One player owning multiple houses

[Rhysati]

It really is inexcusable in 2021 that any MMO is still failing on housing(WoW still hasn't even shown up!). Everquest 2 had apartments and houses throughout all the cities you could just walk up to a door and go into an instanced housing. In EQ2 you can have twenty-five!!!! houses PER character. It came out in 2004.

Since then LotRO made housing districts just like FFXIV did. And have never had the problem of housing not being available. Not even on the largest roleplay servers. If a district got too full, a new one would generate on the fly with a new name for that neighborhood. It came out in 2007. Star Wars Galaxies came out in 2003 with the ability for players to not only build a house wherever the heck they liked on the planet, but could also form into collective villages and become cities with its own spaceport, cantina, guard troops, etc. City of Heroes/Villains developed Superhero and Supervillain bases that you could build from scratch, putting together your own layouts and decorating them as you saw fit. It came out 2004.

We also have more modern games with housing. Wildstar had impecable housing where you could not only put items anywhere you like in 3D space, but could resize objects to tiny tokens or giant structures. SWTOR lets you own housing and slowly build up and expand it over time. GW2 lets you make gigantic guild halls that are more like large outdoor maps you can fly in. You can decorate them to your hearts content. ESO allows housing all over the world and you can buy every single one of them if you like, there is no limit.

This list could go on and on, but the point is: What do all of these games have in common aside from having housing? None of them have/had restrictions like FFXIV. In each and every one of them you are entitled access to that house/guild hall system if you are a player. They aren't full up. They aren't super limited. You just walk up, pay your fee or whatever you have to do and you have your house/hall. Done.

FFXIV has failed hard when it has come to accessibility of housing and I say this as someone who has one.

[geekgirl101]

Thing is SE wants us to not have 1 house per player, they want us to compete for housing. I'm not sure why they've made such a ridiculous decision just because it worked in one game doesn't mean it works in another, but now they got limited space they can't and aren't willing to make it any better other than using a lottery system to avoid needing to spend hours mashing a sign and competing against bots. It's a band aid for a big open wound.

[Dewslam]

Thing is SE wants us to not have 1 house per player, they want us to compete for housing. I'm not sure why they've made such a ridiculous decision just because it worked in one game doesn't mean it works in another, but now they got limited space they can't and aren't willing to make it any better other than using a lottery system to avoid needing to spend hours mashing a sign and competing against bots. It's a band aid for a big open wound.

The housing system was designed in a time where the game's population was a lot smaller and they didn't predict it to explode as it had, on top of that it was designed with a Japanese userbase in mind - and as weird as it sounds: there are pretty vast differences between online cultures. It's not 100% perfect and all, but on the JP data centers people respect "the spirit" of the rules more than on western ones. So there was a lot more fair play with stuff like houses and apartments. Less people snatched up entire wards entirely to themselves, whereas when it came to western players the as soon as people realized they could do that, they did do that. And even now people will buy themselves a private house and a private FC house while bragging about how they have apartments for every one of their eight alts and then lose their minds screeching if you suggest that yeah, it's kind of greedy to eat up limited resources for entirely selfish purposes like that.

The entire purpose of the housing system, in its inception, was that it would just be an FC thing. Players weren't even supposed to have private houses. But players just made private FCs and demanded private houses. Every step of the way the changes to the housing system have been entirely reactionary with Square trying to tighten loopholes and such that the players exploit and abuse while refusing to stop grandfathering in stuff like people who own entire wards rather than making them adjust to the new rules, or simply doing the few things that would basically solve every problem easily.

[TwistedTea]

It's not 100% perfect and all, but on the JP data centers people respect "the spirit" of the rules more than on western ones. So there was a lot more fair play with stuff like houses and apartments. Less people snatched up entire wards entirely to themselves, whereas when it came to western players the as soon as people realized they could do that, they did do that. And even now people will buy themselves a private house and a private FC house while bragging about how they have apartments for every one of their eight alts and then lose their minds screeching if you suggest that yeah, it's kind of greedy to eat up limited resources for entirely selfish purposes like that.

Except if you actually look at the Lodestone data, JP has plenty of multi-house owners including some of the famous FFXIV housing designers.

But Western culture bad, JP culture good!