One player owning multiple houses

[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!