New Ward Housing Distribution

[Almagnus1]

When SE releases the Ishagardian ward, they should do the following breakdown for houses:

75% Personal Houses
20% FC Houses
5% Free for all

It's clear that many people want to participate in housing, and as the stats show, most houses skewer heavily towards personal houses as many FCs with houses prohibit their members from decorating, gardening, and workshop access.

[Sotaris]

With an upkeep fee orrrr?

[Kenky]

No. Splitting the wards will (hopefully) help. I doubt by very much, but anything is better than the status quo. Punishing FC groups with a smaller % because personal owners are greedy is unfair to the FCs. (Note. I am a Personal owner. I can say we're greedy.)

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

[Canadane]

imo there should be more FC specific housing than personal.
One FC house can provide for hundreds of players. It also keeps the neighbourhood alive. You'll see people playing around in a FC house much more often than you see someone at their personal house, from what I've noticed.

[Jojoya]

No. Splitting the wards will (hopefully) help. I doubt by very much, but anything is better than the status quo. Punishing FC groups with a smaller % because personal owners are greedy is unfair to the FCs. (Note. I am a Personal owner. I can say we're greedy.)

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

SE could probably figure out what percentage should be set aside for FCs based on past purchases, especially during periods when a personal purchase moratorium was implemented on new wards. There were still a fair number of empty houses in the 5.1 wards when the personal moratorium was lifted on most worlds, even with all the personal houses relocated into those wards during the moratorium. It took the lifting of the moratorium for them to finally fill.

Certainly it's frustrating for a FC not to be able to get a house when they're ready to buy but the demand for FC houses doesn't seem to be as strong as some think. Most of the demand is for personal.

The big problem with setting percentages for ward types is the need isn't going to be consistent world to world, and they're likely going to have to designate the same wards as FC on every world. What will be too many FC wards on one world won't be close to enough on others.

imo there should be more FC specific housing than personal.
One FC house can provide for hundreds of players. It also keeps the neighbourhood alive. You'll see people playing around in a FC house much more often than you see someone at their personal house, from what I've noticed.

Let's be realistic about how FC housing works out in practice. You mean one FC house provides housing content for the leader and a couple of the officers while the FC members only get to visit it. They don't get to decorate. They don't get to garden. They don't get to do things in the workshop.

Members hanging out at the FC house doesn't keep the neighborhood alive. It keeps the house alive because they're at the house, not running around the neighborhood.

What keeps a neighborhood alive is the need to be in it in the first place then the need pass through the neighborhood to reach other places in the area. Those needs are almost non-existent with the wards. The only content in the wards is the housing. Need to get to your house? You teleport directly there, no need to pass through the "neighborhood". Summoning bell? Already in the house, you don't need to pass through the neighborhood. Marketboard? With each ward/subdivision having 6 MBs for 30 houses plus a 7th at the apartment building (which is sometimes closer to some houses), you're not passing through the "neighborhood" to reach the MB. It's usually just one house away if not directly outside your house. Vendors? You're going to use the Aethernet to teleport to them on the rare occasions you need to buy something then teleport directly back to your house, no need to pass through the neighborhood.

I just cruised through the ward with my personal house. Six of the houses are owned by FC with two of those FCs being fairly large. Ran into exactly one other player - a wanderer who seemed to be visiting one of those 2 big FC houses (didn't see any of the actual FC members around). Then I went to the ward with my FC house. There are 8 FCs in that ward with 3 of them fairly large. Saw no one around at all. This is NA prime time right now, if FCs help make neighborhoods active I should have been seeing other players cruising around, right? Except they aren't because their members online are actually in the places where there's content to be done, not hanging out at the FC house.

When I go on my random housing tours, it's extremely rare I'll run into more than one or two players in a ward unless one of the RP venues is open for business. Even then, players are rarely hanging around outside the venue, they're going straight into it. The idea that FCs make wards feel like active populated places is more of a dream than a reality.

[Nepentha]

This is a terrible distribution.

75% FC houses
25% personal houses

Better. Just because someone is convinced shell FCs are a huge problem (hint: they aren't) does not mean FCs should be punished as a whole.

[Almagnus1]

Eh, reread the OP again, and I wasn't clear that this if for new wards only, and we should leave the existing wards alone. Percentages aren't for so many houses in a ward, but for the wards themselves. For example, if 20 wards were added, 15 wards should be personal house only, while 4 should be FC only, and 1 ward should be a free for all.

When you take into consideration the huge boom we've had in population recently, and take the population data from https://ffxivcensus.com/ into account, it's now showing 4,885,698 total characters across all servers, with 647,345 defined to be active, that is any characters that has the minion for completing the Shadowbringers Main Scenario Quest from the Patch 5.0 story. So that gives us an upper and lower limit for the actual active population. Of note, there's 2,378,009 characters on the North American servers, which is close to HALF the number of players worldwide. The success of FFXIV is something we should be cheering on... but unfortunately it means that the housing problem is going to continue to get worse as time progresses and there definitely needs to be South American datacenter if not a fourth North American one too.

So taking a look at the FC and housing data from https://www.xivhousing.com/ and it's reporting that there's only 330,325 FCs, of which only 126,012 have houses. The remaining houses are either personal houses or vacant, which account for 265,668 houses.

The numbers in the OP came from pulling both data sources together, as the only realistic way out of this housing mess is to put enough personal houses onto the market so that we can better satiate the personal housing demand.