PLEASE get rid of Ward Buyouts!!

[LunaNightborne]

I understand that some wards were "grandfathered" in from the old housing system. However, there are still people/FCs that own majority wards and it's excessive. With how limited housing is (even before the Covid freeze and regardless of new wards) it's obnoxious to go to the wards to look for a house and see an entire ward filled with one FC.

Even the newer wards have this issue with multiple accounts doing the same thing. The houses are not decorated nor used, they are simply bought out to be resold later or just to have the bragging rights of "I have an entire ward."

So please, PLEASE remove the ones that were "grandfathered" in. A simple demolition email to clear the house of items would be sufficient.

And please allow us to easily report people blatantly buying out wards.

Newer players have little to no chance to get a house and it's severely disheartening to see a single FC tag plastered all over a ward.

I'm sure this is a massive issue on all servers, but here on Siren it's rampant. I've blocked out names to keep things fairly vague. The screenshots below are three FCs. Each color represents a different FC.





^ This is a ward added AFTER houses were limited to one per service account and it's the worst hit.

[Mimilu]

It's not just people grandfathered in, you can make alts to get more houses. Someone with a Standard sub (that allows for up to 8 characters on the same server) can potentially own 16 houses on the same server (1 personal house and 1 FC house per character).

[Frizze]

Grandfathering has nothing to do with what you are looking at. What you are seeing is something else. The fact is that FCs arent required to have unique tags. Each of those is a different FC using the same tag. Each of those FCs will have different member(s). And especially for the red one, they are sure to not be all on the same service account. If you eliminated grandfathering, none of those houses would open up(the average server would see less then 10 houses open in fact). What needs to be cleaned up to fix the issue you see is some of the loopholes around FC ownership and purchasing rights. Or they could implement something like an instanced housing system(with full yards and different sizes and all) to make sure everyone can have a house who wants one. This would not only get all the "homeless" the option to buy, it would dis-incentivize people making shell FCs just to buy and resell a house.

[alpacaurbags]

Not sure how this happens, but can confirm it in at least one of our wards on Adamantoise. A FC has at least half the sub division to themselves, using each house for a different roleplay-esque thing based on the descriptions. Its kind of excessive...

[Jojoya]

Grandfathering has nothing to do with what you are looking at. What you are seeing is something else. The fact is that FCs arent required to have unique tags. Each of those is a different FC using the same tag. Each of those FCs will have different member(s). And especially for the red one, they are sure to not be all on the same service account. If you eliminated grandfathering, none of those houses would open up(the average server would see less then 10 houses open in fact). What needs to be cleaned up to fix the issue you see is some of the loopholes around FC ownership and purchasing rights. Or they could implement something like an instanced housing system(with full yards and different sizes and all) to make sure everyone can have a house who wants one. This would not only get all the "homeless" the option to buy, it would dis-incentivize people making shell FCs just to buy and resell a house.

I agree that SE's time would be better spent cleaning up the ownership loopholes than going after the grandfathered houses but let's not pretend that the multiple FC house situation doesn't exist. The number of truly unique FCs sharing the same tag is very small and the odds of them all ending up in the same ward is even smaller.

We all know that most of those "different" FCs with the same FC tag are actually shell FCs being run by the same player using multiple characters. In a minority of cases, they're shell FCs being run by alts of characters in a central FC where that FC is trying to get access to more Grade 3 actions and workshop voyages than the game intends a FC to have. If they were legitimate FCs, they would have more than the 1-2 characters most of them have.

[Jirah]

Most FC homes are desolate and I’m 100% sure they would be demolished if auto demolish was back on

In January I had plenty of options to relocate to but March when current events hit the market was crowded. And stalling the housing market is a joke. Pandemics last for years even decades and I makes me unnerved to think that auto demolish will finally reappear when the PS6 is released

[Catstab]

Ward owners (that aren't grandfathered) can hold a maximum of 9 total houses per account or 8 FC houses per account. So keep in mind that even though all 7-8 players are the same real person, SE considers ward owners to be 7-8 players, as they pay 7-8 subscriptions.

Ward owners have reported themselves out of curiosity, and been told that it breaks no rules. Is ward ownership fair? Yes, because anyone who wants to spend 400-700 million gil and $1500 per year in account subscriptions can do it. Is ward ownership considerate? Perhaps not, but the simple fact that it's possible shows that the average player is not motivated to buy the houses that the ward owners are selecting.

SE did what they were going to do against multiple house owners when they brought personal housing from 8 per world per account to 1. It seems unlikely they will make the same change with FC housing, after so much time. It is possible they will limit FC houses to one per account in the future, but if and when that happens, it is almost certain that any account already in possession of multiple FC houses will be allowed to keep them.

[Sindele]

70% of owned houses are personals.

I believe the last major attempt to collate the data suggested that single-member FCs own something like 8% of all FC houses.

There are definitely people who have gone mad with power (and most of them you won't know about because they aren't overt about it), but if you think it represents some massive potential well of valuable houses to free up, I've got some very bad news for you.

[SSakuras]

Most FC homes are desolate and I’m 100% sure they would be demolished if auto demolish was back on

In January I had plenty of options to relocate to but March when current events hit the market was crowded. And stalling the housing market is a joke. Pandemics last for years even decades and I makes me unnerved to think that auto demolish will finally reappear when the PS6 is released

Uhh..... ya don't read the Lodestone news very often do you? XD auto-demo will return in a month, probably less than. It returns with patch 5.4, which is set to release "early December". We're already halfway through November.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...634fa6df3f42b8

[Frizze]

I agree that SE's time would be better spent cleaning up the ownership loopholes than going after the grandfathered houses but let's not pretend that the multiple FC house situation doesn't exist. The number of truly unique FCs sharing the same tag is very small and the odds of them all ending up in the same ward is even smaller.

We all know that most of those "different" FCs with the same FC tag are actually shell FCs being run by the same player using multiple characters. In a minority of cases, they're shell FCs being run by alts of characters in a central FC where that FC is trying to get access to more Grade 3 actions and workshop voyages than the game intends a FC to have. If they were legitimate FCs, they would have more than the 1-2 characters most of them have.

That was sloppily worded on my part. I was merely pointing out that to the system each of them is a unique FC. I did imply that most are single member and i named shell FCs as a problem, but i could certainly have been more clear. Most of the time its 1 person with alts, sometimes its an older bigger FC that split to get more airships/subs/wheels. Exactly as you said.