Fix Housing Megathread

[Caitsithhh]

“Side Content” not “Owed Content”

[MilkieTea]

“Side Content” not “Owed Content”

Sure, it’s not owed, but it’s quite obvious that *THIS* scarcity is not by design.

Let people talk about it. If you don’t want to see it, it’s easy to ignore it and go to other threads.

[Jojoya]

Na it’s your attitude that thinks it’s something more than a luxury that kills it. Imagine thinking just owning the game means you’re owed everything

MMOs run into problems when they restrict access to content to a lucky few instead of making that content equally accessible to every player who is paying the required real money to play and meets the game play entry requirements for the content.

If limited resource content systems that only a few players get access to were so beneficial to MMOs, why don't we see more of them getting used?

When you want customers to keep returning to a theme park, you need to make sure they can get access to the content that interests them the most. If they can't get that access, they stop returning and your theme park is short the revenue it otherwise would have been earning. That's not a good business decision.

[Almagnus1]

MMOs run into problems when they restrict access to content to a lucky few instead of making that content equally accessible to every player who is paying the required real money to play and meets the game play entry requirements for the content.

If limited resource content systems that only a few players get access to were so beneficial to MMOs, why don't we see more of them getting used?

When you want customers to keep returning to a theme park, you need to make sure they can get access to the content that interests them the most. If they can't get that access, they stop returning and your theme park is short the revenue it otherwise would have been earning. That's not a good business decision.

That's also why it needs to be reasonably easy for someone to get a house. These are not supposed to be status symbols, and if someone really likes housing, the best they can do with getting started is with an apartment, but ultimately... that's not everything that comes with house ownership and little (aside from skills) transfers from an apartment to the house.

[Themarvin]

Everyone can get a house, an apartment offer the exact same features, except for the garden, visually and enhancing the current apartment system would solve a lot of things.

It is unlikely that we would end with enough houses for everyt signed in account or active spot in game as it is, just playing with logic and reality.

1. Remove Grandfathering, that exist on most servers if not all, some people got more than one house on their single account.
2. Add upkeep as in paying rent or tax for the plot, don't make it cheap.
3. If house is not freequently used or interacted with by the owner, or forgotten... make an alghoritm that does that House Demolition feature start early, unless doing something about it.
4. Make medium and large apartments, but make the cost of those incredible high.
5. increase the item limit for houses inside, so you can eg. have 800 or 1200 slots in a large, 4-500in a madeium and 300ish in a small.
6. Remove garden patches for growing things, and make it an instanced thing like a greenhouse or something for everything, 3 deluxe gardens no matter if apartment or house.
7. Add on a time served, so being able to buy a house plot alone, does not only mean you need to fullfill the base requirement, but also a loyalty program, meaning you need to have been active subscribed for a year or so to be able to buy a house plot.
8. This game need more options as in how to place things, so we do not have to keep on using legal clitches, give us the tools to turn and place and rotate... and float... instead of having to use specific created loopholes in the game for it.
9. Be able to alter the interrior build.. so it does not have to have eg. Shirogane or Mist frames and pillars and whatever, give a choice to change things and re-build looks.

[Sotaris]

snip

tldr: punish your players for you playing your game.

[Jillian]

Na it’s your attitude that thinks it’s something more than a luxury that kills it. Imagine thinking just owning the game means you’re owed everything

Items available in the FFXI online store are a luxary item. Housing is part of the base game and should be available to everybody (especially with how heavily SE advertises it every expansion).

[Seleni]

Processing power, storage, database schema, UI restrictions, development time, lore, game design, etc. Whatever the limiting factor(s) are, the houses in wards are likely to remain, well, limited. If it were easily done, it would not have been like these for years.

Scarcity in and of itself creates prestige and thereby demand. So it’s not likely that there’ll ever be enough ward housing for everyone that wants one.

Boosting instanced housing (e.g. apartments) with additional space/feature might help somewhat. But as long as the wards exist and remain limited, there are going to be people that would only want ward housing. For example, some never bothered to even get an apartment before dismissing it as insufficient. It’ll likely be the same with any non-limited housing.

Well they could go thermo-nuclear and eliminate ward housing altogether (massive destruction of entire Eorzea then rebuild?), but they’d get lots of upset customers if they do that.

[Almagnus1]

Short list of things that would really help the situation:

• Make gardening generally available outside of housing (hopefully this happens with Endwalkers)
• The workshop becomes generally available (through Garlond Ironworks?) outside of housing
• For each character on the server, that char should have a teleport location to each house owned by each character on that server
• All personal houses on a server owned by the same service account should have access to a common shared storage that allows you to store unbound items and gil from any of your personal characters and also remove them from your own characters. Multiple personal houses should not give you additional storage.
• Give us an Ishgardian NPC ward that allows someone to get a personal house or FC house alongside the rest of the NPC ward that costs the same relative to the rest of the ward.

IMO, there's no real point in messing with the grandfathered housing until most of the above happens. That said, SE needs to seriously address the shell FC issue as the entire shell FC thing needs to die in a fire.

[Jojoya]

Processing power, storage, database schema, UI restrictions, development time, lore, game design, etc. Whatever the limiting factor(s) are, the houses in wards are likely to remain, well, limited. If it were easily done, it would not have been like these for years.

Scarcity in and of itself creates prestige and thereby demand. So it’s not likely that there’ll ever be enough ward housing for everyone that wants one.

Boosting instanced housing (e.g. apartments) with additional space/feature might help somewhat. But as long as the wards exist and remain limited, there are going to be people that would only want ward housing. For example, some never bothered to even get an apartment before dismissing it as insufficient. It’ll likely be the same with any non-limited housing.

Well they could go thermo-nuclear and eliminate ward housing altogether (massive destruction of entire Eorzea then rebuild?), but they’d get lots of upset customers if they do that.

But at least there would be limited and unlimited systems existing side by side. No one would be denied a house of some sort as long as they met the base entry requirements. Those who prefer having a ward house could then compete to own one of those while still having an instanced house to use as they wait.