One player owning multiple houses

[Jojoya]

If we think the congestion is back now. Just wait til Ishgard Housing wars.

Lottery means you won't have to be trying to log in when the servers come up from maintenance. They'll probably give players a period of 4-5 days to purchase their entry.

[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.

[Eriane_Elis]

You're more than welcome to have 2 houses if you can. One for personal and one for FC. Then you can have an apartment and a FC room. So technically 4 "houses". This is perfectly fine and if you want to rent your house you're more than welcome to. When I joined it was easy to find a small, medium or large plot of land but of course things change lol

I think that SE is in a bind now that the population is pretty high. They can't just add more servers, it's expensive for such a small part of the game, although admittedly I am a fashionista of sorts that decorates homes a lot. I even look at youtube videos and visit various websites to see other people's creation, it's a way of life! But I can't do that right now because the login queue makes it impossible to swap between alts.

Anyway....... There's nothing wrong (in terms of the rules) with buying land and doing nothing with it. You're given the right to do it and it's your right to squat on property if you like. What you're not allowed to do is sell it for real money which people have done. I've heard people selling their small property for over $1000! It's crazy. Morally I think it is wrong to buy a piece of land and sit on it but you never know the reasoning behind it. Maybe they can only play 1hr a day or every few days and eventually they plan to make a house and decorate but don't have the time/gil for it yet. The land itself I believe gets taken away if no house is built within a period of time. I could be wrong but I think you have a week or two to do it. I spent over a year in subscription fees just to login once a month to prevent demolition while I was on hiatus. It shouldn't be that way but it is. Maybe this part of the game, SE will eventually figure out a more cloud-like way to load the instances to alleviate the need for so many servers on this feature. One could hope.

Edit: I meant to say that I had made a suggestion years ago about having your own instanced island where there would be no need to load server resources unless someone was there. I think they will be including something like this soon but I don't know if it will come with a house or if it's just farmville.

[Lostar]

I agree with the above sentiments; that SE is in a bind.. that it was their lack of foresight that got us all here and despite the housing system being in such high demand, it seems as though it is of a lower priority despite such. Having an instances island where we even get a large plot of land, perhaps even larger and more customizable than the current housing in order to lure prospective home buyers there and have it count towards your one house limit may lead to the necessary depopulation within the districts enough to where those of us who really desire landlocked places will have them a bit more easily accessible. It seems like such a smart solution but that would depend on how well they code it; For instance, all of ESOs housing is instanced so they may as well be islands (and at least one of them are) but many of them also cost a lot of real-world cash and that might be to offset the cost of maintaining server storage... but they are there forever. I have not logged into ESO since mid-2020 and all my houses and furnishings are right where I left them. Lovely, yes?

My partner and I have a Medium in The Mists and if they ever do release instance housing that does not have a demolition timer on it then that is where we are going and that house in The Mists that we've had for years will be up for sale for a new buyer to enjoy and I bet there will be a lot of cases like this.

[Serenitey]

Multiple ones I do not even mind it is the FCs that purchase whole wards on a congested server that bothers me. Im sure many will say that is fair etc but if its a congested server and these homes are never being used, really what do you need more than 6 for?

[Big_Bap]

Damn, it's been years and you are still not over it. Even funnier, you're still clueless as to what they are being used for.

[Jojoya]

You're more than welcome to have 2 houses if you can. One for personal and one for FC. Then you can have an apartment and a FC room. So technically 4 "houses".

Using that thinking, it's actually possible for a player to have 160 "houses" per account.

Need to remember the ownership limits placed are per world, not per account. If I have one character on each of 40 different worlds, then they all get to have a personal house, FC house, FC private chambers and apartment (assuming I could find the houses available to purchase). If you want to ignore private chambers and apartments, I could still have up to 80 houses on my account.

The housing system is heavily flawed when it comes to supply and purchase. The flaws have been very apparent since Heavensward. It's exceeding strange that SE won't do anything to fix the flaws when so many other MMOs don't have their housing systems crippled.

[Kalinas]

Shared these thoughts in another thread:

It was created with the idea that only FCs would own a ward house at first and that player housing would come later. This is why we have wards. FCs were supposed to hang out in them. Well, the houses were really expensive at launch in an attempt to drain gil from the servers and not many FCs bought them. They didn't have the workshop back then and it was just a luxury/bragging item for FCs. Very few saw the small houses as being worth it (they didn't even have the basement area at the time). 2.1 was the patch that gave us FC housing and that was a HUGE patch for the team. To not see housing take off like they thought at first shifted the dev focus to other projects.

By 2.3 most FCs who wanted a house had one, so SE opened the ward to individuals to fill the wards which were mostly empty as they probably thought that housing wasn't something to really invest time/money. After the initial surges of buyers, it died down again. Again SE kinda kicked the ball down the field since it still wasn't a huge selling feature of the game. Fast forward to the mash up of FC/Player housing which is the mess we have today. Now there's not enough houses for the FCs or players.

Fun fact: the houses were never supposed to ever go "poof" and evict you if didn't login for a set time. This was in keeping with SE team's idea of taking a break to play other games. No maintenance or decay fees either. The evictions are a symptom of the overall housing problem.

[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!