For most of my journey through Final Fantasy XIV, my home has been The Mists Plot 13 where we managed to snag a small house and turn it into our Free Company house years ago. The sad thing at this point I can no longer seem to remember what ward we were originally located in. Once we placed that Aetherite shard in our lawn… I stopped needing to care about which one I was intending to visit. Over the years we contemplated trying to move houses to something larger, but we were so ideally situated in the ward that nothing ever felt right. We were across the road from a market board and retainer bell, and just a few short paces away from the vendors located centrally on the zone. Similarly we were only a row of houses away from the beach making it feel like everything was close at hand. One of the key problems with housing in Final Fantasy XIV is that it is extremely expensive… and secondly it is completely unavailable most of the time given that it is physical housing rather than instanced. Each Ward having a limited number of potential spaces divided up among small, medium and large plots, and unfortunately Square Enix has been extremely slot to add additional resources.
With the launch of Stormblood came a golden opportunity because they announced that they would be adding a brand new housing area in the city of Shirogane. It was about this time that we started talk of actually finally moving to a new area, especially after seeing that this new zone had beach front lots. There was still the logistical problem of having to sell one house and then immediately turn around and try and buy a new one… all the while hoping you didn’t get sniped and end up without a Free Company house in any form. However at some point along the way they announced that they would be adding in a relocation system that allows you to move houses and everything in them. There has been a standing joke online over the last few days of the opening of the Shirogane housing area being the ultimate extreme battle… and reading reddit it definitely seems the case. Functionally how we got the house was having Tam and Ash both online at 3 am PST when the housing area opened… both with enough money to buy a house in the hopes that one of them would be able to get in and purchase something. Tam absolutely nailed it and got us Ward 7 plot 49, which is a great medium house right off the beach and beside the entrance to the zone. The nearest Market board is up the hill from our house making it still a short distance away, though I have to admit they have done an amazing job of trying to make sure ALL of them are a very short distance away.
This is a different shot of our new home, and the one that Tam posted when he made his “we got one” post. It is a freaking nice location and the only problem we have right now is dealing with trying to decorate it given that we moved up from a small… and this thing seems massive with three floors. There is currently some sort of a bug hitting a bunch of us with our private rooms, but I put in a ticket and am hoping they can do something to fix that. The Free Company house has been this hub of activity for our members over the years, and while it is going to feel weird to be in a new location… I am sure given a short amount of time it will feel just as much at home as the last one did. I’ve not really had time to meet our neighbors but I am hoping they are as cool as our last batch was. It seems however like we were the lucky ones, given that everyone is clamoring for more available properties. I think if you were not awake at 3 in the morning when the plots went on sale… you didn’t get a home simple as that and it reminds me of the land runs that happened in Horizons each time a new housing area opened up. This is the problem with physical player housing, and one of the reasons why I tend to prefer implementations like Everquest 2 or Wildstar that have unlimited instanced housing. I will say the feeling of a physical neighborhood with other players that you get to know over the years as you hang out at the market board is pretty great. It just sucks that so many players have to go without housing because of this.
