Thoughts on Relocation removal

[Big_Bap]

Give the Japanese players the NA treatment and see how their perspective might change...

This is your daily reminder that the Japs have had 32 servers, from the very beginning, while the NA region has 24 (only one has been added since 2013).
This is your second daily reminder that the NA population has always been significantly higher than the JP's.

Remember when nobody gave a f*** about Mateus housing until there was none left? Same shLt

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Too lazy to update this, but things have not improved within the 20 something months since I wrote that.

It’s been 3 months since the suspension of automatic housing demolition. If you are playing on the North American Data Center, chances are you are aware that all the available plots have been purchased for some time now. I sometimes post small analysis on the Housing Discord, but I figured writing a more complete text about the subject would probably be more beneficial. So let’s get started shall we.

Before going deeper into this, I must mention that some of the numbers below are not 100% accurate, but they are good enough to paint a picture of the situation. The last time Square Enix released official statistics or numbers regarding ingame content was in 2015. Keeping track of 342,720 plots across 8 Data Centers on a daily/weekly basis would require a ridiculous amount of time and becoming a full-time FFXIV housing statistician isn’t going to pay any kind of bills. So what’s the alternative? Thankfully, the Lodestone allows users to search for FCs based on housing criteria (Estate built, Plot only, No estate or plot).

That’s great and all, but what about the personal houses?

Sadly, the Lodestone doesn’t allow users to search for characters based on personal housing ownership, but it doesn’t really matter in this case since all the plots are occupied. There are 120,960 plots across the 3 North American Data Centers and as of earlier this week, 33,962 Free Companies owned a house. Below is the % of FC houses against the total amount of available plots. The 1.5% drop in November was caused by the release of the 3 additional ward tabs.

July 2019: 27,01%
August 2019: 27,20%
September 2019:27,45%
October 2019: 27,62%
November 2019: 26,10%
December 2019: 26,54%
January 2020: 26,93%
February 2020: 27,33%
March 2020: 27,65%
April 2020: 27,79%
May 2020: 27,95%
June 2020: 28,07%
Average: 27.30%

As you can see, that percentage has been consistent during the last year. As I said earlier, there’s no way to keep track of personal housing through the Lodestone. What you can do is use the monthly increase/decrease of FC houses on a given DC and combine it with the FC to personal house ratio of said DC to come up with a fairly accurate number. Obviously, if an FC relinquishes and another FC picks up their plot, that will not be reflected. Once again, these numbers aren’t meant to be 100% accurate, but they are good enough to give you an idea of what’s going on. If you have any serious doubt, let me point out that 17,280 plots were added in November and that the numbers below amount to 16,799 purchases a month before the auto demolition was announced.

https://i.imgur.com/yeJM4yt.png

These numbers are extrapolated by a combination of monthly FC houses acquisition and FC house/Personal house ratio. Now that the technical stuff is out of the way, let’s go back to the actual suspension. You can clearly see that there’s a significant dip right after the month of March, when the suspension was announced. The suspension itself doesn’t tell it all. If anything, it’s uncovering another underlying reason as to why North American players struggle to obtain houses. Here are numbers for all 3 regions in the past 4 months.

https://i.imgur.com/lcRZYaV.png

As displayed, the North Americans who are/were looking to purchase a house have been negatively impacted by the suspension. Meanwhile, the European and Japanese players have not been affected negatively by the suspension. How could that be?

Let’s look at how many “active characters” there are in each region according to ffxivcensus.com

North America: 279,480 characters
Europe:125,681 characters
Japan: 242,184 characters
So far so good. Now let’s take into consideration the amount of servers and plots for each region…

North America: 24 servers / 120,960 plots
Europe: 12 servers / 60,480 plots
Japan: 32 servers / 161,280 plots
If you divide the amount of “active characters” by plots in each region, you end up with…

North America: 2.31 active characters per plot
Europe: 2.07 active characters per plot
Japan: 1.5 active characters per plot
No wonder North America got hit hard with the suspension compared to Japan. The Japanese players nearly have 40,000 more plots available compared to the North American players, despite having not as many "active characters". To level out the situation, Square Enix would have to increase the NA’s server count to 37(+13). Since the rebirth of this game, 4 servers were added to the European servers (Omega, Louisoix, Spriggan and Twintania) while only one server has been added to the North American Data Centers.

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This is your third daily reminder that more wards were released when all the plots were sold out on the JP servers, while NA/EU have had to deal with that situation for many months. What a coincidence...