ten times what it used to be when housing originally came out. And it doesn’t stop there. Throughout the game’s lifespan, Square Enix has added 7 servers across its datacenters to accommodate for the evergrowing player base.



*Cough* *Cough*

Well, that chart right there… where to even start…

I think I’ll start attacking that one by introducing another one first…



Just like real life, inflation also affects Eorzea. With the amount of currency currently moving between players, it is obvious that Square Enix has very little effective tools to control the economy… well actually they do, but let’s move on for now.

So yes, Dark Matter! If you can find something as good as this to represent a relevant inflation indicator, other than the mender, feel free to message me. Of course, there are other items that can only be obtained through a vendor. That being said, the more you progress into the game, the higher the rewards. Dark matter being the only vendor item that is eternally bound to follow the level cap, or the patch cycles if you prefer, you already know what I’m about to do…



*Cracks knuckles*

So here we are. As you can see, Square Enix has been slowly increasing the cost of repairs as the game ages because the players get richer every day. Not shown is obviously the cost of repair by the mender but quite frankly, If you’re reading this, chances are you have your crafters leveled up so you can avoid paying that guy’s overpriced rates on your gear anyway.

I think we can all agree that some of the prices on the 2.1 housing chart were inappropriately expensive and had to be lowered in some way. Not only were most Free Companies incapable of purchasing plots in a timely manner, therefore relying on the 90 days devaluation timer, but Square Enix was also failing at removing the amount of Gil they intended to.

Do I think the 2.3 price chat/consolidation was a good solution? Yes and no. (I will spare you another rant about how idiotic it was to put personal and Free Company housing on the same turf with the exact same prices for now.)

As shown in the chart, the average price for housing was brought to something more reasonable, for the time. I feel it is important to mention that there wasn’t even a year between the launch of 2.0 and patch 2.3. I would also like to reiterate that only patch 2.1 and 2.3 were only half a year apart. In other words, chopping the average value of houses in half in such a short timespan was quite brutal and remains unheard of to this day.

We’re not talking about player-driven markets here, where prices can obviously not be used for this exercise. Not even the raid gear that is awarded at the very end of an expansion allows you to do twice as much damage as the first raid gear that comes out. The concept is the same for the relic weapons. Their purpose is similar as they have to stay somewhat relevant for the entire duration of an expansion and as a result, they don’t become easier to acquire until they are no longer relevant, aka the next expansion.

We will come back to Dark Matter prices and housing a bit later. For now, you can go right ahead and search between the cushions of the sofa. Truth is, you’re simply not gonna find anything that has had its value/relevancy altered in such a way that quickly. In that regard, no, it wasn’t a good solution. It was quite simply a justification for the personal housing prices to prevent riots across Eorzea.


That being said, I am no fool.

Even if I can’t put money in my FC chest because it’s been sitting at 999,999,999 Gil, I know how difficult it can be to obtain money in this game, or rather, how it used to be.

Gilgamesh has never truly suffered from inflation. For example, players on Aether flocked to my server (they still do) when the World Visit system was introduced for that specific reason. Those players finally had the option to pay reasonable prices for items, due to the healthy competition between players on the Market Board. Something that was missing on a lot of servers.

My point is that you had to work a lot more on Gilgamesh to acquire even just 1,000,000 Gil around that time. Of course, items were being purchased a lot faster than on less populated servers, but it also meant you had to play against dozens of other players. It also meant you had to craft/acquire the same items multiple times to make as much as what it would sell for on servers who didn’t benefit as much from market board PvP. Another factor was the little amount of obtainable/craftable items at the time.

Everything was in place to have as many people attempting to sell the same items and despite being frustrating at times, it was fun and rewarding. For those reasons, the 2.3 housing price chart was a good thing as it allowed smaller Free Companies on non-legacy servers to obtain a house in a more convenient amount of time.


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But then it came…the catalyst… patch 2.38…



Boy, oh boy.

Even though it was funny seeing hordes of ninjas traveling between every Fate in Coerthas, this was and remains the worst patch the game has ever seen. Now I can already hear the people in the back yelling that it wasn’t, but this is my F.A.Q, not yours. You want to whine about no male Vieras or something? Go back to Tumblr.

For those in front, you might already know why this is the worst patch in this game’s history. If you don’t, grab your bottle of G-fuel my Lala…

The reason is quite simple, but I’m not going to cut the corners here so please bear with me.

Despite the high prices, that were introduced with patch 2.1, the long-term availability would have never been compromised. I’ve already stated earlier that I believe something had to be done about that price chart. On paper though? Well to this day, it would have prevented any kind of housing shortage…


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Let’s take a look at this lovely pie chart. That’s every single Free Company across Eorzea. In red, Free companies who have had at least 1 member enter their house in the past 45 days.

In blue, well you have everything else from homeless Free Companies used for RMT purposes (in order to place Gil and items safely away from the Game Moderators’ reach) to Free Companies that haven’t been sanctioned by a Grand Company yet (used by players who do not wish to receive /tells) and everything in between.



If you ask me, I think having 1/3rd of every Free Company as active is pretty impressive considering the game has been out since 2013. There is one problem with that pie chart though. That problem is the lack of representation from Free Companies who are not only active but do meet the minimum requirements to purchase a plot.

Is there a way to know how many of these Free Companies can or even desire a house, but are unable to do so at this moment? No.

I know the number I’m about to pull out is grossly exaggerated, but let’s pretend that number is 1/5th of the Free Companies who already own a house. That’s 17,310‬ Free Companies across 68 servers or if you prefer, 254 Free Companies per server.

Did I say grossly exaggerated? Realistically speaking, there are probably less than 100 Free Companies per server who would like to purchase a house at this moment. I took the initiative to display what 100 extra Free Companies per server would look like on the graph. Since there are people out there that have no first-hand knowledge about the subject and are eager to confront me about a number they would consider as “too low” despite their lack of insight, I’ll just roll with the extra 17,310‬ Free Companies.

With that out of the way, let’s look at the chart. If Square Enix would have made personal housing instanced instead of combining it with Free Company housing, we would be somewhere near the maximum amount of available plots. Of course, players might (would) resort to making “hollow Free Companies” even more than now. But that honestly cannot be quantified and coming up with an estimate would most likely be impossible.




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What we can do is compare the number of Active players taken from ffxivcensus.com and the total amount of plots.



As you can see, there are nearly 3 times the amount of plots compared to the number of Active players. How come there’s a housing shortage then? Surely it has to be the insanely high amount of Free Companies that prevents players from owning a house.

Yes, that’s it!!!

Grab your pikes and your torches boys, it’s time to kill those fat cats!!!

Oh, wait…

Hey Cloudddd’ Striiifee’, cancel the countdown, we got bamboozled.

So yeah, almost 3 times the amount of Active players than there are plots in the entire game. Considering ffxivcensus.com’s definition of an Active player (4.1 Main Scenario Quest Reward) there’s a lot more than just 748,912 players. A lot more… But I’m a fair player. I don’t need to put more nails in someone else’s coffin so let’s just keep that number as it is.



Just take a good hard look at that chart. Take as much time as you need…

Okay done?

If you didn’t pick up the hints along the way, this is the part where the pieces of the puzzle are gonna fall into place.

So what do we have? Well, obviously we have an unsustainable system where the sheer amount of Active players dwarfs the amount of Active Free Companies. Effectively, players looking for a personal house are the very own reason why they cannot have a house on certain servers. That situation never occurred, outside of legacy servers, when housing was restricted to Free Companies only. Even if you would remove Free Company housing entirely, there would still not be enough plots to meet the demand.

Then there’s the fact that the minimum level to purchase a personal house has never been increased after 5 years. Why?

The very lengthy auto-demolition allows any player to enter their house 8 times/year and keep it from being demolished and released back into the market. Let me say it again, 8 times per year.

Remember when I brought up Dark Matter? Let’s look at it again:



It’s been 5 years since the first update to the housing price chart and 3 years since the final update/consolidation of the prices. If something like the cost of repairs goes up as the game ages, why in the hell does the value of houses go down? Housing is a Gil sink. It isn’t supposed to go down throughout the game’s lifespan.

So not only has Square Enix shot themselves in the foot by allowing personal houses to compete against a system that was perfectly suited for Free Companies, they thought it was a good idea to lower the values across the board… twice. If anyone here can explain the reasoning behind lowering the value of a Gil sink when literally every new item that gets added to the game costs more than the previous one, please rise up from your seat, walk down the aisle, climb up the stage and pick up the microphone so everyone can hear your words of wisdom (not).

Considering completing A Realm Reborn gives you over 1,000,000 Gil and that the rewards keep getting higher as players reach level 80. It really isn’t surprising that everyone and their Moogle can afford a house.



It is also worth mentioning that the low housing prices have contributed to the proliferation of Gil across all servers. After all, what is there to spend money on in this game? There’s a very good reason as to why a lot of players purchase a house, it’s a status symbol. You want a quick and effortless way to fix the shortage of houses? Rise the prices up for both Free Companies and players.



If you happen to work with numbers all day and that doesn’t look a whole lot better to you. I urge you to go back to school to learn the basics of supply and demand. Before anyone starts screaming because they think I’m in favor of seeing small plots have a minimum sticker price of almost 15,000,000, I’m gonna show you what the prices would actually look like instead of those averages:



Before going any further I’m gonna get something out of the way. Considering that the vast majority of houses that are demolished or relinquished are small houses and that the players competing against each other are not even relying on the devaluation timer. If you look at the minimum inflated prices and compare them with the present initial prices, there’s not a whole lot of difference between the two. If you thought about using the old RMT boogeyman to counter this solution, congratulations, you played yourself.

The players and Free Companies already have this kind of money. If they can’t afford to buy a small house right away, all they would have to do is wait for the devaluation timer to do its job. If you're gonna whine about it being too slow, I guess you weren’t around when it was 90 days until a plot would finally reach its minimum value before Square Enix changed it to 30 days.

For the initial pricing of mediums and larges, well… they are already being traded between players for those prices so no big difference on that end, except that more Gil will be removed from the game with every purchase. That’s how you counter RMT, by having functional Gil sinks.

In conclusion, my suggestion would not only stop players from using automation or to click endlessly on a virtual chunk of wood to acquire a house, but it could also allow Square Enix to remove the hidden timer. Wealthy players would still spend the same amount of Gil on the prime locations and less fortunate players would no longer have to fight against each other in a twisted game of RNG.

[ItMe]

I was gonna parrot the popular "just have a housing raffle" idea, but HOLY COW YSHTOLA!
THATS SOME GOOD INFO!
Thanks so much for making such a helpful and informative post. I'd shower likes on you if I could.

Though, if there were a more effective gill dump, wouldn't that increase RMT because people wouldn't have the gil to buy houses?
Wouldn't this just lead to a bigger bot problem?

Also, how did you get all this great information?

[Canadane]

Also, how did you get all this great information?

They have more houses than you can imagine. It's their business to know these things.

How did you get around the character limit? :O

Edit your post, there's no longer a (reasonable) limit.

[Vyrerus]

They have more houses than you can imagine. It's their business to know these things.




Edit your post, there's no longer a (reasonable) limit.

Wait so, it's that simple, you just make a post, and then you edit it, and that lets you bypass the 3000 character limit?! Good god!

[TheDelxoD]

In conclusion, my suggestion would not only stop players from using automation or to click endlessly on a virtual chunk of wood to acquire a house, but it could also allow Square Enix to remove the hidden timer. Wealthy players would still spend the same amount of Gil on the prime locations and less fortunate players would no longer have to fight against each other in a twisted game of RNG.

You are a literal god, thank you so much for this info. I have looked around and this has opened up my eyes to so much.

Including Black Matter.

I wish I could pay you back or buy you a drink or something. Bless your soul.

[Vyrerus]

The text that you have entered is too long (22013 characters). Please shorten it to 3000 characters long.

How did you get around the character limit? :O

[MsQi]

...

What is the suggestion?

[Yshtola]

What is the suggestion?

Read.......

[Gemina]

If anyone here can explain the reasoning behind lowering the value of a Gil sink when literally every new item that gets added to the game costs more than the previous one, please rise up from your seat, walk down the aisle, climb up the stage and pick up the microphone so everyone can hear your words of wisdom (not).

That's pretty easy, actually. SE lacks foresight. They don't have a crystal ball that let them know back in 2013 just how much the player population would grow. However, when it comes to new items, they are not, nor have to look into the future; they merely just need to go off of the data from the previous expansion. You also need to factor that those new items depreciate over the course of time as well. They have a novelty value, just like housing. It's not so much that the cost of plots have depreciated over time so much as they were price gouged up the wazoo when they first came in.

There is no question that housing in terms of inflation and population growth was handled poorly. A lot of ideas they had implemented back in ARR are residual elements from both 1.0 and FFXI, and it took them some time to figure out that today's players don't want to put up with that crap. Those kind of antiquated grinds were more accepted in the Jurassic period of mmos after consoles were introduced to them. However, ARR continues and will likely always be present in some cumbersome way so long as FFXIV exists due to spaghetti coding.

This is all great data compiled together to show what housing has done over the years; but how about the players? What are the players who actually own a plot up to? Are they taking advantage? I don't have any intricate charts to showcase data of the course of the last 7 years, but I do know that I have members in my FC who do nothing with their personal houses. One of them is going on 240 days since their last log in and has been informed through discord that demolition is currently suspended; another doesn't use her personal house at all, and spends all of her time at the FC plot; another has a plot with a dirty stable, wilted plants in the garden, and an uncapped bony bird who we can't feed because he has not granted any permissions to anyone.

Point of this is alleviate some of the fault placed on the devs, because our 'great' community isn't always so selfless and helpful. In fact, they can and will cut your throat the moment you become a competitor for something they want. Like a house. And a lot of the housing woes would be relieved to the point to give the devs some breathing room to address the issue properly if there were less dicks among our community.

As a plot owner, some things are indeed easier for me to say. I purchased my small plot without any trouble back in 3.0 for around 3mil, which is what they are currently going for. I upgraded to a medium when SB brought with it the Kugane district. Again, without any trouble and for the same price they are going for now. With that said, I know I lack an understanding when it comes to housing. To me, I see the interior as entirely aesthetic whom a lot of players don't even take advantage of based on the homes I've visited.

The exterior has the only actual utility a house provides. Players literally have access to all this without a plot with the exception of gardening. So if I was a dev, I would sooner release instanced gardening before I would instanced housing. Far less work, and it completely eliminates that angle to anyone's approach wanting to chastise the devs and their decision making when it comes to housing.

At the end of the day; it is what it is. The decision to obsess over a house to the point that you will actually camp a plot and click for hours on end is not a healthy one, it's not necessitated, and I even have to question the motive behind compiling all this data, which had to been crazy time consuming just to post, let alone gather it all. I fault the devs only for not taking into account that players will be human when to comes to resources that are limited in the game.