Listen to the Rain

A while ago, I wrote about our attempt to get a house for our Free Company in Final Fantasy XIV. At that time, the system for getting housing was terrible and encouraged standing and clicking on an object for literal hours at a time, hoping you'd be the first person to get the "buy house?" dialogue. People literally made themselves sick doing it, or exacerbated their stress injuries. aaron.hosek to this day hates going to the housing areas because hearing the music brings back memories of clicking for 17 hours.

But! To their credit, they realized that the system was bad and in Endwalker they implemented a new system--a lottery. You buy a ticket and there's a drawing, and this also makes it easier for Free Companies to win the larger houses since each member can buy their own ticket. When they released housing in Ishgard, that's how we won a large that we turned into a haunted library. When they put in more houses a few months ago, sashagee and I both bid on mediums near each other in the Lavender Beds (the magical forest kingdom area), each with one other bid, and she won and I lost. I was pretty annoyed for a while and eventually got over it, but basically every cycle a new medium would come up for sale, I'd bid and lose, and that's the way it was. The last time, there were two mediums, one with 167 bids and one with 39. I bid on the one with 39 and when I saw that it was still unclaimed during the results period, I assumed it was like several other times and the real winner just hadn't logged on to claim it, so I was very surprised to click and see "The winning number is...40"!

I've already decorated the house, because I just mostly copied my old themes. I wrote about my old housing layout here, though that was before I did a major revamp, and the new house is basically the same. Since it's twice as big, I added a separate dining room with table and chairs, a small cloakroom in the front with a bench, a sitting area with books and drinks, an upstairs lounging area with triple triad board, expanded the library, added a washroom with flushable toilet, and put a meditation area in the bedroom. And after all that, I'm at 299/300 slots used for decorations, so I need them to add the new expanded housing slots so I can keep putting in more decor. If we get 100 more slots, I might even actually put in an upstairs as a trophy area--right now it's walled off.

I don't want a large because I don't like the layout, so unless another house opens in a location I like better, I've found my dream house (in a video game). The music is gentle, it overlooks a lake with giant trees, and glowing flowers wave softly in the breeze at night. Now to wait for the new slots that should come sometime in 2024.