The current housing system is not okay.

[katthekat]

There's a lot of threads upset with the housing system, but I think people have been overlooking the main issue with housing being finite and limited as it is currently.
Housing is a form of content. People spend their time decorating houses. There are many crafting recipes exclusively for housing items, some of which are only usable outdoors, which means you need a house to actually use them. Crossbreeding in gardening, something locked behind housing, is the only way to get certain crafting materials as well as the one way to get a Chocobo past level 10. The only other way to get this is if you buy one off the Market Board from someone who had one.
Apartments exist, but they offer only a small portion of the full experience of housing. You do not have full customization of the room's appearance, you have a smaller item limit, you can't share your apartment (and by extension, placed food items) with anybody, you can't decorate outdoors or use outdoor furniture items, you can't crossbreed plants. You can decorate for other people, but this very rarely gives you full creative freedom or constant access to the ability to decorate. Apartments are NOT the full housing experience, and we should not treat them like they are.

Imagine for a second that you wanted to do a dungeon, but even if you met the requirements for it, you had to participate in an opt-in drawing for the chance to even try the dungeon. As long as you met the base requirements, regardless of whether you'd even try the dungeon, you could be entered into the drawing. At the end of the week, you're told "Whoops! Guess you can't try this content yet. Better luck next time!" There's a limited number of slots for this dungeon and once they're gone, they're gone. You can subscribe for months and still not get into this content.
Sounds awful, right? In any other situation, in any other piece of content, nobody would take this, but in housing, it's acceptable because housing is "prestige". This is bad game design. This will be a quit point for players.
I don't have a solution. Adding more houses means they'll run out again, and people have cried out against even the thought of adding instanced housing alongside the current ward system for people who just want to be able to experience having a house. So I'm at a loss here. I'm just tired, upset, and ready to quit because not everyone can access content that is advertised and should be part of your sub.

[CammyBear]

I have two months left, so I'm trying to be patient and take a wait-and-see approach, but I am starting to feel a bit of buyer's remorse. I don't do high-end raiding. I play this game for other reasons. Housing is one of them.

I'm holding onto hope that maybe something promising will be revealed in the next Live Letter, but I might end up just taking a break at the very least.

If I wanted to play as a homeless hero, I could just go back to World of Warcraft. I worked hard for my gil, and met all the requirements to try for a house. It doesn't really motivate me to bother with the way things are going now. Sure, there is a lottery system, but even that only works (to a certain extent) so long as there are houses to bid on. What happens when all the plots are taken, and not via relocation? If we don't have auto-demolition enabled, doesn't that mean there is a possibility of nothing being available to bid on at all?

I don't accept apartments as an OK alternative. (I already have a private quarters in my FC anyway, by the way). It is a temporary measure at best, but that's a purgatory I don't wanna be stuck in for an extended period of time just because the devs refuse to do more than a band-aid fix (This is a handful of assumptions, but until we receive official word to help alleviate concerns and clear things up, this is the best I have to work with).

Please don't ignore our plight, Square.

Thank you.

[TwistedTea]

...In any other situation, in any other piece of content, nobody would take this, but in housing, it's acceptable because housing is "prestige". This is bad game design...

I've never observed SE advertising ward housing as 'prestige'. All of SE's actions over the years, have been to try and make access to ward housing more accessible to the majority of players.

However, the nature of limited ward housing and the server resources it requires - means there can never be enough ward houses for every single player.

SE for their own reasons has buried their heads in the sand when it comes to implementing solutions like fully instanced housing.

It's some players who attach 'prestige'.

Personally, I do not see what 'prestige/flex' value is there in an item obtained through luck and for some in the past, through botting.

[katthekat]

It's some players who attach 'prestige'.

I do feel like I misstated that a bit; it is absolutely players who attach the 'prestige' label to housing. However, this is often a reason I hear in favor of keeping housing as-is, so I included it.

I'm aware SE has their own reasons for refusing to change the current housing system or make a new one that would be more accessible to all players. However, with the scale that the game has grown to recently, I don't think there's a way that they'll be able to provide enough housing for everyone in the current system. They added a lot of houses with Empyreum, and while not all of them are released to private buyers yet, when (or if) they are, all of those houses will eventually be bought up and we will be right back where we started, waiting for another housing district to open up so that more houses will be available. By the time another opens, unless something catastrophic happens to damage the player base, there will probably be even more buyers aiming for a house. We are stuck in this loop, and unless they change the system at its foundation or miraculously get the elusive server resources required to supply a truly massive amount of houses in the current system, we will not be getting out of it.

And this doesn't even account for house sizes, as it seems a good portion of players want a medium house rather than a small. If wards are kept as-is and a massive amount of housing was added, we may reach a point where there are vacant small homes, but players are still unhappy because they want a larger sized house. These players have a right to want this and should be able to get it if they have the gil, but the current system doesn't allow it.

[AriaHorizon]

Personally, I just want to have a personal outdoor space to chill/practice my rotations so a small house would be enough for me, but the chances of me getting one is decreasing drastically as time passes - Went from 1/3 chance to 1/6+, 1/10+ and now 1/30+.

It's honestly depressing. There are so many nice outdoor furniture that I can't use now (I already have an apartment). I also hate going to random people's house to use a practice dummy and it was so awkward when the owner came back (thankfully we have explorer mode now but that just feels so unnatural).

I hope Island Sanctuary can fulfil my needs.....

[YukikoKurosawa]

BUT MUH HECKIN' NEIGHBORHOODERINOS (that are empty)

BUT MUH IMMERSION

BUT MUH PRESTIGE HOUSING CONTENT

Or whatever other non-argument against instanced housing.

[Kytrin]

BUT MUH HECKIN' NEIGHBORHOODERINOS (that are empty)

BUT MUH IMMERSION

BUT MUH PRESTIGE HOUSING CONTENT

Or whatever other non-argument against instanced housing.

Lol yeah I don't get those arguments either. My neighborhood is a ghost town, I can handle my own immersion just fine thank you, and I would much rather my friends able to get a house too so we can all have nicely decorated places that are FAR more immersive than a ward.