Final Fantasy XIV housing crisis

By Amy McCrindle

“It feels as if the developers are just slapping tape onto something that’s fundamentally broken”

In massively multiplayer online games(MMOs), player attainable housing is an important feature. Buying a property with your hard earned in-game currency and expressing yourself through the house’s decoration has created entire sub-cultures within communities. For most MMOs, buying a house is an easy task that only really requires you to have enough coins. This isn’t the case for Final Fantasy XIV.

In a strange case of art imitating life, the virtual world of Hydaelyn is facing a housing crisis. The issue of housing has haunted FFXIV since the feature’s implementation in 2013. Originally, houses could only be bought by a Free Companies – a group of players that can range from 10 to 500 members who have come together under one banner.

After much bleating from the player base, private housing for singular buyers became available a year later. This is when the cracks began to show. When buying a property at this time in Final Fantasy XIV, a player would have to click on a placard next to an empty plot to purchase the land. The option to pay for the house only became available after the timer hit zero.

Players would gather in their hundreds in front of a ticking placard and spam right-click in the futile attempt to be the lucky first person to have their payment go through. It was common for those lucky people to then set up a system not too dissimilar to a black market, auctioning their properties off online for real money.

In response, the developers made the well intentioned, but ultimately disastrous decision, to hide the placard timer. Impatient players who didn’t want to spend up to 24 hours clicking on a single spot in the hope of obtaining a plot of land began scripting bots. The bot program would run in the background of the game, doing the clicking for them as they went about their day. Usually, the botting player would win.

The bot problem plagued the game for years until the implementation of new housing wards in the city of Ishgard and the current lottery system.

Despite some hiccups, the lottery system has worked in creating a fairer system. However, it didn’t solve the housing crisis.

Legacy player Eri Sakura, who’s been a subscriber to the game since 2011, has an in-game business where other players commission her with in-game currency to decorate their homes. Eri has seen every update to the housing system, and despite how long she has been playing, doesn’t actually have any property of her own.

Sakura said: “I think the lottery is the best update to the housing system that the game’s seen…but that doesn’t mean that I think it’s good. It feels as if the developers are just slapping tape onto something that’s fundamentally broken in the hopes that it will hold it together for a little while longer.”

Eri agrees that the lottery system has, for the most part, ended the botting problem, but believes that it’s led to an increase in toxicity from players in the game.

Sakura said: “The last lottery round, I went to throw my hat into the ring for a private medium plot in Ishgard. When I got there, a group of around fifteen people from a single Free Company were standing beside the placard. They started to harass me and threatened to mass report me if I entered the lottery for that plot. They wanted to create an entire neighbourhood for themselves and were chasing away anyone that wasn’t a part of their group.

“I knew that if I did enter and I did somehow win the plot, the members of the group who won neighbouring houses would never leave me alone. So, I left without putting a bid in. When I went back the next week during the results period, members of that Free Company owned a majority of the thirty properties in that one ward. It was incredibly frustrating.”

In terms of what the developers could do to solve the housing issue, Eri believes that they can take notes from other MMOs like World of Warcraft.

Sakura said: “I think that there should be mandatory player housing on top of purchasable properties. It doesn’t have to be anything huge or extravagant. I mean, if they can give everyone their own private island then I think a little cottage or apartment in Mor Dhona wouldn’t be too much of a stretch.”