New Housing Scam: Beware.

[Nepentha]

Presently there's an aggressive campaign advertising a house selling discord in both Party Finder and shout chat in major cities. (At least on Balmung on Crystal DC.)

It is a scam. If you join the discord, there is no channel you can talk on. Just a very opaque ticket system. They will ask you for a down payment. Once they have it, they will boot you from the server. You will not get a house. You just give away millions of gil to a scammer.

SE is about to get inundated with tickets and complaints about this latest scam. They could possibly save a lot of players this heartache if they just gave housing to everyone.

If you see it in PF, report it. If you see it in shout chat, report it. Tell your friends and family not to fall for it.

Edit: They are paying people 100k to advertise. Warn folks you see shouting it that it's a scam. Then report.

[Arrhin]

Full disclosure: I have a house, have had one since housing was released.

By the f@cking Twelve. Yoshi el al need to get on this housing BS and stop screwing around. It's been literal years, and we all said that Wards were gonna be a problem FROM DAY ONE. Instanced housing needs to be implemented asap, and Daddy Yoshi needs to be made aware that XIV as he imagines it does not exist, the dream has died. I mean on a more positive note now that the scammers are onboard taking advantage of the desperate house seekers, SE may be forced to come up with something effective. On the other hand they have a pretty bad track record with scammers too.. Sweet Twelve the dream IS dead.. /pdead

[Sweeeet]

I completely agree that more housing is needed. I love the fact that housing isn’t individually instanced (wards are, houses aren’t). I played ESO for a hot minute while waiting for 6.2 and the instanced housing is lonely and pathetic. However, there is just no reason for SE to not create more wards in each district. These are imaged on virtual servers and implementing more wards isn’t a a daunting task and could be done rather easily. Does it take more server space? Yes! BUT they have far more subs now than they did 3 years ago and what have we gotten since then? Same amount of wards as all others for the release of Empyrium and people are still fighting to get a house. It just simply doesn’t make sense. I’ve not even heard them hint at expanding wards… radio silence. As history dictates, even if they mentioned tomorrow a planned expansion of wards… we’d still be looking at a 2+ year wait.
Let people buy a house! For the love of The Twelve, please??

[worldofneil]

However, there is just no reason for SE to not create more wards in each district. These are imaged on virtual servers and implementing more wards isn’t a a daunting task and could be done rather easily.

I agree that adding more wards would be ideal, but unfortunately it's not as easy as you're suggesting. Each ward is a zone that is active and running all the time* and on any one server that means there are always 240 housing zones running, which is considerably more all the other zones combined.

Even though the wards are all 5 basic designs, they're all different because of customisation of houses and gardens so although they might look the same, from a technical viewpoint they're all separate.

We're up to 77 worlds now so that's 18,480 zones that are running all the time, just for housing. Even if they just added 6 more wards (12 with subdivisions) that's 60 more zones to run per server and 4,620 more zones over all the worlds.

Now I don't know how many wards they can run per server, but they've said in the past about optimising the servers to fit more wards on so clearly they're at the current capacity or close to it. Could they put in more hardware? Probably. Do they want to? Probably not. It's not just the initial cost of the hardware/installation, but ongoing cost of maintaining and even things like electricity usage will factor in.

Unfortunately the reality is that they'll drip feed in extra wards over a period of years because they know that whatever they put in will never be enough, but that they still have to make some effort.

*Even if they shut the zones down when not in use, there's likely at least some people going in and out of them regularly that the performance hit for continually starting up/shutting down is worse than just leaving it running,

[Shibi]

,,,I’ve not even heard them hint at expanding wards… radio silence. As history dictates, even if they mentioned tomorrow a planned expansion of wards… we’d still be looking at a 2+ year wait.
Let people buy a house! For the love of The Twelve, please??

As much as most of us (except Marvin) would love SE to add more houses, or do something smart like adding instancing, or even letting people rez furniture on their island, it's not going to happen any time soon.

So, until then, the next best chance of a house is in a few months for NA players will be when the new servers are added. And unlike Materia, you have DC travel, so you won't have to deal with a glut of sub-70,000g onions.

[Alycen]

As much as most of us (except Marvin) would love SE to add more houses, or do something smart like adding instancing, or even letting people rez furniture on their island, it's not going to happen any time soon.

So, until then, the next best chance of a house is in a few months for NA players will be when the new servers are added. And unlike Materia, you have DC travel, so you won't have to deal with a glut of sub-70,000g onions.

New servers is not the solution, please stop suggesting it. Nobody should be expected to transfer servers for this.

[Shibi]

New servers is not the solution, please stop suggesting it. Nobody should be expected to transfer servers for this.

I will BOTH keep suggesting it, and I will keep lobbying SE to improve the absolute crazy stupid system they created because I am pragmatic and realistic.

We *can* push SE to better the situation and at the very same time prove it's needed by filling up those new servers.

Oh look, SE say - in your case - the new servers are empty, we don't need to do a thing.
Oh look, SE say - in my case - the new servers are also full, hmm, maybe our vision of housing isn't so great after all.

Which is better? Your way or my way?

[Alycen]

I will BOTH keep suggesting it, and I will keep lobbying SE to improve the absolute crazy stupid system they created because I am pragmatic and realistic.

We *can* push SE to better the situation and at the very same time prove it's needed by filling up those new servers.

Oh look, SE say - in your case - the new servers are empty, we don't need to do a thing.
Oh look, SE say - in my case - the new servers are also full, hmm, maybe our vision of housing isn't so great after all.

Which is better? Your way or my way?

It is incredibly demoralising to see people who come here to make a suggestion and constantly being shut down every time with "Oh look, the solution is out there, transfer servers!".

If new servers are indeed the solution SE intends as the way to fix the housing scarcity, then we should be making it loud and clear that it isn't acceptable.
The two are not mutually exclusive, I agree, but constantly shutting down people's entirely reasonable discussions with "Just wait for/go to the new servers" is only wearing down the voice pushing for this change, not SE to actually implement said change.

Lastly, do remember that this isn't a competition, we are on the same team.

[Oizen]

Square Enix could quite literally kill the entire housing RMT market with one change yet they're like "nah this is good for the game"

[Pablomaldito]

If you really want to have a house on a time scale that isn't measured in years, then doing so on a new server (whether by transferring or leveling an alt) is the only viable choice in the current system - and it looks like the current system is all we're getting in the foreseeable future.

You can go back over half a decade on these forums, and you'll find the same conversations we're having now. People have been talking about fixing the housing shortage for years. More wards, instanced housing... none of those ideas are new. In the face of SE's absolute unwillingness to provide enough houses for the players, the advice to get a house on a new server is really the only viable solution if you want a guaranteed house while you're still not sick of the game.

Hoping that SE will actually fix the shortage is best addressed with one of my favorite quotes from the movie Bad Santa
"Wish in one hand and s**t in the other one. See which one fills up first."