Housing Frustrations

[geminipestdeath]

As I've recently become fairly frustrated with trying to get a small against the veritable tide of auto-clickers (reported two on my last attempt about half an hour ago), let's look at some quick stats.

According to the PS5 Beta trailer during the Endwalker livestream, FFXIV has 20m+ players. Each server has 5,520 housing plots separated between four different neighborhoods and spanning several wards/subdivisions. Given that there are 68 active servers between JN, NA, and EU, you're looking at a grand total of 375,360 plots.

For the record, that is <2% of the player-base. Granted, not all 20m+ players are active, of course. Not all will be able to afford or have interest in housing. Some will probably settle for an apartment. But consider for a moment that percentage... <2%. Think about it real hard for a second. Assume for just a moment that if any other feature of this game could only be accessed by <2% of the people playing it - let's say, an exclusive Savage or something that only awarded glamours. Not everyone is interested or capable of running it, right? But I'd argue that there are quite a few players that -probably- would be interested but would be excluded from it by its very nature. How would the community react? Would people defend it? Would people say, "Right but you don't have to do the Savage, everyone has access to Extreme" as they do with apartments, or "Savage really isn't worth anything" as they literally wear the glamour from said Savage?

Point here is that the demand extremely outweighs the supply, and whereas there seems to be precisely zero effort in fixing it, there are people who would basically give you the RL treatment and tell you to suck it up and keep trying because it worked for them back in 2017 when the PCU was a pittance of what it is now. And this isn't a new phenomenon - this has been going on for literal years. If it's one thing I've taken away from this, my seventh attempt at getting a house and failing - some legitimate, some relocations, some to auto-clickers - it's that it truly is not worth my time. Time is a finite, invaluable resource that we all have but once lost we can never get it back. And frankly? If there wasn't a whole host of other things I wanted to do in this game, I'd have unsubbed on that fact alone. Nothing provokes my disdain quite like wasting my time and coming out with nothing for it, and that's without a community of proverbial millionaires telling me that money doesn't buy happiness as I'm chewing on sawdust.

In regard to the "can't fix/expand on it because it would stress the servers" argument - we know for a solid fact that 375,360 players are willing to pay $12.99/month to be able to own/retain a house in this game. At $4.8m+/month just in that alone, I'm sorry, but I don't buy that argument.

[Themarvin]

20millions who has subbed in for a period time, amount of people actually playing the game and active as well, is quite a bit of a different story, it is 20millions of all time, meaning dead accounts is probably calculated with.

They did that with wow and other MMOs as well.

[Jojoya]

snip

While I agree with the general idea that SE needs to pay more attention to housing. you've got some numbers wrong and you're making some assumptions that you shouldn't.

The game does not have 20 million active players. There have been 20 million accounts created since the game was released. Most of those accounts are no longer active (just as WoW had over 100 million accounts created as of Cataclysm even though the game only had about 10 million active subscribers at the time).

The best guess is that there's a little under 1 million active players right now. Number was higher earlier in the expansion but has dropped a bit now the expansion is more than half over (normal for MMOs).

Even if only 50% of active players would like to own a house, it means we've still got a fairly large shortfall. With Ishgard not being opened until 6.1 and the active player count no doubt increasing again with the new expansion content, there's no way Ishgard housing is going to be sufficient to fill demand if the number of wards in all housing districts remains the same. SE needs to do something else if they're serious about making sure there are enough plots for every player that wants a house.

As for 375,000 players being willing to pay $12.99/mo just to keep a house... are you nuts? This isn't a housing-centric game. There might be that small percentage of players who pay a subscription solely to keep a house but for most of the rest of us, housing is a small part of a much bigger package. If the rest of the package fails to keep us entertained, we're not going to stay subscribed just for our house. Most people are smart enough not to waste money that way.

Also, that $4.8 million a month you mention isn't solely to pay for housing. It pays for a lot of things, some that aren't even directly game related like accounting staff and maintenance staff, insurance and other benefits for employees, etc. Companies do have expenses generated by necessary operations that aren't directly related to creating the products they sell. It's naive to think those numbers are inconsequential in a company with thousands of employees.

Certainly, SE needs to do something to address the lack of supply so every player that wants a house can get one but let's not distort the situation.

[geminipestdeath]

snip

"Granted, not all 20m+ players are active, of course."

Was my exact words, but hey, reading can be as difficult as getting a house, apparently.