Worst housing system in history

[Themarvin]

You unironically think a system that excludes 95% of the playerbase is better than a system where every player can partake in the system?

Prove it by people of whom am looking for a house is 95% of the playerbase?

[Themarvin]

i highly doubt its less than 98% im not sure but im not going to be surprised if its around 90-98% of playerbase who are excluded from the housing

Prove it?

And nope you can't base it on accounts, you need to base it on people that want housing and the current active playerbase.

[Themarvin]

Its kind hard to give an exact metric because we dont know exact player numbers, people who actually want a house, how many of those players are bots, still playing the game ect. But we can actually quantify how many houses exist in FF14.
Heres a rough estimate with some assumptions on my part:

-Five Housing Districts: Lavender, Goblet, Mist, Shirogane, Empyreum
-24 Wards per district
-60 houses per ward
-73 Servers across all data centers

60 x 24 = 1,440 Houses per Housing District
1,440 x 5 = 7,200 Houses per Server
7,200 x 73 = 525,600

Total population of the game is another grey area, websites online have estimates ranging from 25m to 38m, I don't think Square Enix ever publishes exact numbers of this figure, and again that number is heavily obscured by details I mentioned above.
Not only that but it doesn't account for server density, obviously housing scarcity is a larger issue on bigger servers. No brainer there. but here are your estimates with the numbers I've found.

525,600 Houses is approximately 1.38% of 38m.
525,600 Houses is approximately 2.1% of 25m.

However you'll notice we didn't even account for the fact this is all housing, not Indiviudal or FC. Considering Square Enix sees the current system needs 18 FC wards, 6 Individual buyer wards, those numbers are obviously way lower.
If you take the data directly like that, then the 95% I spitballed is actually an understatement.

Its hard to say if this counts or not because obviously not all of those players are active all the time, but then housing doesn't require you to really be active with it, you can just sorta, log in every now and then go in it then log out. Which I think a lot of people do. So I'm inclined to use the larger numbers instead of just currently active players.
Also doesn't account for assholes from the old system that own entire wards, which would only lower the % further. Point is theres a lot of wiggle room with these precentiles to go lower, and not a lot of argument for them to go higher other than bots/disinterested players.

Not really, you need to base it on people playing, alot of these accounts is inactive, and why is there only much less people playing per day than those numbers?

[Stormpeaks]

Not really, you need to base it on people playing, alot of these accounts is inactive, and why is there only much less people playing per day than those numbers?

Those are some absolutely borked numbers posted above yours, the daily player population is about 1 to 1.5m, 25 to 38m includes all inactives and even unsubscribed accounts.

If out of about 1.5m players, there are 525.6k houses, then 1/3 of the population has a house, which seem very fair to me.

[Jojoya]

The point of the matter is over half of the players who PAY RL money every month are not getting the same gaming experience as the others. Sorry I see it as SE stealing from all the players who want housing and to do the other activities you NEED a house for. I know the airship is basically useless now but that's just one more thing that was kept away from most players.

Not certain why you chose this thread to necro but we need a citation on your claim that half the active players are being denied part of the gaming experience. Try using some actual numbers to support your claim. Don't forget to cite your sources for the numbers.

Don't forget there are a large number of players that are perfectly happy without a house because they have no interest in housing, and that there are still hundreds of available plots in the personal worlds on the New worlds. If someone really wanted a house, they could get one on Dynamis and still play with their friends on other data centers.

I'm not trying the say the supply is where it needs to be overall. There's still room for improvement. But your claims that half the player base are being cut out are very much exaggerated. There aren't enough bids each lottery to support that and even some of those bids are from players trying to relocate their existing house..

Those are some absolutely borked numbers posted above yours, the daily player population is about 1 to 1.5m, 25 to 38m includes all inactives and even unsubscribed accounts.

If out of about 1.5m players, there are 525.6k houses, then 1/3 of the population has a house, which seem very fair to me.

Most of those numbers are also from over a year ago. We have another necromancer on our hands.

Things are better now since SE converted 12 of the original FC only wards to Personal/Unrestricted and added an additional 1500 plots for Personal/Unrestricted purchase per world. Still not good but definitely better.

[Themarvin]

Those are some absolutely borked numbers posted above yours, the daily player population is about 1 to 1.5m, 25 to 38m includes all inactives and even unsubscribed accounts.

If out of about 1.5m players, there are 525.6k houses, then 1/3 of the population has a house, which seem very fair to me.

Exactly and spot on, and the person who found out, does not know how to read the actual numbers, SE DO.

However your Data is old.

[ijuakos_xqwzts]

Prove it?

And nope you can't base it on accounts, you need to base it on people that want housing and the current active playerbase.

And it's kind of like how the government calculates unemployment: as soon as you give up, you don't count. Most people have likely already given up and resigned to their fate of never being able to procure a housing lot in this stupid system.

[Kenky]

There's a lot of ways to check statistics to get a (decently close) feel for the amount of players at present. But then you'd need to factor in certain criteria?

Want to cut out the bots bloating the numbers? Okay, add a caveat so that only characters who have completed an arbitrary quest or achieved something to count (some people I know track statistics entirely by who has the achievement for beating the Endsinger. No bot is going to do that)

Then you're left with another big number, that you'll need to divvy out by Server / Datacenter / Region / etc to get more decent numbers. But that's still missing a big thing. Not everyone WANTS a house, or cares for the system

So if you get, say for examples sake.. 100,000 people on Balmung that have cleared all your checks and show up on your spreadsheet. How many of those want houses? How many of them HAVE houses? You don't know if 2 characters are the same person, since XIV keeps track on the character, not the account. (This only excluded for housing, a la 1 personal, 1 fc rule) So you could have plenty of people who already have a house, yet want ANOTHER one on another character bloating the numbers. Then you have people who want a house, but have given up. Do they count? Should they be added to the pool?

Doing all that mathematics, crunching numbers and equations and two people will come up with WILDLY different numbers. There's no real way to dial in to a direct number, hence why people use words like "I suppose" or "It might be", to give them leeway.

All in all, "There's not enough housing to fit needs" is as loud as ever, yet there does not seem to be any real indication that things would change. That could be attributed to SE being SE, but it could also be people refusing what is already on the table (Apartments, as example!) or people feeling like they are 'entitled' to this system because they pay for a subscription.

There's a fair few people that have become either grossly entitled, or alarmingly vile to others for a simple disagreement or difference in view. If that keeps up, I wouldn't be surprised if SE continues to not do anything on the housing side, despite wanting more variety. (I'd love a Gyr Abania style housing district)

If people want change, they need to first show they are deserving of that change

[Ayan_Calvesse]

There's a lot of ways to check statistics to get a (decently close) feel for the amount of players at present. But then you'd need to factor in certain criteria?

Want to cut out the bots bloating the numbers? Okay, add a caveat so that only characters who have completed an arbitrary quest or achieved something to count (some people I know track statistics entirely by who has the achievement for beating the Endsinger. No bot is going to do that)

Then you're left with another big number, that you'll need to divvy out by Server / Datacenter / Region / etc to get more decent numbers. But that's still missing a big thing. Not everyone WANTS a house, or cares for the system

Doing all that mathematics, crunching numbers and equations and two people will come up with WILDLY different numbers. There's no real way to dial in to a direct number, hence why people use words like "I suppose" or "It might be", to give them leeway.

All in all, "There's not enough housing to fit needs" is as loud as ever, yet there does not seem to be any real indication that things would change. That could be attributed to SE being SE, but it could also be people refusing what is already on the table (Apartments, as example!) or people feeling like they are 'entitled' to this system because they pay for a subscription.

There's a fair few people that have become either grossly entitled, or alarmingly vile to others for a simple disagreement or difference in view. If that keeps up, I wouldn't be surprised if SE continues to not do anything on the housing side, despite wanting more variety. (I'd love a Gyr Abania style housing district)

If people want change, they need to first show they are deserving of that change

A solid post. As a resident of Crystal I can profess there has not been a single cycle where a new house has not hit the market. Until we hit a drought of housing - we cannot say there is no access to housing. Right now due to the nature of the lotto system I see getting a house a lot like getting the Starbird from (redacted). Except in this case each try involves waiting a week.

I still feel the lotto system was a mistake because it really requires near zero commitment to the task and so I've seen a lot of people say "I don't use a house but I might want one someday" so they tie up a limited resource. I also see a lot of people wanting a very particular plot - usually the S rank plots.
The gil requirement means nothing.

I also agree that a "requirement" should be in place that is not so low. At this time a person can buy a boost and be "housing ready" in under an hour. This makes housing alts a easy option.

[Shougun]

Due to the placard spam I strongly believe this system is better than before (with the restricted and unrestricted as well), but I think any 'small' house that hasn't had a lottery bind on it after the first time should be come open season. So at release of a new ward everyone can lottery, and if any house doesn't get bid on then it becomes open for anyone. Medium should be two times and large three times. Add boosting protection, as that's clearly a loophole lol.

Even though the lotto is also frustrating, but the placard spam was hilarious soul drain. This is a board smack in the face. Both suck, naturally, but one is clearly worse. That said lets get apartments upgraded mechanically, blend them into the housing system, and get everyone a house on their Island :3. Nothing will really ever solve it until they can figure out instanced housing. If we had ESO or something like system (BDO, Wildstar, whatever), we'd never had have all these issues for the years, and years, and years, we've had them. Literally years of issues with housing.