Re-enable Housing Demolition!

[Penthea]

If you are talking about instanced housing then yeah, no demolition needed for obvious reasons. People who lapse their subcription can always get their instanced house back when they come back to the game. But with current system of wards, you absolutely need housing demolition, even if there weren't a shortage of houses. It would make no sense to have a plot unavailable if the owner's subscription expired, because what if that player never comes back to FF14? That plot should be made available to active players again.

I understand why demolition is in the game and I agree with it to a point. My main issues are (other than the flawed system that needs it) is I feel 45 days is a bit too short, and furniture should be held up until the player redeems them, not destroyed after some time. I think 60 days is more reasonable for demolition. In my time in mmos I found that it wasn't unusual for players to be unable to log in for about a month but it would be very unusual to be more than two. It also would match a subscription package, unlike 45 days which matches none.

But there is a huge difference between allowing players to access something, and taking something away that players own. The world is a crazy place right now, especially in the USA with the wildfires, violent natural disasters, the BLM movement that has resulted in opportunists destroying the livelihood of others...and they of course have the pandemic on top of all that. SE know that a lot of players are not logging in because they physically can't due to circumstances completely out of their control and power to fix, not because they lost interest in the game or just mismanaged their finances. Demolition is intended to take houses away from players who most likely lost interest in the game. Not from players who most likely lost their house due to something like fires consuming vast areas of land.

SE have repeatedly turned off demolition during periods when it is very likely a player cannot log in due to large scale circumstances entirely out of their control, in the past we have seen this happen due to earthquakes and violent weather. And well this time it's happening again. We have the pandemic but as I mentioned already the USA has a lot of other awful large scale things going on as well, which is possibly making demolition pause last longer than originally intended.

So I'm on the fence about all of this. Yes it sucks when there is no demolition, I know it very well because I had no house during one of the times it was turned off. But at the same time I know how horrible I would feel to finally log in after surviving a massive disaster and then finding I lost my home and so many possessions in FFXIV too.

There is no good solution from demolition on or off. Either way people are without a house when they don't deserve to be in that position. We will only see the demolition issue solved when we get a system where it is no longer needed.