Buying my home was one of the most stressful moments in my life, but in comparison to Final Fantasy 14’s prospective homeowners, I had it easy. There’s a real estate crisis in Eorzea, with too few homes to keep up with demand. And after the 4.1 update, The Legend Returns, things don’t seem to have improved.
While most MMOs with player housing use instances to ensure that everyone has a chance to snatch up a plot, Final Fantasy servers only contain a specific number of homes, and when one of them is purchased, that’s it taken off the market.
Until 4.1, servers contained three housing areas with just over 2,000 plots available. For the entire server. And despite the low number of homes, guilds and players can snatch up multiple plots. Some players are already demanding that a limit be imposed.
So there’s obviously a great many people clamouring for property. Unfortunately, 4.1 only added 720 more homes. According to infuriated players on the forums, they got bought up so quickly that most didn’t have a chance to buy them. When the update went live, login queues kept even the early birds from getting to the houses they wanted to purchase. And even those who got in in time had to contend with other players trying to stop them by opening trade windows.
It’s a demonstrably bad system, especially in a game where people pay money expecting to be able to access all of its content eventually, and adding 720 more plots has clearly not alleviated the issues. Right now, the only alternative is purchasing an apartment, of which there are considerably more, though they’re not nearly as striking and they are still, ultimately, limited in number.
Cheers, Kotaku.