Suggestion to reduce FC housing abuse

[Luna-M]

In the case of the Spriggan Hoarder, All of those plots were ignored to the point of lowest-possible value, yet still nobody even thought about touching them. They have no ground to stand on to complain about it, when they had the exact same amount of time to take one of the plots for themselves.

But that don't suit some people's narrative

[8bitbort]

But that don't suit some people's narrative

Empty houses are not a problem that need to be solved.

[EaMett]

numbers

SE's policy over the past 5 years-ish has always been to maintain the housing availability at around 30% server population (housing eligible?). Fluctuates between housing patches and based on server population, but they've been pretty consistent. This upcoming patch is really just to have us hold until the Ishgard housing opens, which will add another 1/4th available plots.
The argument that should be made is not that people are left out so it should be changed. Since that seems to be the intent with SE wanting housing to be hard/reward/Status symbol. etc.. People not having access to it is kind of one of the founding principles behind it.
Instead, you should probably argue that the number should be something other than 30% or that SE would make significant financial gains by introducing significant changes to the system (to justify the cost). And even then it might be a tough sell since they might not be willing to impact users who already have access to housing. Any feature with over 10% player adoption is a highly used feature, in that sense housing is already tremendously successful.

[Jojoya]

Empty houses are not a problem that need to be solved.

The occasional empty house is not a problem.

Wards that are mostly empty houses are. A mostly empty ward is wasted server resources, an expense generating no return for either SE or the player base. A mostly empty ward means the few players who have a house never see other players there when the entire concept for wards was to create living, active neighborhoods.

Seems like you were never around when many wards on many worlds were mostly empty, only one or two plots purchased. It's a pretty depressing sight that makes the game feel empty of players. Players who feel like the game world is empty can end up less satisfied with the game.

When I bought my house in 4.2, the ward was mostly empty for months. I enjoyed having my house; I hated looking into the rest of the ward and seeing a bunch of empty plots for sale. It wasn't until the end of 2018 that the ward finally started to fill up.

Yes, empty houses can be a problem.

The argument that should be made is not that people are left out so it should be changed. Since that seems to be the intent with SE wanting housing to be hard/reward/Status symbol. etc.. People not having access to it is kind of one of the founding principles behind it.

I don't know why this misinformation gets spread.

Supply has been limited because it's expensive to run servers for them. SE doesn't want to be running lots of wards just to have them end up half empty because that's a waste of money. The low pop worlds (like Spriggan) have still ended up with empty wards at times because SE had to add enough wards trying to meet demand on the higher pop worlds (though they still weren't adding enough to meet demand on the highest pop worlds).

Initial prices were extremely high because they were still trying to bleed legacy fortunes from world economies. SE has stated this on multiple occasions. It also had the side benefit of giving legacy players the first chance to own a house as another reward for their loyalty since they were the only ones already with enough gil to buy them. Newer players had to work to get the needed gil. Maybe it was this that created the status symbol myth? I don't know.

Once demand from legacy players died out and there were still plenty of unsold plots, prices were reduced. That increased demand again and wards rapidly started filling up so they had to add more wards.

If SE truly wanted house ownership to be a status symbol, they wouldn't have lowered prices and wouldn't have increased the number of wards to the point that some worlds had empty or half empty wards for months at a time.

[EaMett]

I don't know why this misinformation gets spread.

It came directly from the mouth of the devs. If I remember correctly it was from the dev/designer that had worked on the housing initially. Either that or it was said directly by Yoshi-P himself. Iirc it was from a non-english source/interview, I had found the source for another poster quite a while back but I'm having no success either finding the source again or finding my post with the link. Hell, I can't even find the name of that dev anymore, it goes back pretty far.

They've also been extremely consistent in carrying this strategy out. If you've been paying attention to census data it's been almost like clockwork.

[Luna-M]

Don't it kinda contradict their thing about being a status thing when they practically give away small plots?

[EaMett]

Don't it kinda contradict their thing about being a status thing when they practically give away small plots?

It shouldn't. I'm not sure what you mean by "give away small plots" (they certainly aren't available on most servers so I'll assume you mean the price). It doesn't really matter what makes it difficult to obtain, whether it's cost or availability. If, for instance, it's a limited resource people are fighting over, it should fulfill that purpose (status/reward/achievement).

[Luna-M]

Meaning getting up to 4m is no issue even for a new player nowdays when roulettes, quests, MSQ etc gives you gil for playing and on top of that selling junk you collect.

What I mean by it contradicting, it would be more of a status thing we still had the original pricing (which I wish we did for a proper gil sink) vs now when everyone and their mother can afford a house plot but availability is blocking many instead of the price tag.