The Real Problem with Housing

[Masenko]

It's simply this:

Until everyone can have a private home that you can actually decorate the outside with with all of the content that they keep making that people straight-up can't participate in, the system will be permanently broken.

I don't care if my house is next to other people. I don't want to show off my house to people. I hate people anyway. I don't even like living next to people in real life. Speaking of which, there's already a housing crisis nearly everywhere in the US. I don't need to deal with the Eorzean equivalent. It's honestly stupid that virtual space is limited. "Oh no, the servers cost extra!" says the company who had to stop selling digital copies of the game because it got too popular.

The problem isn't lotteries or bots spamming or people participating in Housing (Savage) that is now going to be Housing (Ultimate) going forward.

It's that there is no mechanism in the game for people to just buy a damn house for themselves, separate from other people.

Design philosophy: Dungeons have been moving more towards a single-player friendly design. Recently with the Duty Support goon squads you can single-player experience your way through a giant chunk of the game. Why... WHY is housing not like this?

I enjoy playing with the glamour plates and designing my own stuff.
I'm lucky enough to be in a FC that has a teeny house the size of a postage stamp that's been squished on a hydraulic press to have my own room to decorate that fits between the proton and electron of a hydrogen atom.

This is essentially criminal. It's bad game design and I'm honestly really tired of this. This is scores of hours of fun locked away due to poor design and cheap behavior from the design staff. Instead of Housing for All we get PvP. Whoop.

Fix it.
Make private-instance housing IMMEDIATELY.
This is criminal.


Edit: And it should be free and unlockable through MSQ, be upgradeable in size or just start at Large. You think someone as important to the star as the Warrior of (Whatever) shouldn't have their own nice house?

[Sythex]

This, THIS, devs! PLEASE listen to this person! I pay my sub to enjoy the game, but sadly part of the game I want to enjoy is locked behind a luck based system, I even want to take it a step further and say let people have instanced housing based on where they want their house, be it ishgard, gridania, or even the blasted moon!

I personally don't understand the appeal behind having wards that "give other players neighbors" if it means a large portion of players are homeless! myself included! I'm still angry that I lost out to someone who has not been playing the game for nearly as long! I want to be angry at them, but I know the fault lies with development! you say you want a fair housing system but how is it fair that I invest so much time into the game and get all these housing items only for them to sit in my storage collecting dust for years!? I'd almost rather just cancel my sub until they fix this problem!

[Elkanah]

It's weird cause... FFXI has had instance housing since 2002 (at NA release). When you get into new expansions, you have access to it in every single city (and now access to some of the features from places like selbina/mhaura, which were never possible). They always brought it up as "ps2 limitations" and "oh xbox 360 limitations" for a lot of ideas that they received from players over time. Then managed to get rid of PS2 and Xbox 360 for PC only use to implement more stuff on QoL. But by then, it was too late. The player base left and it's really only the more dedicated players who still play xi (I come in off and on depending on whether I'm bored of XIV or not). The glamour system was something new that was never possible before in XI. Neither was NPC trusts. So is it the spaghetti code? The PS4 limitations? PS5 limitations? 1.0 limitations (which seems to have workarounds that they found were possible, including the old 1.0 dungeons getting face lifts in 6.1). Do they wait till 95% of the player base is gone and the game stops making money? Cause it seems odd that the excuses keep piling up without any reason for things that need QoL changes (healers included-- even though I don't play healer, but know so many people who stopped playing healer or continue to complain about it for normal reasons). The phrase of "well, we never knew people wanted housing this much" is disturbing in past interviews. Really? After 10 years, you still think people don't want houses a lot?? <<questionable what meme gif here>>.

[Corvus_V]

Mabinogi has instanced housing, and homesteads. They deleted their housing channels entirely and replaced them with that (although it took some time.)
If a cash cow as miniscule as that can do it, you are an idiot among idiots if you think SE can't afford to pull off the same thing.
Enough with the pity, they're rich.

Even if you're one of the people who enjoys venues and a neighborhood setting, not giving people the option to have instanced housing so they can have access to things like company workshops and gardening is sad and stupid. It's a puny facet of the game that shouldn't be tied to something as hilariously scarce as it is; and it wasn't justifiable to give that kind of scarcity exclusively to FCs, when they every single small is basically the functional equivalent of a large. All you're doing at that point is fostering RMT.

These suggestions are a joke, I keep saying this: but this straw-man of "people were trolling by relocating!!" and "placard clicking sucks" is so pathetic as well. Give me a break.

On the former, what do you think is more cost-efficient, having the entire housing system uprooted to prevent transfers, or a GM banning a couple of rich griefers per capita, who lose access to their griefing funds? What are they gonna do? Sue Square Enix? You think they own their accounts? They need to be banned by a jury of their peers? LOL
I could get banned for this post

On the latter, why couldn't they have just made lottery's for smalls? Why would they have to do it for everything, and why all 24 wards? Do you think people are constantly relocating from small to small for a nicer view or something? Again, give me a break

This whole system is somehow supposed to be more fair to everyone. So what about everyone else who was prepared for the release of Ishgard housing? What about the people who spent money on smalls and spent hours and hours placard-clicking for the express purpose of relocating? Downsizing their storage? Buying furniture? etc? Was it fair to them, too? The people who managed to get time off for the patch? Who stayed awake so that they could log in first? No, right? Imagine training for a race, or a marathon, and then when you manage to get to the finish line first, someone holds you at gunpoint because "its more fair to the people who don't have the time to get in better shape" even though both of you probably work full time and have all your own real life problems. Does it make it ok when you just pretend that they're NEETs or something?

It isn't even more fair like you guys all say it is, because not everyone put forth an equal effort in the first place

[Sythex]

Mabinogi has instanced housing, and homesteads. They deleted their housing channels entirely and replaced them with that (although it took some time.)
If a cash cow as miniscule as that can do it, you are an idiot among idiots if you think SE can't afford to pull off the same thing.
Enough with the pity, they're rich.

It's worse in my mind when I think about what they're giving us instead. "Oh you didn't get the medium house you wanted? here, have an island instead. you can't build on it or decorate it, but you can let all your minions roam around there." .......REAL smooth Squenix!

[Brygd]

It's worse in my mind when I think about what they're giving us instead. "Oh you didn't get the medium house you wanted? here, have an island instead. you can't build on it or decorate it, but you can let all your minions roam around there." .......REAL smooth Squenix!

I'm naively hoping that one reason they've been so painfully vague about what island sanctuaries actually are, is because they were waiting to judge what the demand for Ishgard housing was. If there was insufficient supply (which there was), they could then justify turning island sanctuaries into instanced personal housing.

[Elkanah]

I'm naively hoping that one reason they've been so painfully vague about what island sanctuaries actually are, is because they were waiting to judge what the demand for Ishgard housing was. If there was insufficient supply (which there was), they could then justify turning island sanctuaries into instanced personal housing.

The only issue I have with their judgement is how things ended up with the example of diadem. They thought they did a good thing (and turns out it was more of just the same we already had ingame, but worse with rng). Tried it a second time, then closed it before opening it to just gathering (where it's actually not bad). That took how many years? THAT's what I'm worried about. They see how housing in ishgard does -- try to fix it-- screw it up again-- then finally just remove it before it stays as the foundation firmament route but with minions (island sanctuary). We finally have a fix in expansion 7.55

[Big_Bap]

It's simply this:
This is essentially criminal
This is criminal.

LMFAO.......

[Masenko]

Well it is.
We're being charged money monthly and don't have access to a basic game function that is gated. There's an argument to be made here (likely poorly) that this is fraud of some sort.

And yeah, I'm bitter.

[Big_Bap]

Go ahead, make a chargeback if you think you are being scammed.

Enjoy your account termination.