You won't BELIEVE who's buying all the FC plots!

[Shnrnr]

OK, you totally will, but now you've got the receipts. TL;DR: FC housing belongs to alts.

With WoW throwing down the housing gauntlet, I thought this might be a good time to throw some statistical shade toward our beloved FFXIV housing market, a.k.a Housing: PVP. This post isn't intended as a complaint, or to shame the players who own dozens (hundreds?) of FC plots (there are plenty of other threads for that). I just wanted to quantify the results of a game system that a) limits a much-coveted resource, b) enforces very few restrictions on acquiring said resource, and then c) actively incentivizes players (by way of mountains of gil from subs) to acquire and hoard said resource.

So I did what any normal human being with a totally healthy relationship to a video game would do: I scraped the public Lodestone profiles of about 50k FCs and their owners across multiple data centers. Let's dig in!

Case Study #1: Mateus (skip down to case study #2 for the truly...interesting...numbers)

I wanted to see what the FC housing ownership data looks like on a "normal" server. Mateus was around before subs were introduced, so the housing was long gone before the sub lords started shopping around. First, let's look at the FC ranks:



So far, so normal: a bit of a spike at level 6, the required level to purchase an FC plot, and then a steady march to level 30. Now for the number of members:



Still about what you would expect: Mateus has a healthy number of well-populated FCs. Never mind that almost a quarter wouldn't have enough members (4) to qualify to purchase a house if they didn't already have one. And only about 5% of the FC houses on Mateus (182 houses total) are owned by a solo FC! Now let's look at the most interesting stats, for the FC owner's highest combat class:



93% of the FC houses on Mateus are owned by an owner between level 51-100. Those players are clearly enjoying the game and leveling up! But check out that spike at the bottom end of the graph. That's the 4% of FC houses on Mateus with an owner whose level is 1-15. That's right: the next time you're in a bidding war for an FC plot on Mateus, remember that 120+ houses on Mateus are owned by characters who haven't made it out of their starting cities.

So there are a few eyebrow-raising numbers on Mateus, a standard legacy world. Read on for Case Study #2: Materia.

[Shnrnr]

Materia opened in 2022, several years after FC sub lords had started hoovering up gil and FC housing plots. Today, 3 years after its introduction, the only FC houses left on the entire Materia DC are a handful of plots on one world (Sephirot) in Shirogane and Empyreum. But hey, it's a big ask to play the game past ARR, so that makes sense!

Once again, let's check out the ranks of plot-owning FCs:



Materia's rank chart is almost a mirror image of Mateus; the vast majority of home-owning FCs on Materia are level 6. That's curious, because any number of FC members actively playing the game will level up an FC in fairly short order. But hey, Materia is dead, so maybe it's just harder to rank up an FC? Interesting theory, and of course it would be harder to level a small FC:



Well, there you go - 20% of FC houses on Materia are owned by a solo FC, so naturally it would be tough to level up! Never mind that it takes a matter of minutes to get a solo FC to rank 6 - nothing to see here.

And now we get to the fun part, the FC owner rank:



...where we see that 60% of the FC houses (8300 houses) are owned by "baby alts", level 15 and under. But hey, why would they ever want to leave their starting city when (*checks*) almost 300 of them already own a mansion! It's also worth noting that 6 housing wards on Materia are still locked...but those 1800 unavailable (360 houses * 5 worlds) houses are a drop in the bucket compared to the numbers we just looked at.

I hope you have enjoyed this little stroll into FFXIV's FC housing stats. And please try to forget you saw this post the next time you're in a bidding war for a Goblet small - I'm sure only a few of the bidders own dozens of other houses for their level 3 alts.

[SophiaDL]

This is all great tbh, but what exactly are we supposed to get from this that we didnt already know ?

Populated servers barely have any multiowners, which is a known fact, they make for a very tiny percentage, and dead servers (on Materia in this case but this also goes for Dynamis) are filled with shell FC's because no one (or barely anyone) wants to make a real FC there as it's a complete graveyard

I respect the time taken to do all this I really do, but I'm really unsure as to what point you are trying to make

[Shnrnr]

This wasn't intended to be news; it's the result of following my nose into data I thought was interesting, and of trying to quantify "exactly how bad is it?". It was partially inspired by a recent post about the disappearance of FC housing on Materia, which *was* news to me. I've heard a number of folks arguing that it's fine for all the FC housing to be bought up for subs because there are so many houses still available...which I guess is true until an entire DC fills up. Or that people are only buying small houses for sub shacks, which is also not true.

[MakoEyes]

Only a matter of time until the other two flappers let loose their gums in here.

[Solowing]

Only a matter of time until the other two flappers let loose their gums in here.

Seems like the first one beat us here

Nah not sure what this data means, I'm waiting for more layman's terms

[Rinoa_353]

Only a matter of time until the other two flappers let loose their gums in here.

Waaaa waaaaa waaaaaaa, that's all you do lol.

[Shnrnr]

If anyone is curious about the situation on Dynamis, here's the data on the worlds where the all the FC housing has been bought up (Rafflesia, Seraph, & Hali):





I am also holding out a hope that SE might actually look at the forums (or even their own housing data...). This turns vague complaints about "tons of sub shacks" into "anywhere between 40-60% of all the FC plots on newer worlds". Across all the worlds, that adds up to tens of thousands of plots that could be available to FCs with characters that are actually playing the game.