Plots everywhere demolished and open!

[van_arn]

I believe that actually further dissuades house use.

Buy something, that for most casual players, very expensive that you can very readily lose if you decide to take a break for whatever reason (besides wanting to take a break because maybe you were burnt out or playing something else at the time there is of course just life being life, covid, job, natural disaster, etc - which SE tries to help with but they can't fully because it would mean locking houses).

Added with other reasons of course like the system doesn't flow very smoothly. like if the system started you out either massively tiny but free but then pointed you towards upgrading that to apartment scale, then to small, etc, etc (location theme also being like this in terms of smoother far friendlier transitions)- meanwhile the game wont threaten to remove progress either. I strongly believe people would more eagerly interact with the system then. At first maybe just because they can store seasonals, but each time you get in it would be like "how about that extra space.. eh? you want a garden don't you, it's right here just press upgrade ;3".

Instead we have situations where people are actively told to buy houses they don't want just so they can then later pay more to get the house they actually did want. Freaking what? It actually works, but seriously that's the way that is a "good way" to interact with the system? It's awful.

Square clearly doesn’t want every player to own a house. The systems in place actively discourage players from easily buying one. Placard camping is intentionally awful to do; they want you to give up.

Even if someone buys a house in a bad location and relocates to a better location, they’re still paying less than the house is worth. Demand for these should be high as a mark of an aspirational goal, is high, and will continue to be high. The problem is Square hasn’t matched the price of these to the demand; one or two good map runs can “buy” an estate, but that doesn’t even come close to their actual value on a congested server.

Perhaps they don’t increase the cost to discourage gil buying, but that only opens the market for rmt housing which will only become more pervasive as more and more players want an estate. Additional wards help in the short term, but that’s only putting off the problem until later.

Either Square embraces the “everyone can have a house” pricing they’ve established by adding enough wards for every player to own an estate OR they open an actual limitless auction system that can reflect the actual value of an estate and price people out of the content we’ll never see an effective solution.

There are real-money service costs associated with adding that much housing, so they may not be able to offer everyone a house. The problem is they’re trying to have this system both ways, and it can’t function both ways.

[Shougun]

Square clearly doesn’t want every player to own a house. The systems in place actively discourage players from easily buying one. Placard camping is intentionally awful to do; they want you to give up.

Even if someone buys a house in a bad location and relocates to a better location, they’re still paying less than the house is worth. Demand for these should be high as a mark of an aspirational goal, is high, and will continue to be high. The problem is Square hasn’t matched the price of these to the demand; one or two good map runs can “buy” an estate, but that doesn’t even come close to their actual value on a congested server.

Perhaps they don’t increase the cost to discourage gil buying, but that only opens the market for rmt housing which will only become more pervasive as more and more players want an estate. Additional wards help in the short term, but that’s only putting off the problem until later.

Either Square embraces the “everyone can have a house” pricing they’ve established by adding enough wards for every player to own an estate OR they open an actual limitless auction system that can reflect the actual value of an estate and price people out of the content we’ll never see an effective solution.

There are real-money service costs associated with adding that much housing, so they may not be able to offer everyone a house. The problem is they’re trying to have this system both ways, and it can’t function both ways.

I will fundamentally disagree with concepts of housing (houses) be just for the few or more older school thoughts that introduce weird system finagling and scarcity due to memory issues (not all old school stuff I think is bad but this would be one of them, I don't care for that scarcity mindset). For example this system is clearly inspired by systems like Dark Age of Camelot (very old mmo), I think literally, since Yoshi said he liked that game (enjoyed playing and the pvp experience if I recall correctly).

Although I would absolutely agree that the thoughts like "if it was only FC still" or "if it cost significantly more than it did now" would pull back on many of what people experience (but I think would still make people upset, just less 'immediately so', no placard issues, etc- and this lack of upset is if we assume they did it from the beginning vs now.. if they did it now I still think people would be absolutely pissed lol).

If only FC could buy houses and they costed 5 to 10 times as much, there would be massively less wards needed and probably far more likely to see people (FCs) use the house they invested huge amounts of gil (better neighborhoods). Yet they did try to get player housing and make it more accessible (as was the demand for it), as you said (they're using one system to do something it shouldn't do and are damaging things in general because of it). Another example of the system doing something it shouldn't is that each time they add wards, particularly as they add them equally, they increase the amount of dead / ghost town vibes - so the basically only major benefit to the system is compromised by trying to get a significant amount of people in at a lower bar.

Some people hear that and might think "so raise the bar" and that's fair in the sense it would do a ..thing.. lol, but to me that just says "the system picked was bad, fix up /other/ systems" (like making apartments upgrade-able into instanced houses).

So we might disagree on the ultimate functional goal, not sure lol, going towards that all get to experience it sort of concept, but I would agree that one possible way that we didn't have all the huge problems we have now is if they had kept housing out of many players hands. I don't think that is a good thing... but clearly their system is having massive troubles accommodating (having both is clearly failing all over the place lol). So I definitely agree in some of your premises, just want it to be clear that to me the end goal is every single person would and could get a home of ANY size or theme (and more, since I think instanced systems offer far more potential customization/power) and I don't fancy any sort of obtuse old school systems that require thoughts like "buy a house you don't want to get a house you do". Definitely of the crowd that if I buy something I get to keep it, like the house if I took a break, or even if I bought a theme'd area and changed I'd not lose the other theme (like a wildstar system).