Listen to the Rain

My free company in Final Fantasy XIV bought a house!


If you're familiar with FFXIV, you know that housing is a problem in the game. Much like the real world, there's a limited supply, most people who want a place to live have to resort to short-term accommodation or small apartments, and the market is primarily controlled by jerks with too much money. Everything that Squeenix does to improve the situation also makes it worse--they prevented single accounts from buying a ton of houses (while letting those who had bought a bunch of houses keep them), they implemented a random timer on sales after a housing plot is relinquished to prevent private sales (meaning people have to stand outside and repeatedly click the housing plot for hours in the hope of getting something), and they allow people who already own a home to bypass that timer (meaning someone can stroll up and take the plot at any time). Housing is terrible, it's always been terrible, they know it's terrible, and yet nothing changes.

Yesterday was the release of patch 5.35, which brought in a bunch of stuff but mostly the addition of extra housing wards, each containing a couple dozen houses. Almost 750 houses in all, and by the time I woke up at 6:30 a.m., an hour and a half after the patch, all of them were gone. sashagee, aaron.hosek, and one of our other free company members sat for hours clicking on placards. The other member had the house sniped out from under them after four hours by someone who just strolled up and clicked the sign, but we kept waiting. And waiting. I got up to eat lunch, and go to Japanese tutoring, and when I got back there were seven other people at my sign when most of the day I and been alone or with a single other person, so I left. And as I was riding around looking at listings, a message popped up that aaron.hosek had bought us a house in Shirogane, the Japan-themed housing district! The other two people there had gone afk and after twelve hours, the invisible timer finally ran out.

The system is dumb. The day was terrible. I would much rather have instanced housing so that everyone could get what they needed rather than people having to sit for an entire day clicking a sign just for the chance to get a house. But now we have a Japanese-style house in Shirogane, right near a market board and steps from the ocean, and since we're on the housing treadmill we never have to click like that ever again!