So, for those still wondering what exactly is allowed and not for housing resale, and various other housing related stuff (like apartments)...:
Taken from here
Quote:In the producer letter, you mentioned players should stop the resale of land. Do you intend this restriction to include players who want to sell to their friends when they are moving servers?
Yoshida: The idea is that buying land with the intent to resell is not acceptable. This is an act which inhibits the ability of other players to enjoy the game. If we receive reports, we will investigate with log data, and if we determine that the motive was profit, then we will release the land. Of course, if you purchased the land for yourself and later decided to transfer worlds, there's no problem with handing the land over to FC members or friends because the intent wasn't to earn gil through resale.
What will happen to the price of land if it would have dropped by the time the resale happened?
Yoshida: It will return to its initial value.
For housing in general, one of the reasons resale is a problem is because the land gets sold out even when land is added. What is your ideal image for housing?
Yoshida: It's a bit difficult to be sure, but I think the ideal would be if about 80% of all land was sold to meet the demand, which would leave a bit more that new players would be able to purchase if they could afford it. In most worlds, the additional land added achieved this state, but in some of the more crowded worlds, it still sold out. We are considering managing this by adding additional land to the more crowded worlds.
First, I'd like to completely cover the demand for individual housing with the implementation of apartments in patch 3.4. After that, we'll do some careful consideration and follow up by addressing the demand for FC housing in overcrowded worlds in the next major update.
There are also two kinds of play styles where some players want to have a house for their FC, but some players also want to have their own house and land for their character. In the case of a FC, you can collect gil from multiple people, but for an individual, all the gil comes from one person. We want to be able to accommodate both FC and personal desires, so this is a tough problem to tackle.
Do you think land sold out immediately due to high resale demand or just due to population?
Yoshida: The higher the population, the higher the demand for land, and the higher the demand for land, the more people who want to use it to make gil. I think it's like that.
You said that selling out and resale is a problem on a small fraction of the worlds, so do you mean to say that housing is already in an ideal state in most cases?
Yoshida: Well, with the shortages and resale issues in overcrowded worlds, I wouldn't say its ideal, but I think it's good in about 80% of the worlds. New players can level up, earn gil, and by then they should be able to afford the houses as the prices continue to decrease.
Did you put any thought into regulating the resale systematically?
Yoshida: Once bought, the system already has conditions where the land cannot be sold through the system and is automatically removed after a certain period of disuse, to make it difficult for players to resell through the system. However, a MMORPG is made to be "played," and there are mechanisms available to allow players to abandon land of their own will. The system doesn't have the ability to determine whether players had malicious intent when they decide to use that mechanism, so combining that mechanism with the ability to trade you end up with resale. It would be possible to stop it entirely if we want to take a view that everyone has bad intent, and there'd be less time and effort involved with that as well. But by doing that, we would destroy some of the good intentions of the community like players handing over land before they take a break or transfer worlds.
On the other hand, we heard opinions like limiting the number of houses to one per account, but for players who have multiple characters on one account and want to role play on each, this still creates a problem. Furthermore, for FFXIV, since the requirement to buy land is to be level 50 on one job and to save enough gil, there is quite a high hurdle to be able to purchase land. So we should respect those players who have done enough to satisfy the conditions to purchase land on alternate characters.
If these things continue, the housing system will become very overcrowded. Rather than viewing everyone as inherently bad, we'd rather allow as much freedom as possible to remain in the system. Additionally, after speaking with players and getting feedback from a majority, we can make provisions if we decide that certain things should not be allowed. So first, let's talk about it. I think there wouldn't be any problems if everyone would act ethically.
Taken from here
Balmung:Â Suen Shyu
