Scrolling through my last few blog posts from two years ago, it occurred to me that I never talked about finally and I mean F-FINALLY getting a house in FFXIV. It happened on April 2nd 2022 in fact. I still know this because the momentous occasion warranted a tweet and big exclamation marks.
Now if you are at all acquainted with FFXIV, you will have heard about its notoriously deplorable housing system. Plots are very limited and before 2022 players would have to cycle through endless tabs of different housing zones in the game’s capitals just to learn if a plot was actually vacant. That was the easy part because then you would have to go and camp that specific plot for hours clicking its placard, together with another 20+ people, hoping the house would be released within an unknown multi-hour window and praying you’d be the timely clicker when it happens. It was truly humiliating.
For this reason many players gave up on housing in FFXIV before a somewhat useful change was rolled out in Endwalker. Instead of camping a placard, you could now enter the ‘lottery’ for your elected plot for a fee and then get notified if you actually won. It’s not a fix of all of FFXIV’s housing problems by a long shot but it solved one of its most egregious aspects. And so it happened that I too won a house after a new housing zone was rolled out in Endwalker. Only took me 8 years to beat the final boss in FFXIV!
And yet, new problems arise once you have your own house. Among them is the requirement to log back in frequent intervals, lest your hard-won abode be demolished by the ingame timer and returned to the lottery pool. 45 days doesn’t sound like much when you’re subscribed and actively playing but it’s short when you’re on hiatus. There’s also no real taking a break from the game and un-subbing for the summer. And I get it, inactive players sitting on land is irksome but that is just another issue the game is creating for the community through artificial housing scarcity.
Nobody in their right mind is going to give up a housing plot they waited 8 years to acquire. You bet am gonna log in every 44 days just to make sure I don’t lose my virtual real estate, even if I loathe the system. That is, until I’m fully fed up and done with the game anyway – a day I feel is slowly but surely approaching!
Player housing upkeep is the real reason why I periodically login to LOTRO. Keeping the Kinship house and my own house going takes gold, and you have to login every so often and “feed the meter” to keep those houses there. So yeah, I feel your pain.
I used to do the same in LOTRO for about a year but I was a broke noob and at some point I couldn’t be arsed to play the game just to make money for upkeep. Alas! xD