Housing PROBLEM??

[Soulgix]

https://imgur.com/a/YlSaLxu
With the amount of houses available to new and old players alive....is soemthing like this...normal, acceptable, working as intended?

[Yodada]

https://imgur.com/a/YlSaLxu
With the amount of houses available to new and old players alive....is soemthing like this...normal, acceptable, working as intended?

normal - yes
acceptable - yes (beside some people will claim this as immoral)
working as intended - yes

If you want to bark at a tree blame Square for not providing the supply which would be sufficient.

[Jojoya]

https://imgur.com/a/YlSaLxu
With the amount of houses available to new and old players alive....is soemthing like this...normal, acceptable, working as intended?

It's working as intended.

Prior to 4.2 it would have been considered normal since there were no ownership limits until then. Many times in the past most worlds had nearly empty wards with no buyers so players who wanted to own multiple houses found it easy to purchase them. Anything purchased before 4.2 was not affected by the new rules so those houses may be normal under the grandfather clause.

It's acceptable under the game rules even if the general player base frowns on it due to the housing shortage. But the shortage is not the responsibility of players and taking away a few hundred houses worldwide from multiple house owners who had obtained those houses fairly is not going to alleviate the problem.

It's up to SE to fix the supply issue.

[Arazehl]

Rather than asking is it normal, it's more did people get away with it? The answer sadly is yes. SE has a huge problem of not covering up the little loopholes that surrounds the housing market. Due to these housing oversights under the grandfather clause, and due to these failings on part of SE, they got these houses at a time when the housing policy could be taken advantage of under the current policy at the time.

Is it fair? Not really, but according to SE there is nothing they can do for this oversight on their part. There was no policy at the time for FC housing and it's just human nature to be greedy and snatch up more than is needed. So the housing market suffers for it and we just have to suck it up because of SE's little oversight.

[Eriane_Elis]

Housing wasn't popular like it is today. The whole housing system was designed on the spot rather than future-proofing. It was more of a competitive feature "just to have" just like Free companies are a guild feature but they kinda just do nothing with it. It's now a problem but it wasn't at the time. But they did take notice and they did impose limits after this (not sure if that's the same player that influenced them or not).

SE won't demolish that person's fleet of houses because it was bought prior to the policy change. In the future, more wards will be added and possibly instanced housing for dedicated zones (like islands maybe?). FF14 wasn't intended to be as popular as it is today and they certainly didn't expect the housing system to be such a big subculture. I've heard that some people have sold their houses for over $1000USD before. Sure, it's against the ToS but that's how much people want houses.

[dspguy]

They really should just make housing instances the way LOTRO did. As "wards" fill up, spin up another instance of one. In that game you could decorate both the exterior and interior, just like FFXIV. If a game that is 15+ years old figured that out, I don't see why SE can't do the same.

[Jojoya]

They really should just make housing instances the way LOTRO did. As "wards" fill up, spin up another instance of one. In that game you could decorate both the exterior and interior, just like FFXIV. If a game that is 15+ years old figured that out, I don't see why SE can't do the same.

As long as they leave it at "automatically add a new ward when the current wards fill". The rest of the LotRO housing system was terrible.

[Themarvin]

It is grandfathering, also as with fixing different ingame professions and the likes, they should just do the same with housing max 1 FC and Private house per account

[Kalinas]

Housing wasn't popular like it is today. The whole housing system was designed on the spot rather than future-proofing. It was more of a competitive feature "just to have" just like Free companies are a guild feature but they kinda just do nothing with it. It's now a problem but it wasn't at the time. But they did take notice and they did impose limits after this (not sure if that's the same player that influenced them or not).

It was also created with the idea that only FCs could own a 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.

[Yodada]

It is grandfathering, also as with fixing different ingame professions and the likes, they should just do the same with housing max 1 FC and Private house per account

Check the Screenshot again. This has nothing to do with Grandfathering. Grandfathering was only for Personal Houses. Its just Multiple Players or one Players with several accounts that have the lead of the FCs.