Shell FCs are a bigger problem than we think...

[Divinemights]

And what ideas have you contributed?

Since when you ever pay attention or respect what others are saying?
Anyone disagree with you = stalker
Anyone using stronger points = harassment
Anyone ask you to provide support for your claim = ignored

[Almagnus1]

Oh I've contributed ideas. You just don't pay attention unless it's your ideas.

You've only started a single thread which states a painfully obvious solution (add more wards). You haven't started any further threads, so I'm guessing these "ideas" are basically barbs at other players based on your interactions.

The difference between you and I is I want to make the playing field equal.

The difference here isn't that we want to make the playing field equal (as I have long advocated for that from a policy perspective), the difference is that I'm actually trying to do something about it.

You just want to find a way to get to the small percentage of people who own multiple properties. You don't care how you get that done, so long as it gets done.

Yeah, that's not true. Main thing with this thread is to identify what exactly a shell FC is, how we can separate out the legitimate FCs so we can identify what of the 10,042 to 27,768 properties are actually shell FCs, and which ones are legitimate micro FCs. There needs to be discussion around what metrics identify a smaller FC from a shell FC so that the greedy people that are tying up these homes and locking out a likely 10k+ people from the housing system can stop doing that.

Given that you (and the rest of the Hate Club) have see anything and everything I post as "bad" (whatever that really means), I expect you to be an obstructionist towards any real efforts that I am putting forth to try to better identify and clarify this issue in hopes that SE will take further action to make this situation better.

Your last terrible idea not only failed miserably in combating resellers and flippers (and multi-home owners), it actually created a small, flourishing underground of placard click bots to be developed.

Eh no. Sometimes it's darkest before the dawn...

A lottery system will be implemented for purchasing housing plots. Relocation rules will be adjusted, and there will be designated areas for purchasing plots via lottery, or first come, first served. These are currently in preparation for the release of the housing area in Ishgard.

Players will only be permitted to enter the lottery if they meet the requirements necessary to own housing. A number of features have been prepared to prevent RMT and troublemaking, such as depositing the gil upfront and disallowing participation on Free Trial accounts. Furthermore, there will be a gil penalty for those who do not purchase a plot after being selected in the lottery. Please note that this penalty will be quite strict.

Additionally, certain areas will be reserved for purchase as personal or free company housing. Details regarding this and other housing-related updates will be shared later.

[Almagnus1]

Since when you ever pay attention or respect what others are saying?

I do when most of the post isn't veiled attacks and barbs.

Anyone disagree with you = stalker

No, the stalker is (and always has been) https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ewPewPewPewPew .

Anyone using stronger points = harassment

Darling (the same as sweetheart, sugar, and other terms of affection) are typically used as pet names for women in a romantic relationship. When you are asked to cease with this behavior, and then cease to do so, that is actually sexual harassment. It's no different than a random dude walking up to a Japanese woman, referring to her with the "chan" suffix, her requesting that he use "san", the guy continuing on with this and being corrected multiple times. It's not endearing, it's rather obnoxious, and there are laws in the US about this kind of behavior. This is one of those RL things where the guy that's doing this is likely to get maced.

Some behavior is legitimate harassment and if someone is asking you to stop doing it, you should do so.

Anyone ask you to provide support for your claim = ignored

When the latest thing that I "failed" to provide support for is information on the definition and proper grammatical usage of the word "we", as in:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/we

: I and the rest of a group that includes me : you and I : you and I and another or others : I and another or others not including you —used as pronoun of the first person plural

It's generally not worth my time to respond to such trite requests.

[Jojoya]

And yet, there are far more players and due to how most FCs lock down FC housing, more players will get more out of housing with a personal house than they ever will with an FC house.

FC housing still impacts more players assuming the FC uses grade 3 actions. You can't buy those from the affiliated GC. They can only be obtained by crafting the grade 3 wheels in the workshop then priming them on the wheel stands that can only be placed in FC houses. Once active, actions don't discriminate based on rank. Everyone in the FC gets that benefit.

Designating more wards as personal still doesn't give more players access to housing. A FC house is still serving at least one player same as a personal house.

From there it goes to the generosity of the house owner, whether FC leader or individual. The FC leader could potentially give up to 511 other players full access to the house, even if we know that's not how it works out in practice. The individual player could only give access to up to 3 other players. Should we also be getting on the case of individual owners who aren't adding 3 tenants and giving them full permissions?

All of this discussion keeps dancing around the real problem. There are not enough plots for every player who wants a house. Weighing ward designations toward personal does not help more players. It only cuts down on the number of players who can own multiple houses via FCs per world and SE could address that problem in other ways (namely, enforcing the one FC house limit).

[Almagnus1]

FC housing still impacts more players assuming the FC uses grade 3 actions. You can't buy those from the affiliated GC. They can only be obtained by crafting the grade 3 wheels in the workshop then priming them on the wheel stands that can only be placed in FC houses. Once active, actions don't discriminate based on rank. Everyone in the FC gets that benefit.

But how significant are the grade 3 buffs instead of the grade 2 ones? While it's been a while since I looked at the actual stat value, from what I recall most the buffs aren't THAT much improved over the GC ones.

Designating more wards as personal still doesn't give more players access to housing. A FC house is still serving at least one player same as a personal house.

From there it goes to the generosity of the house owner, whether FC leader or individual. The FC leader could potentially give up to 511 other players full access to the house, even if we know that's not how it works out in practice. The individual player could only give access to up to 3 other players. Should we also be getting on the case of individual owners who aren't adding 3 tenants and giving them full permissions?

No, for a personal house, the expectation is that it's 1 person : 1 house, not 4:1 house. At that point the personal house has basically become an FC house for all intents and purposes without a couple of the perks. I look at the tenant system for the personal house as a nice bonus feature, but not anything that should be calculated in with the math. The cleanest way out of this mess is by introducing a significant number of personal houses until that demand is sated, while also giving the FCs enough wards so things don't degrade further. Given the huge growth the NA playerbase has seen, there definitely needs to be more datacenters in the Americas because otherwise the North American housing issues are going to degrade even further.

All of this discussion keeps dancing around the real problem. There are not enough plots for every player who wants a house. Weighing ward designations toward personal does not help more players. It only cuts down on the number of players who can own multiple houses via FCs per world and SE could address that problem in other ways (namely, enforcing the one FC house limit).

Ward allocation (like what SE has stated in the above live letter quote) is something that I see largely as a mitigation for the shell FC problem. Getting more houses into the hands of players does, actually, increase player involvement with the system as more players are going to have meaningful access to the decorating rights than if the entire allocation was given over to the FCs - at least going by the population numbers for https://ffxivcensus.com/ with somewhere between 647,345 to 4,885,698 active characters (their active numbers are likely a gross underestimate), compared to the FC numbers from https://www.xivhousing.com/ which indicates a total of 330,325 FCs worldwide. While the houses are roughly a 2:1 persona/FC split (with 265,668 personal houses to 126,012 FC houses), the house ratio for FCs owned:total is a lot higher than the player owned:total ratio, which is why I'm leaning heavily towards more personal housing as that seems to have the stronger demand between the two.

The big problem I see with all of this is that the number of houses needed to fix this problem is going to mandate (at minimum) another datacenter or two, and then 2-3 more housing neighborhoods. Even then, we still may not have enough houses and we're still going to have the shell FC problem unless SE implements something to solve that problem.

The other problem with the shell FCs... what do you do with them as a fitting (but not excessive) punishment?
Should the shell FC be stripped of their house and have the FC remain?
Should the shell FC be deleted?
What does the mechanism to fix a false flagging look like?
How do you detect a shell FC without (for example) falsely flagging the couple's FC?

There's a lot of questions raised, and not a lot of answers right now, and while the vindicative side on me wants to burn them all to the ground (as I suspect that many members of the Hate Club are shell FC owners), that is not a good policy decision and not something that should be acted upon until an approach of greater finesse can be conceived... which also explains why SE has been so reticent to do anything about the housing issues because of all the possible collateral damage a mistake can create.

[Awha]

I have not read the entire thread, just the OP so sorry if this has been brought up.

If small FC's are a problem wouldn't the logical step be to remove personal housing?

[Almagnus1]

I have not read the entire thread, just the OP so sorry if this has been brought up.

If small FC's are a problem wouldn't the logical step be to remove personal housing?

No, FC housing and personal housing are distinct.

Besides when there's only total of 330,325 FCs worldwide (going by https://www.xivhousing.com/ ) and somewhere between 647,345 to 4,885,698 active characters (which is likely exceedingly low because https://ffxivcensus.com/ was operating the assumption that the active players and there's not another public source for active characters), yet 265,668 personal houses to 126,012 FC houses worldwide.

In other words, we shouldn't delete the majority of land holders (the personal houses) just to satisfy the minority.

However, if SE starts segregating wards in the future, the shell FC issue is going to be causing problems for the legitimate FCs:

Additionally, certain areas will be reserved for purchase as personal or free company housing. Details regarding this and other housing-related updates will be shared later.

[Awha]

No, FC housing and personal housing are distinct.

Besides when there's only total of 330,325 FCs worldwide (going by https://www.xivhousing.com/ ) and somewhere between 647,345 to 4,885,698 active characters (which is likely exceedingly low because https://ffxivcensus.com/ was operating the assumption that the active players and there's not another public source for active characters), yet 265,668 personal houses to 126,012 FC houses worldwide.

In other words, we shouldn't delete the majority of land holders (the personal houses) just to satisfy the minority.

However, if SE starts segregating wards in the future, the shell FC issue is going to be causing problems for the legitimate FCs:

That is fair but if housing is a finite supply and we buy into the premise that Shell FC's are a problem shouldn't we try to maximize the use per plot to best of our ability to make the most out of each plot of land.

[Almagnus1]

That is fair but if housing is a finite supply and we buy into the premise that Shell FC's are a problem shouldn't we try to maximize the use per plot to best of our ability to make the most out of each plot of land.

That sounds good on paper, but in practice most members in FCs don't have access to decorations (much less gardening or the workshop) so to get them involved in housing they really need their own house. It really boils down to having your play experience gated by someone else, or being able to do whatever you want to with the property without having to get someone else's approval.

[Joven]

That sounds good on paper, but in practice most members in FCs don't have access to decorations (much less gardening or the workshop) so to get them involved in housing they really need their own house. It really boils down to having your play experience gated by someone else, or being able to do whatever you want to with the property without having to get someone else's approval.

Sooooo, start your own FC.