The solution is honestly not as complicated as some think it is

[DamianFatale]

I keep seeing people argue about housing, and want it one way or another without thing about others and what they want...
We have to accept that we cant have everything we want, and some things have to be changed or sacrificed to get another.
Full on instanced housing is not going to happen, but this would be a decent compromise.

-Leave neighborhood housing the way it is right now.
-add medium and large apartments to the apartment housing*
-Limit house ownership to 1 house per FC/account per Data Center (one account can own a house as an FC leader, and a house as personal)**
-add a small 2x2 inside gardening housing item. (if that can even be done)
-add choices to the layout of the house, nothing crazy, just a "mirror" option (so small house with stairs on left side)
-Allow FCs to choose where to place the door for members rooms


*Note on apartments:
Small: same as it is now
Medium: same as a small house
Large: two floors equal to a large house (instead of a med house's three floors)


**Note on ownership changes:
When changes are made, send out emails to all effected accounts, that they must reply with what house they want to keep with location/server. All other houses will be demolished, released and owners will be refunded 80% of the value to the characters connected to them.

These are all great ideas. I would also continue to add new residential districts, and of course add instanced housing to the Island Sanctuary. This would alleviate all problems. This way everyone has the chance to earn a house, but also get a house in a ward, as well as your ideas which would make apartments even more useful.

[Khryseis_Astra]

The point is that, this constant hunt to try and take stuff away from people because some people think they are owed a house, simply because they play the game, and that it's their "right" to have one, is getting ridiculous.

You know from my other posts that I’m all about adding more features so everyone can participate in housing, and not part of any campaign to take anything away from anyone.

But this statement above… why wouldn’t paying subscribers expect to participate in a game feature? Maybe I’m not fully understanding your meaning here… but yes I think every player should have access to a house. That’s an entirely reasonable expectation. But do you get how it sounds to say “some people think they’re owed a house” referring to people who can’t get one, while defending those who have multiple of a scarce in-game resource?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still about trying to solve the actual problem: scarcity. Because you’re right, even if all the multi-owners were stripped down to 1 personal/1 FC tomorrow, it isn’t going to fix the overall problem. But statements like that are just fuel for the fire of all those who are understandably upset at not being able to get one house while someone else has like 5. A little empathy goes a long way.

[Stormpeaks]

You know from my other posts that I’m all about adding more features so everyone can participate in housing, and not part of any campaign to take anything away from anyone.

But this statement above… why wouldn’t paying subscribers expect to participate in a game feature? Maybe I’m not fully understanding your meaning here… but yes I think every player should have access to a house. That’s an entirely reasonable expectation. But do you get how it sounds to say “some people think they’re owed a house” referring to people who can’t get one, while defending those who have multiple of a scarce in-game resource?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still about trying to solve the actual problem: scarcity. Because you’re right, even if all the multi-owners were stripped down to 1 personal/1 FC tomorrow, it isn’t going to fix the overall problem. But statements like that are just fuel for the fire of all those who are understandably upset at not being able to get one house while someone else has like 5. A little empathy goes a long way.

Entitlement is the worst thing there is, and the ones saying that they should remove all the houses from multiowners are entitled, they think they deserve it more than the multiowner that has worked on getting those houses for god knows how many months or years, but no, dont deserve it anymore than the multiowner.

I have said it a million times, on EU, there is more than enough housing, and as for NA, if you really want housing that bad, Dynamis exists, that's what I did on my NA character, I moved from Aether to Dynamis, and got a house in the first round in Shirogane.

They can expect a house, yes, but it doesnt say anywhere that they should expect a house on the biggest world in the game, obviously there will be scarcity as its limited.

[True-to-Caesar]

Entitlement is the worst thing there is, and the ones saying that they should remove all the houses from multiowners are entitled, they think they deserve it more than the multiowner that has worked on getting those houses for god knows how many months or years, but no, dont deserve it anymore than the multiowner.

I have said it a million times, on EU, there is more than enough housing, and as for NA, if you really want housing that bad, Dynamis exists, that's what I did on my NA character, I moved from Aether to Dynamis, and got a house in the first round in Shirogane.

They can expect a house, yes, but it doesnt say anywhere that they should expect a house on the biggest world in the game, obviously there will be scarcity as its limited.

Yea… ward owners are totally fine yup.
Said nobody ever except the owners themselves.

1 personal and 1 FC is fair, beyond that it’s just nonsense as long as the resource is limited.

Doesn’t matter in the end, just need a better game with actual proper housing (bonus if it’s not tied to a sub). Then poof, gone are those people you disagree with because they dare want 1 good house, I’m not sure SE would appreciate but judging how they treat the matter it’ll be way to late when they do anything at all.

[DeNada]

If houses are in great supply eg. Materia, you can be a multi-owner as much as you want and I doubt anyone would care. It's only when supply is greatly diminished when it impacts the experience of non-owners trying to get a plot but is prevented from doing so due to the presence of multi-owners artificially restricting such supply such as on Balmung to give an example.

This is akin to corporations buying up residential housing in cities IRL where housing are already in scarce supply and actual people looking for a house aren't able to get one due to being priced out of the market. No doubt this is not a one to one comparison since this is a video game and not real life but you can somewhat draw the comparison.

The solution is to either greatly increase supply, revamp the entire system or clamp down on multi-owning practices which to be fair, is SE's responsibility. Meanwhile, the rest of us can put up suggestions in the official forums for SE to consider since this is our only outlet and griping elsewhere would be pointless as SE does not even look at other sources from what I've been told.

[Stormpeaks]

If houses are in great supply eg. Materia, you can be a multi-owner as much as you want and I doubt anyone would care. It's only when supply is greatly diminished when it impacts the experience of non-owners trying to get a plot but is prevented from doing so due to the presence of multi-owners artificially restricting such supply such as on Balmung to give an example.

This is akin to corporations buying up residential housing in cities IRL where housing are already in scarce supply and actual people looking for a house aren't able to get one due to being priced out of the market. No doubt this is not a one to one comparison since this is a video game and not real life but you can somewhat draw the comparison.

The solution is to either greatly increase supply, revamp the entire system or clamp down on multi-owning practices which to be fair, is SE's responsibility. Meanwhile, the rest of us can put up suggestions in the official forums for SE to consider since this is our only outlet and griping elsewhere would be pointless as SE does not even look at other sources from what I've been told.

I mean I could be wrong on this, feel free to correct me, but I have very high doubts that there are THAT many multiowners on Balmung, let alone with entire wards

[Sindele]

None really worth speaking of, to my knowledge. It's also worth noting that the first point is a bit specious, too: there are multiple cases of wards being bought when houses were largely devalued and left unfilled on a given server and then the owners being buried in harassment when the server later inevitably starts to fill up. I'm not going to say it necessarily applies to every poster and every point, or even *most*, but there's definitely a streak of purely self-interested entitlement that crops up on this forum from time to time - you see it with the posts like 'remove all FC housing'.

[Nepentha]

None really worth speaking of, to my knowledge. It's also worth noting that the first point is a bit specious, too: there are multiple cases of wards being bought when houses were largely devalued and left unfilled on a given server and then the owners being buried in harassment when the server later inevitably starts to fill up. I'm not going to say it necessarily applies to every poster and every point, or even *most*, but there's definitely a streak of purely self-interested entitlement that crops up on this forum from time to time - you see it with the posts like 'remove all FC housing'.

Yep. I'm seeing in on Dynamis now. My friends and I are having a blast there, we like small servers. Hell might even make this my permanent home. But it's also deader than a doornail. Lots of housing around. (Especially in Goblet, which is where our house is.) Slowly there's some clear sub shack folks buying up housing for the workshop.

I can already hear the screaming about it in... oh, a year or two. When servers fill up finally, and housing goes back to being scarce and suddenly these people buying houses on a dead server will be getting lambasted for their greed and temerity.

[Themarvin]

I keep seeing people argue about housing, and want it one way or another without thing about others and what they want...
We have to accept that we cant have everything we want, and some things have to be changed or sacrificed to get another.
Full on instanced housing is not going to happen, but this would be a decent compromise.

-Leave neighborhood housing the way it is right now.
-add medium and large apartments to the apartment housing*
-Limit house ownership to 1 house per FC/account per Data Center (one account can own a house as an FC leader, and a house as personal)**
-add a small 2x2 inside gardening housing item. (if that can even be done)
-add choices to the layout of the house, nothing crazy, just a "mirror" option (so small house with stairs on left side)
-Allow FCs to choose where to place the door for members rooms


*Note on apartments:
Small: same as it is now
Medium: same as a small house
Large: two floors equal to a large house (instead of a med house's three floors)


**Note on ownership changes:
When changes are made, send out emails to all effected accounts, that they must reply with what house they want to keep with location/server. All other houses will be demolished, released and owners will be refunded 80% of the value to the characters connected to them.

It is on SE's end, most people do not understand the complex ways servers and more are run for this, it is too easy to say the solution is easy, because the work in need to be put behind, other than the basics of course... you can limit ownership as well as remove grandfathering and more to it, anything else like making bigger/smaller and so on and so forth is a complicated proces... and it is not like running a server in ones moms basement kind easy at all.

[UkcsAlias]

most people do not understand the complex ways servers and more are run for this, it is too easy to say the solution is easy, because the work in need to be put behind, other than the basics of course...

Thats because if it was designed in a better way, this actualy would have been easy since its a matter of scaling things. Only when things scale up to a diffirent magnitude it becomes difficult as that requires a design change and further optimizations.

A house isnt that diffirent to a dungeon to a client, as both are just an instance. The random objects for the house arent too diffirent from the inventories of other players in regards to data that needs to be loaded, as both are still quite plain a list of items with some position values (or for items stack size and probably inventory slot). So on that part, the struggle shouldnt be too hard.

But because this was coded a long time ago without an intention of scaling it up further, it has a very poor base design that complicates everything. And this was already a result of a complete rework. But the issue here is, for a game that is this old, the base game actualy has very poor code as it never was made to scale. They most likely never expected this popularity and just wanted dirty fixes everywhere. Which now backfire as you cant easily change these things anymore.

But investing time in those things (which again is an easy statement to make) is the only way to truly fix these things. But that will go with some heavy bugs which i think they currently just dont want to happen. Bugs can turn people away. Housing is still secondary to the main game, and yet fixes here will guaranteed cause bugs in MSQ etc.

So this makes the only solution a very slow one, improving steps 1 by 1. Which sadly avoids the major reworks as this cannot be performed at such pace.

Managing a game and keeping it profitable isnt easy. There is a reason why devs like EA and activision ditch games quickly and make a new game, its simply easier to do, yet for an MMO simply not done.