FFXIV: New Shirogane Neighbor
So with yesterday’s patch, FFXIV released the hold on housing, and let individual players purchase plots again. There’s lots of stories out on Reddit about the experience, many of them actually good this time around. Not everyone got exactly what they wanted, especially if they preferred a larger house, but a lot of people who didn’t have housing before do now. And that’s a win!
I moved my house to Shirogane not long ago, to a plot near the ocean and the marketboard. The front of my house faces inward towards the road, with the side to the ocean. This is fine, but that means my house is facing the plot across the street.
This plot has been open since I moved in, so I’ve gotten used to tromping over on the property there, especially running around on the temporary bamboo fence. My biggest concern was someone would move in across the way and flop out something ugly on the yard that I’d have to see.
I’ve been spending a lot of time at my house since I moved in. So have some of my friends. Amoon has joked about buying the plot, but seeing that the servers were going to come up at 2am his time, and he had work the next day, it didn’t look likely to happen.
Imagine my surprise when I logged in yesterday to check and see if I had a new neighbor.
I did. It was Amoon!
Later, he told us how though he didn’t actually plan on being there at server up, it just sorta happened. He struggled with the login issues I had when I tried to snag a house for our FC back when Shirogane launched… namely, login errors and the game taking forever to actually load in the world. That sort of stuff.
He said there was actually someone else standing at the placard when he loaded in, but that he managed to snag the plot mere seconds before they could.
Don’t feel too badly, though — there were still plots open on my server, even in Shirogane, when I went to look late last night. Probably more in the other housing areas. I’m sure that person got a home.
Another FC member, Locke, also moved into our neighborhood. He snagged one of the more central spots.
I know a number of other FC folks also got their first house yesterday. It’s neat to see all these people getting their own places!
The best part is that I still have permission to dance on the fence across the street…
Well, that is, until I helped Amoon build a real fence for him to place around his plot.
All in all, it’s still not a perfect housing system. It’s much improved. Adding a bunch of new plots and limiting the number of individual plots people can purchase to just one per person per server has gone a long way to increase availability. Sure, there are some people abusing the FC housing… but on the most part, at least on Midgardsormr, things are looking better.
Funny enough, Midgardsormr is back to being a preferred server. And Balmung got locked down for new characters again after being open for just a few hours. That doesn’t surprise me. XD