FFXIV: Housing Lotto at its Worst
Posted on June 7, 2022 by Aywren
There is no doubt that of all the content in FFXIV, and as much as I love this game, the housing system has to be the most painful I’ve seen in any MMO. I’m not talking about the decorating (though that could use improvements too), but the scarcity of housing vs. the number of players who want and can afford a house.
It’s always been this ways since back when they made the choice that Free Companies and individuals had to share the same housing type. There was a time when Yoshi-P made it sound like they were considering two different systems, but it never came to pass. Now we have what we have.
When the devs first announced that they would be moving to a lotto system for housing acquisition, I was glad to hear that. Certainly, anything would be better than the random release and having to sit outside a house for hours clicking the placard and hoping you were the first to buy it.
Turns out, this might be even worse than the previous system
Not because it isn’t fair. It is. But the emotional fallout of hundreds of people losing after waiting for days for the lotto to finish is far, far more devastating than a few people camping a house and one person finally managing to get it at a random time.
Waiting is the Hardest Part
I feel like part of it is all the waiting that’s involved. So lottos open, and there’s a window of time in which people can put their bid for a house. Whether you put your bid at the beginning or the end, you still have to wait for the system to close bidding.
All that while, you check the placard and see the number of other bidders slowly creeping up, day by day. Some of the individual houses I’ve seen reported on Twitter have over 200 bids on them. This is absolutely crazy because you know only one player is going to walk away from that happy.
Then, after days of hoping you’re the number picked, you lose. Along with the 200+ other people.
They take to Twitter or Tumblr or whatever to voice their sorrow. I’ve seen what sounded like literal tears over this on social media. Because it’s all a big sounding board, the discontent of loss after loss gets magnified.
This is far, far worse a public reaction than the first-come-first-serve method. More people are attempting to get a house, and it’s completely fair. But so many more people are losing, and voicing their unhappiness each time.
It’s gotten far more competitive this time around, too. And part of that has to do with the breakup of housing lottos.
Free Company vs. Individual Housing
I was absolutely shocked when I realized that 18 of the 24 wards of EVERY city belong to Free Companies at this point. This has caused an overwhelming shortage of houses that individuals can even bid on.
I know the idea is that if a FC gets a house, more people overall get access to housing features. Maybe that works in Japan, but from what I’m seeing that’s not going over well here.
Add to it that during the time it took for them to fix the housing lotto from the first round, many folks spun up their own FC or bought a FC and had the leadership transferred to themselves. While it does now require you to be a member of a FC for 30 days before you can take leadership, the time it took for them to fix the issue was over 30 days. So, you can bet anyone looking to abuse that to get a FC just for housing already has.
While there are apartments for individuals – be real. It’s one room with heavy item limitations and low storage. You can’t fully garden or have a yard – not even a balcony, which could serve the purpose. It just doesn’t make up for the loss of a house.
Free Company and individual housing should have never been in competition with each other from the start. In a subscript-based game, to have something this large be locked away from so many people is a very bad look.
Hope Ahead?
If anything good comes out of all this, it’s that numbers and data speak for themselves. This is the first time that the player base and the devs have seen first hand just how much demand and how much scarcity there is for housing.
I’d argue that even if you feel like you don’t have a chance at a house to put in a bid. Because that’s one more number to add to the pile of data that I know the team has to be collecting about this situation. If anything will help turn this around, it’s the data the lottos are producing. Because in development, money talks and data gets responses.
While it still hasn’t been confirmed one way or another, I’m also holding out hope that the Island Sanctuary system will have some kind of instanced housing built in. I’ve heard other people speculating this, as well.
If this is the case, and the team knows that instanced housing for all individuals will be rolled out in time, it would make a lot more sense why they’re locking down so many wards to Free Companies. I just wish that they’d open up about it if that’s the direction they’re taking this.
I honestly don’t see any other way out of this mess aside from some kind of instanced housing system being added to the game. Adding more wards won’t help with the population we’ve got. Not when hundreds of people are bidding on one house.
Possibly upgrading the size and feature of apartments could help. But it would have to be a pretty tempting set of features for some folks to give up the yard and house status.
I’m not sure where this is all going, but I’m not looking forward to losing my bid again in two days and seeing the next round of sad faces. S/E needs to do something about this soon – either through announcing something new or reconsidering how all this is shaking out.