Housing system is a joke

Linnaete

sus
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Dear folks who are in a FC with a nice house and folks who have your own personal houses: good for you. You got there fast enough and I hope you've made great use of the house, the Chocobo stable and the garden that comes with it.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, either as people who have been gradually saving up Gil bit by bit, or relatively new Free Companies like the forums' official in-game guild, servers such as Lamia currently have ZERO available housing plot available.

Ultimately it just shines light on how pathetically half-arsed they have implemented the housing system. Let's walk through the pros and cons, shall we?

PROS

+ You can decorate the house with all sorts of stuff you have picked up/bought/crafted. That's a plus...I guess.
+ Gardening can be lucrative and can ONLY be done with a house.
+ Chocobo stable to dye your bird and to train it to its highest rank.
+ Folks can get their own rooms in a Free Company house (a finite number of rooms and with a mandatory, steep 300,000 Gil asking price for some reason...) and feel right at home.
+ You have neighbours. It's not a wholly dead instanced area, because plenty of people do warp in to hang about outside their homes, or they converge by the marketboards.

CONS

- There is NOWHERE near enough houses to go around. Lamia is considered a mid-server in terms of population and we - as of typing - have no available housing plot, compared to a couple of weeks ago.
- There is nothing we can do about Free Company and personal houses owned by people who have been inactive for long periods. Basically, we are dealing with a lot of occupied properties where the lights are out and the tenants are nowhere to be seen. There is no way (perhaps understandably) we can evict them and use the land.
- Chocobo stables limited only to housing. There is no way for a person without a house to dye and train their bird, because apparently communal stables in places like Bentbranch Meadows in Central Shroud have not crossed the minds of any development team member.
- Prices can be ridiculous for a personal house. Good for people who know how to make millions of Gil a week, but not the vast majority of people who aren't as capitalist-savvy.
- Square-Enix are too reticent to say anything about the current housing situation. In fact, they seem to be exhibiting little to no interest in doing anything about it, so their non-answer may as well be interpreted as a "tough shit, pay money, uproot yourself and go to a small, dead server".
- Putting FC and private houses together, thus exacerbating the housing shortage even further.
- Having no ability for a Free Company or an individual to "upgrade" their houses in terms of size, so they resort to buying up another property. This brings me to:
- HOARDING HOUSES. There is no way to stop a Free Company from hoarding multiple houses, nor a way to prevent a handful of big-shot players from buying up entire hamlets for themselves. There's something obnoxiously arsehole-ish about this.
- I have felled demigods, dragons and the undead. And here I am a homeless, itinerant tosser whose only exposure to a bed is in an inn.

So why is Square so reticent about this and why are they doing so little to address this problem? Possible reasons:

1) Their housing team is busy on more important stuff.
2) Their servers cannot handle this.

Let's explore these two possible explanations:

1) Their housing team is busy on more important stuff.

Maybe everyone is on full gear for Heavensward, dedicating all that energy to where it matters: content. But I quickly rebuke and say that housing IS still content, even if it's a relatively small part of the game. You can't simply ignore it when there are people on multiple servers complaining about a feature that they cannot use and enjoy, because of an arbitrary limit.

And if the team is busy, perhaps they should have put more thought into the whole system WHEN they were free to work on it. Did NO ONE contemplate the problems I have outlined in the CONS list above? Did no one seriously raise the point that it would lead to certain people being able to buy up scores of houses early, thus depriving people later of the chance to get on the property ladder as well? Did no one in the development team consider separating FC and personal housing to help alleviate the inevitable issue? Does ANYONE at Square genuinely believe it is a viable solution to just pay real money to move to a quieter server (and to abandon everyone and everything in your old server)?

Half-arsed, that's all I can say about this. If they're too busy to address the supply side of the equation, then this whole housing system was half-arsed from the beginning, by a team that frankly doesn't care. I probably don't blame them too much either; the game is far bigger than housing.

2) The servers cannot handle this.

This is 2015. How would this be acceptable? What servers do they use? Potatoes? Why is this game so limited in terms of what can be achievable, such as the question of why inventory space cannot be expanded?

How can World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic manage to keep up with housing supply effortlessly and this game cannot? How are their servers not potatoes?

Are they not getting enough money to invest into upgrading server architecture from potato status? Even after all the steady monthly sub money coming in globally? Absolutely ridiculous.

So after all this, Square can only vaaaaaguely say something about the possibility of expanding existing housing areas sometime after the expansion arrives. Could be weeks. Could be months. An Ishgard housing area seems unlikely, given the lore behind it all, so I am not holding my breath for an entirely new housing area for the expansion either (especially when it would exclude newer players and players who haven't got the expansion). No serious answer to the supply issue - just the possibility of a few trickles more housing plots, maybe.

And here is another clincher:

Square-Enix are far more interested in the features aspect of housing, not the supply side of it, because I wager to them, it's all a triviality and not a priority in any way, I imagine. You want to craft an airship as a FC when Heavensward hits? You will need a house for it. Great if you have a house for it. Not if you don't. Thus they deprive plenty of people the chance to try out an expansion feature by depriving them of the chance to have a house in the first place. A downright debacle.
 
Couple of things:

1) HOARDING HOUSES. There is no way to stop a Free Company from hoarding multiple houses, nor a way to prevent a handful of big-shot players from buying up entire hamlets for themselves. There's something obnoxiously arsehole-ish about this.

A FC can only own 1 house, in order to by a second house you must relinqish the first, this goes for personal as well, an individual can only own 1 house (person being char, you could in theory have 8 alts with 8 houses). So while they /could/ share the gil around and have them buy houses it's not really something seen on any of the servers I've been on.

2) Their housing team is busy on more important stuff.

SE basically has 2 teams that does work, first team works on updating the current major release (2.0 aka A Realm Reborn) and updates to that system(s) and a second team that works on the next major release (3.0 aka Heavensward). What we know is that the amount of money they are holding back from this project is directly related to the fact that they lost a good amount of $$ they lost to the 1.0 project. ie, they are being cautious about spending the money or cheap depending on how you want to view it.

3) The servers cannot handle this.

The servers they are running on were purchased back in 2009/2010 for 1.0. Buying new hardware is not cheap, we are talking millions of dollars to do an upgrade, and again we go back to lost money from 1.0 as to why they are not doing it. We can also talk about how the Montreal DataCenter (Where the NA/EU servers live) but let's just say that wasn't the original plan either.

As for the game comparisons ... Blizzard has made so much money off of WoW they can (and have) replaced servers without even dipping into normal operating costs. SWTOR - They did not release housing till 3 years (and a major expansion) after the game was launched and they had a stable amount of money in hand ( from their paying customers and real money micro-transaction system) to pay for it. SE launched housing 1 year after 2.0. You can claim it was 3 years after 1.0 and a major expansion however 1.0 lost money, SE Quarterly financials from Sept. 2010 to Nov. 2012 (1.0 lifespan) it's spelled out.

While I 100% agree there are not enough houses and they need to resolve this issue. However new servers need to be purchased to support additional housing areas and/or better Coding/DB indexing needs to take place to further utilize existing hardware. I think in the long scale they will fix the housing issue, I think it's just going to be another sour spot for another 6-months/1 year, 3.0 right off the bat is not likely to get "new" housing, I think 3.1 / 3.2 time frame we will see it (probably when they buy the servers from the $$ they make from 3.0 expansion sales). I think they have plans in place, I really do, they know it's a sour spot and they have done (mostly) right by fixing the sour spots (again mostly).

I however disagree in that it's a debacle. I view it as another misstep and hesitation by a company that lost so much money in 1.0 that they are hesitant to spend money in 2.0 until it's been proven stable. (1.7 years I do not view as long enough after what happened with 1.0)

-just my 2 cents into the discussion...
 
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