Housing discrimination

[Penthea]

wow, makes me wonder how much people aren't abusing the FC function since pretty much everyone here seems to..

That's a bold statement. How do you get the impression that "everyone here" is abusing the fc function?

I'm certainly not in any way. I "own" one fc house. In fact I'm only in one fc across all of my characters, and it's the one that I lead. I just don't like your suggestion because it punishes legitimate fcs who also own only one fc house.

I know a few small fcs with less than 10 members, and they are active. They just want to stay small because they want the fc to be just for them and their irl friend group. What's wrong with this? Is it only because a fc house can serve more? Well their only other option is private houses but if they switched to that then they would need two private houses to give housing access to everyone in their group. And they would also be locked out of the workshop. That isn't a better alternative. And neither is inviting people you may not even want just so you can inflate your roster to keep the fc house.

You're also making the assumption that 10+ members must mean a legitimate community, which is very much incorrect as I have pointed out earlier there are some large fcs in which almost everyone are strangers to each other and they do nothing together. There is far more to community than just the number of people involved.

And you're forgetting...raid teams need only 8 members! So with your suggestion fcs with only raid team members wouldn't be eligible for a fc house even though they are very much an active group.

There is certainly a problem with shell fcs but your suggestion is not a good fix. It would be swapping one set of problems for another while punishing legitimate fcs. The best way to combat this issue is to make the fc house purchase restriction permanent and to also allow all characters on the same server be able to access to same private home, which would reduce the incentive to get multiple houses.

And in addition to the above perhaps also make fc tags unique to reduce the bragging rights of owning multiple houses. Seeing something like <meep> <meep2> <meep3> and so on in a ward doesn't quite have the same visual impact as <meep> on every single house.

Disclaimer: I have no idea if a fc uses <meep> as a tag, and if they do I have no idea if they have multiple fc houses...if they happen to I was not intending to call anyone out! I just chose a nonsense word for the above example.

[Arielen]

That's a bold statement. How do you get the impression that "everyone here" is abusing the fc function?

I'm certainly not in any way. I "own" one fc house. In fact I'm only in one fc across all of my characters, and it's the one that I lead. I just don't like your suggestion because it punishes legitimate fcs who also own only one fc house.

I know a few small fcs with less than 10 members, and they are active. They just want to stay small because they want the fc to be just for them and their irl friend group. What's wrong with this? Is it only because a fc house can serve more? Well their only other option is private houses but if they switched to that then they would need two private houses to give housing access to everyone in their group. And they would also be locked out of the workshop. That isn't a better alternative. And neither is inviting people you may not even want just so you can inflate your roster to keep the fc house.

You're also making the assumption that 10+ members must mean a legitimate community, which is very much incorrect as I have pointed out earlier there are some large fcs in which almost everyone are strangers to each other and they do nothing together. There is far more to community than just the number of people involved.

And you're forgetting...raid teams need only 8 members! So with your suggestion fcs with only raid team members wouldn't be eligible for a fc house even though they are very much an active group.

There is certainly a problem with shell fcs but your suggestion is not a good fix. It would be swapping one set of problems for another while punishing legitimate fcs. The best way to combat this issue is to make the fc house purchase restriction permanent and to also allow all characters on the same server be able to access to same private home, which would reduce the incentive to get multiple houses.

And in addition to the above perhaps also make fc tags unique to reduce the bragging rights of owning multiple houses. Seeing something like <meep> <meep2> <meep3> and so on in a ward doesn't quite have the same visual impact as <meep> on every single house.

Disclaimer: I have no idea if a fc uses <meep> as a tag, and if they do I have no idea if they have multiple fc houses...if they happen to I was not intending to call anyone out! I just chose a nonsense word for the above example.

What they mean is that anyone with a small FC or an FC house at all without having FC numbers backing it proper (even should there be a totally legitimate community behind it), is abusing and "not using the system as intended".

I surmise that they dislike personal housing too because it presumably caters to individuals (even though plenty of people use their personals to host a bunch of people).

[Baxcel]

wow, makes me wonder how much people aren't abusing the FC function since pretty much everyone here seems to..

As someone with a small FC of only my friends and a few family members (were under 10 people with only 4-6 being active daily) this would really hurt us as its been really hard to find members an recruit.. (we made our FC at the end of Stormblood)

All the gil cost for the FC came from my personal funds.. i bought the land and the house materials myself and paid for the workshop too..

If anything this idea would make it harder for FCs to recruit since everyone wants the FC to have a house and be a high rank while recruiting..

But I could agree with removing the FC houses that are only owned by a single FC member..

Also here's whats going to happen to this thread.. those with multiple houses will come in an start yelling at people about wanting to take away houses.. theyll claim only a small number of houses are owned by the same people.. theyll be rude an insult anyone who thinks the current system is bad.. and eventually the OP will never return to his thread because its so toxic.. and the multi house owners will claim victory an leave the thread to die.. or theyll derail it about off-topic for several pages them claim victory an leave..

[PewPewPewPewPew]

Based on the data mass extracted by Mew directly from the lodestone for August 2020:

Single ownership FC houses with plots make up 7,390 total plots out of 107,092 total plots owned by FCs across all worlds (which is 30% of all houses available in the entire world).
That means only 7% of all existing FC owned plots are single-owner FC plots. At the same time, single owner FC plots make up 2% of all 342,720 plots across all worlds.

If we expand and look at that same data for FCs with 1-3 people total, the total number of FC's with a roster ranging from 1 to 3 people make up 21,209 FCs that hold plots.
That means just under 20% of all existing FC owned plots are owned by FCs with a roster of 1-3 characters. Meaning FCs with a roster of 1-3 characters make up only 6% of all 342,720 plots across all worlds.

Conclusion: These numbers show that shell FCs are too insignificant to be a leading cause of housing shortages. This data was extracted directly from lodestone as of last month.

Posting this from another thread here because based on the above data:

One-man FCs or FCs with less than 4 people are not a significant cause to house shortages.

[Arielen]

theyll claim only a small number of houses are owned by the same people..

But...that's a fact. The lodestone stats are available and have been compiled into publicly available documents that you may peruse at your leisure.

At any rate, it's not discrimination if you have equal opportunity as everyone else to do something.

[Penthea]

Posting this from another thread here because based on the above data:

One-man FCs or FCs with less than 4 people are not a significant cause to house shortages.

Maybe not now but it is a problem that will get worse if SE do not make the purchase restriction on fc houses permanent. Removing that has increased the amount of shell fcs quite noticeably on some servers. As I mentioned before in another thread, it is an issue that will one day far outpace the hoarding of grandfathered players if SE continue to turn fc purchase restriction on and off instead of keeping it on. While the problem with shell fcs is relatively small right now when you look at the game as a whole, there is something to be said about tackling an issue before it becomes a serious problem. History has shown us several times that some players or fcs buy as many houses as they possibly can and sometimes it's to the point that they strongly dominate wards. This is not good when housing is a limited resource.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuut OP's suggestion on how to tackle the above is not what I would consider a good solution. It would too easily punish legitimate fcs who are small whether that's through just starting off, having difficulty in recruiting the sort of members they want or wanting to stay small for the happiness of the members.

If a requirement on the amount of members having access to a fc house is to have a specific base number, then it should be 4. Not 10. As it is now 4 is the minimum requirement to do group content. 10 doesn't even make sense considering it's not even a group size for any content and you need only 8 to do raid content. But even this I disagree with, I just happen to be more okay with 4 as a base requirement than 10.

[Arielen]

Maybe not now but it is a problem that will get worse if SE do not make the purchase restriction on fc houses permanent. Removing that has increased the amount of shell fcs quite noticeably on some servers. As I mentioned before in another thread, it is an issue that will one day far outpace the hoarding of grandfathered players if SE continue to turn fc purchase restriction on and off instead of keeping it on. While the problem with shell fcs is relatively small right now when you look at the game as a whole, there is something to be said about tackling an issue before it becomes a serious problem. History has shown us several times that some players or fcs buy as many houses as they possibly can and sometimes it's to the point that they strongly dominate wards. This is not good when housing is a limited resource.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuut OP's suggestion on how to tackle the above is not what I would consider a good solution. It would too easily punish legitimate fcs who are small whether that's through just starting off, having difficulty in recruiting the sort of members they want or wanting to stay small for the happiness of the members.

If a requirement on the amount of members having access to a fc house is to have a specific base number, then it should be 4. Not 10. As it is now 4 is the minimum requirement to do group content. 10 doesn't even make sense considering it's not even a group size for any content and you need only 8 to do raid content. But even this I disagree with, I just happen to be more okay with 4 as a base requirement than 10.

By the logic of shell FCs being a bad thing, then why not tackle personals?

[Yshtola_Cat]

lmfao

Penthea is now making up facts on housing ownership. Let's have a discussion about removing every single personal house that doesn't have 3 tenants immediately

[Penthea]

By the logic of shell FCs being a bad thing, then why not tackle personals?

Well I personally don't think they're bad as long as the account has only one fc house per server. I mentioned this before in the beginning of another post in this thread, along with a reason why a person may have a fc of this kind. Not everyone who has a one-man fc is doing so with the sole goal of hoarding.

Even if a person has several accounts I'm okay with this as long as the restrictions remain at one fc and one private house per server because the impact these people under this restriction can have is minimal unless they have enough money to keep subs rolling on a large number of accounts. Which appears to be a rare occurrence to me, obviously due to the tremendous cost of this sort of activity.

The main difference between personal and fc houses is the workshop. Some fcs have shell fcs with the sole purpose of using the extra workshops to funnel the money to the main fc. If we are to look at abuse of the housing system, fcs have the potential to abuse it far more due to the increased amount of gil they can generate with these houses. Catstab actually presented a very good solution to this that would simultaneously grant fcs without houses access to workshops and reduce the incentive to create shell fcs to purchase additional houses.

Abuse or taking advantage of the limitations of the housing system is going to happen whether we like it or not. As long as housing is a limited resource there are going to be issues somewhere about uneven distribution. The best we can hope for is to make purchase restrictions be always at only one private and one fc house per server per account. The only legitimate solution to any of this is a fully fledged instanced housing system with unlimited plots...but as I mentioned so often already it doesn't look like we will ever see this.

And well personals have already been tackled due to the purchase restriction being one per server per account and it has not been lifted since it came to the game. An improvement to this that I want to see is to allow all characters within the same server and account to access to same private home. It would be beneficial to anyone who has alts within the same server, and it would reduce the incentive to purchase several houses.

[nranola]

FC membership is something that is always in flux. Maintaining FC membership above a certain threshold and also have a certain number of players log in every 30 days is a logistical nightmare. This change will make it so that shell FCs don't get housing, sure, but it also makes it so that small FCs will be in higher and more constant state of stress just to keep their FC house. What will end up happening is you get fewer bigger FCs being able to maintain houses and the vast majority of the remaining houses being occupied by individuals. At which point you will not have put a dent in the housing shortage at all, you have just allowed more private houses to be taken up at the expense of small FCs.