The Housing Market in FFXIV is Busted

Millions of players in FFXIV can’t afford to buy housing due to how much FFXIV gil and time it takes to simply get a plot of land. This problem is unsustainable and Square Enix has to address it soon.

The Housing Market in FFXIV is famously broken, is there any hope for it?

The Housing Market in FFXIV is Busted

When it comes to Final Fantasy XIV, even the greenest player has likely heard of the housing market… and in the same breath, they were likely regaled with how much of a poorly executed system it is.

In-Game Housing

When it comes to MMORPGs, the introduction of a housing system can be seen as a positive. It’s a way for the player to immerse themselves more fully into the world, it acts as an incentive for players to keep playing (and keep paying subscription fees), and it can even be a source of pride or vanity for the player.

To make sure that we’re all on the same page here, yes, this article is talking about digital housing in Final Fantasy XIV. But no matter your personal feelings about the rhyme or reason behind the idea of digital housing, it’s clear as day to anyone with eyes that Final Fantasy XIV has messed it up in a big way.

In a game that features millions of players worldwide, to make a mistake of such a large caliber may seem impossible to fathom, and yet, this is the worst timeline in which we live.

Read on to learn about all the ways the housing market in Final Fantasy XIV is a headache and a half that should be scrapped before it can get any worse.

Some History

Before really getting into the nitty-gritty of it, realize that a plot of land – for yourself or your Free Company – can set you back between 1.5 million Gil to 50 million Gil. Ignoring that that’s a wild range for a FFXIV Gil breakdown, that’s also an obscene amount of money to ask any one player to pay. Some players have been playing since 1.0 (#rip) and will have never seen that much Gil in one place.

Keep in mind that there is no out-of-game way to buy an apartment or a house. This means that the FFXIV store remains the place to buy FFXIV mounts, glamours, Phials of Fantasia, and Emotes for your FFXIV account, but nothing else.

Needless to say, before you begin to consider in-game housing, you’re going to have to sink quite a bit of time into farming Gil, but you’ll also have to have at least one class at level 50, and you’ll have to have reached the rank of second lieutenant in your Grand Company.

Your Grand Company… you know, that feature that the game forced you to select back around level 15 that you promptly forgot all about? Yeah, that one. You’re not alone in the forgetfulness, though – it’s easy to completely outstrip the usefulness of your Grand Company when it comes to gear, items, and the like.

Anywho, back to business… the business of housing and how it’s all in shambles, that is!

Problems With the Housing Market

Where to begin? When it comes to Final Fantasy XIV’s housing market crisis, the laundry list of issues continues to grow with every patch.

Some of the main issues include (but are not limited to):

Inability to Select a House or an Apartment for Purchase

In Final Fantasy XIV, plots tend to go online daily at around 12:01 am. This is not an exact science, and the time has even been known to fluctuate. This means that you may sign on at 12:00 am to start clicking through the district you’d like to be in, and you’ll still be clicking once every few seconds for the next four to five hours.

This can end up costing days of your life as you spend that same 4+ hour block of time attempting to get a house or an apartment, and there’s still no guarantee you’ll succeed. Plots have been known to appear and disappear within a span of a few seconds, so even a moment of inattention can spell defeat of your attempts to get an in-game home.

This has caused a direct negative health result in some players, as they’ve given up on sleep, eating, and even going to the bathroom to try and secure an apartment or a home in Final Fantasy XIV.

People Can Hoard Digital Homes

There was once a (slightly more) friendly time when not logging in over a specific period would result in your home or apartment being automatically removed from your ownership, but at the start of the pandemic, that was changed. No longer can homeless players hope to wait for an abandoned home to appear – now, they have to hope that someone will just give up their home out of the goodness of their hearts.

And, considering that sales for Final Fantasy XIV are currently through the roof – so high that Square-Enix had to suspend purchases and the creation of new accounts for a few months – the competition for the housing market is higher than ever right now.

There have been reports of people who have multiple accounts on different servers and who use those different accounts to secure a house for their character. This means that one player may have six or seven houses while another player may not have any.

Supply Cannot Meet Demand

One of the main issues is that there just aren’t enough houses to go around. However, that, in and of itself is one of the main issues when it comes to the housing crisis in Final Fantasy XIV. It’s one thing when, in real life, there is not enough physical space to build more houses, or that the price of housing prevents people from buying real-life properties.

The discussion of housing supply meeting the needs and necessities of people is not the point of this article. However, it is somewhat related, largely because this shouldn’t be the type of situation that needs to be dealt with when it comes to a digital game.

It’s baffling that a game, with millions of players and dollars in revenue, is purposely refusing to:

• create more housing to meet the demand of players who want to have a house
• change the system to give newer players a chance to get a house or apartment
• changed how the server looks at houses and apartments/turn them into instanced events.

A bit more information on the last point… one of the big pushes is to turn houses and apartments into instanced events, such as when your character goes into an Inn Room. At the Inn, every player has access to many items and songs that are attached to a player’s account. This means that Final Fantasy XIV already has a prototype system that would work significantly better for the housing crisis – but the heads at Square-Enix are choosing not to do anything about it.

Final Thoughts

Luckily, Square-Enix hasn’t allowed for it all to crash and burn! They’ve included – as part of their Terms of Service – that no in-game property or element can be sold for real-life money or goods. This means that, that $500 apartment in The Mist that you’ve been eyeing? Instead of spending real money, report it so that it opens up – then hope for the best that you’ll be able to snap it up before someone else does.

Still, no matter how you look at it, the housing system for Final Fantasy XIV needs to be shaken up in a huge way. Perhaps Square-Enix is refusing to do something because they don’t consider it to be a problem, or perhaps they’re waiting for things to reach a breaking point before releasing some sort of emergency fix that’ll leave people grateful to them.

We may never know what drives our lord and savior, Yoshi P and his team of developers, and in every other situation revolving around Final Fantasy XIV, that’s all right – we know they’ll come up with something to amaze and excite players new and old.

Imagine what it would look like, though, if they pivoted and funneled a sliver of that brilliance towards the in-game housing issues.