FFXIV Housing System is Unhealthy for its House-less Players (Endgame life?)

[Crimson03]

I love FFXIV and all and don't mind paying the sub at all. FFXIV is a wonderful place to chill. But the Housing System is unhealthy towards new players both mentally and physically.

The Invisible Timer
I understand that the invisible timer was added to prevent veteran players/FCs to monopolize the wards like a disease. But seriously, it's already 2021, and this system is all SE has to give us? After being around for so long? The current FFXIV Housing System is the worst thing in the game. There's not enough houses for everyone.

People are loosing sleep just to own a house, and I've been camping plots since Friday (21/02/2021), only to get beat by people who have crazy luck and walking in last minute.

What I Think
SE should just make Pay-2-Win Wards that you just buy a house thru Mogstation. I'm okay for SE to take more money out of me. 1 million gil is 1USD in Tonberry. A house costs 3-50mil, so take my money already. Then same demolishing rules apply. I'll just pay again.

Ishgard - New Ward and Its Flaws
Ishgard Housing is coming, and they tell us to prepare our gil to have A CHANCE at buying a new home while hoping the veterans players/FCs wont mass relocate into it, leaving us more invisible timers in older Wards.

What I think?
Accounts that have never bought a House before, shouldn't have the Invisible Timer applied to them. A chance at first come first serve when buying a house.

Relocating shouldn't be allowed during the Ishgard Housing opening. Maybe till 24 hours later or something. This would give the chance to new players without houses to actually spend their gil.

Relocating is a nice feature but it has been abused to bypass the invisible timer, everyone knows this, and it is making the houseless players even more desperate. Relocating needs a 6 month cooldown and a price increase, like 3 times the price of the plot they are relocating into. It's a great way to burn the gil of the veterans.

House activity needs to be increased to prevent demolition.

1. Regular visits (once per week) for Small should be one person (owner).
2. Medium 3 (original owner, and 2 shared owners),
3. Large requires 5+ (FC leader and other random FC).

The other sad thing out there are dead wards. There are wards full of houses but no owners to be seen in the neighborhood. Instance housing is needed for these ppl who just want to own a house.

Maybe split it into 2 types of housing.

• Normal wards for people who want neighbors and contacts with randoms
• Instance housing for the people who just want to own and show off

.. and in the end, after all of the above, i still play FFXIV. I currently live with another player, and I love the experiencing of decorating a house and having amazing neighbors and friends pop over. It's an amazing ingame experience in the FF world.

[Kenky]

Okay.. Here we go again. *ahem*

1. Nobody is forcing you to pick spamming a placard over sleeping or doing anything more 'productive'. You are willingly taking that path, so cool it with the blame-game.

2. Pay-2-win? really? That's your recommendation? Not to mention publicly commenting on RMT costs (which is enough to get a permanent suspension, by the way!) won't win you any points, especially when not everyone wants to risk losing their entire accounts (which can be up to several years worth of progress) for Gil that is stupidly-easy to get nowadays.

3."Accounts that have never bought a house before shouldn't have the timer" okay, so you just straight-up give bots an instant-win UNO card and you lose any hope of seeing any house. Ever. To the point that the invisible timer is meaningless. Good job! Purely on the fact that botters can instantly make "brand new accounts" faster than any human can. So they will just keep flooding the zones.

3a. Relocating is not going to be turned off. Period. Sure, it could certainly use a cooldown period, since nobody would need to relocate several times a day. But 6 months is a bit steep. Maybe 1 month at most, or 1 week at least, but no price-increase, unless they are upgrading sizes. To penalize people for wanting a more desirable plot is beyond stupid.

4. Housing Activity could be cut down so you have to be active more than once every 45 days, but at the same time, FFXIV encourages taking breaks when things get to a lull. Reducing the inactivity timer would only make people who already log in once a month to reset the timer.. Simply log in more, then log off again.. It wouldn't really fix anything.

Dead Wards will always be a thing, purely because Square Enix has said, several times, that they like the Ward-style and the Neighborhood feeling. If you want wards to actually be deemed 'active' then you need to give players a reason to be active there.

[ItMe]

snip

I regret I have but one "like" to give.
Well stated.

[Lumivyory]

While I agree that it's not a good design when people have to spend days camping houses with no sleep or breaks...

SE should just make Pay-2-Win Wards that you just buy a house thru Mogstation.

This won't help at all. Not only is pay2win a bad idea overall but considering how much a lot of players spend on Fantasias alone nobody would shy away from paying for a house. And then boom - everything is taken yet again and you'll have to wait god knows how long and might not even be able to catch an opening in such "p2w ward".

Accounts that have never bought a House before, shouldn't have the Invisible Timer applied to them. A chance at first come first serve when buying a house.

Relocating shouldn't be allowed during the Ishgard Housing opening. Maybe till 24 hours later or something. This would give the chance to new players without houses to actually spend their gil.

No timer will just bring back the problem the timer was introduced to fix. People will resell houses to those that never got a house before.
As for relocating - on populated servers people will end up buying everything before anyone can relocate if they won't allow relocating for a whole day.

House activity needs to be increased to prevent demolition.

1. Regular visits (once per week) for Small should be one person (owner).
2. Medium 3 (original owner, and 2 shared owners),
3. Large requires 5+ (FC leader and other random FC).

Big nope, this would be a horrible system.
First of all Yoshi-P himself advises breaks from the game.
Second - not every medium house owner shares it with other people. And sometimes people don't have a sub or can't log in for other reasons and it would be extremely unfair to the owner to lose their house because someone else didn't log in. And if you don't want to share your house you will be forced to just to be able to keep it.
Third - not every large house is owned by a FC. Some people have personal large houses and you cannot even have 5 people in the same personal house.

[Reinha]

Relocating shouldn't be allowed during the Ishgard Housing opening. Maybe till 24 hours later or something. This would give the chance to new players without houses to actually spend their gil.

Relocating is a nice feature but it has been abused to bypass the invisible timer, everyone knows this, and it is making the houseless players even more desperate. Relocating needs a 6 month cooldown and a price increase, like 3 times the price of the plot they are relocating into. It's a great way to burn the gil of the veterans.

So we will just manually demolish the dusty old house we currently own, leave it on a timer and still take our pick from the new Ishgard houses. I've done it before and I'll do it again. There will be no timers in the new wards so it's first come first served.

SE should just make Pay-2-Win Wards

No, it should cost more gil. This is a limited resource people compete over and any suggestion which does not acknowledge and address that is pointless. Throwing money at the Mog Station is too easy and does nothing to reduce the competition.

[Ftail]

1. Nobody is forcing you to pick spamming a placard over sleeping or doing anything more 'productive'. You are willingly taking that path, so cool it with the blame-game.

I’ve never liked this argument, reminds me too much of people who defend loot boxes. “If you don’t like loot boxes don’t buy them, no one is forcing you to buy loot boxes.”

[ItMe]

I’ve never liked this argument, reminds me too much of people who defend loot boxes. “If you don’t like loot boxes don’t buy them, no one is forcing you to buy loot boxes.”

The difference is that if you don't engage with loot boxes you don't get the loot.
Here, there are many ways to approach getting a house other than clicking a placard instead of sleeping.
Choosing to not click for hours doesn't lock you out of the content the way choosing to not buying a loot box does.

[Themarvin]

It is only a select group of niche players that will get a house though... it is not gamebreaking not to have one, everyone can get a house in shape of joining a FC with one, and FC apartment + normal apartment as well.

If this is a problem with people flocking placecards, use the system that will only allow 3 clicks per day per house plot... meaning, you will flush out bots and auto clickers and camping as well, and see that the house system will be be healthy as you will eventually be able to get the luck to get one when a timer ends.

[Wrestlefire769]

Either address RMT or make all future housing RL money with Mogstation. Pick one.

[Wrestlefire769]

Okay.. Here we go again. *ahem*

1. Nobody is forcing you to pick spamming a placard over sleeping or doing anything more 'productive'.

You lose the idea when you choose not to understand that it all will circle back to the fact that, if you want the content, you have to basically play THEIR game. This goes back to the likes of FFXI Ground Kings and when you would have bots attempting to invade server-side so the King "pops purple" for you, then you call your group on their phones while you hold it -- and hope the rest of the bots involved don't spam you off the game.

2. Pay-2-win? really? That's your recommendation? Not to mention publicly commenting on RMT costs (which is enough to get a permanent suspension, by the way!)

It's an interesting concept on what you are saying -- it's not, however, that gil is neither inexpensive on the Black Market nor not easy to get legitimately.

It doesn't change the fact that if Square-Enix chooses not to deal with RMT and the like (and I believe that is their choice because, outside of Japan, there is a community, including people in the company, who support RMT and want it to thrive!), the only remaining solution is that the housing becomes RMT and the owner of the content takes the money for themselves.

And take it from someone who's rerolled off being banned at least once on both MMOs: It's not that hard, and it's getting easier.

3."Accounts that have never bought a house before shouldn't have the timer" okay, so you just straight-up give bots an instant-win UNO card and you lose any hope of seeing any house. Ever.

I know what he's intending, but this is correct. Many of these botters are probably even botting THAT process!!! The real question should be why SE Legal hasn't gotten involved on a lot of this.

3a. Relocating is not going to be turned off. Period. Sure, it could certainly use a cooldown period, since nobody would need to relocate several times a day. But 6 months is a bit steep. Maybe 1 month at most, or 1 week at least, but no price-increase, unless they are upgrading sizes. To penalize people for wanting a more desirable plot is beyond stupid.

I think part of the motivation could be that you best be very careful where you locate the first time, because it will be harder to get a second.

4. Housing Activity could be cut down so you have to be active more than once every 45 days,

That timer is irrelevant -- that just determines when the bots can come in and take over.

Dead Wards will always be a thing, purely because Square Enix has said, several times, that they like the Ward-style and the Neighborhood feeling. If you want wards to actually be deemed 'active' then you need to give players a reason to be active there.

I'd love to see a "Dead Ward" every once in a while.