Now that I’ve gotten some rest, it’s a little easier to reflect upon and digest the events of Final Fantasy XIV’s Savage housing rush. Three days later, and I still don’t think it has truly sunk in that I managed to secure a medium home for my Free Company (FC) as well as a small one for myself.
It’s no secret to anyone that has seen my past few articles on Final Fantasy XIV that I absolutely adore housing. The FFXIV community is so unbelievably creative with all of the amazing builds and decoration ideas that they come up with, that it inspired me to create my own guild and hope to secure a little slice of RP heaven for ourselves one day. That day was this past Tuesday when the FFXIV login servers went online at 5 AM after a lengthy scheduled maintenance.
Days in the sun, with good company.
I didn’t expect to come out of this fight with anything at all, let alone an FC home, but after weeks of preparing for it, it just feels so gratifying to have someplace to finally call our own. If you’re new to types of housing grabs like this, you should know that there is very limited housing in FFXIV. There are a fixed number of “housing wards” with plots of land that are unique to that instance. Each ward has a subdivision, so you have one more chance of grabbing an identical plot that you like the look of in each ward. Typically, when maintenance is over, everyone rushes to a plot and starts to spam click to grab a home while they wait for a timer to pop.
What was unique about this housing rush was that there were no timers. As soon as the maintenance was over, if you managed to get in, you could run right to a plot and claim it for your own. That is, if you could get through the queue time first.
My friends and I started our housing journey officially early Monday night. We have been planning to compete for housing for months now, but it really ramped up once we learned that the three new housing wards were being added in as soon as October 13th. So, full of nervous energy, we went to bed early to give ourselves plenty of time to fall asleep and push back our anxiety. Typically, you want to get up about 2 hours before maintenance to download any patches or updates so you can log immediately into the game. I woke up a little earlier, probably around 2:30, got a shower, coffee with my favorite sinful creamer, and logged into Discord to see if anyone else was awake.
“Wait, wait, a little more to the left.”
The morning was a little bit of a blur up until the hour before the server came back online. One by one, my friends began to trickle into the voice call, groggy and nervous for the hour. At this point, we had really done everything we could. If you go on Youtube, you can find all kinds of videos with helpful tips and tricks to help you secure your dream home. I planned which wards I wanted to visit, specific plots, the buttons I’d click to get there, and timed my travel route to see if it was better just to run on foot or mount up. I even made a “busy” macro, that let me set my character to a “do not disturb - busy” status in game. Apparently, some jerks will try to open a trade with you when you’re trying to buy a plot of land and it will cancel your window, giving them the upper hand.
We spent the final hour psyching each other up and talking about what we would do after it was all over. This was our chance to stand out in our RP-heavy server and create a place that we could host our own RP events. This would be where my folks could have a little piece of FFXIV for themselves, decorated how we liked it, in a way that represented our FC. When 5 AM finally came, along with thousands of other players, we threw ourselves at the launcher and tried to log in. Three out of four of us were able to log in. For some reason, his client decided to hide the patch from him, and even though he had downloaded it previously, he had to wait for it to update once more. My close friend managed to make it to the front of the queue, got all the way through and was actually in the game in a matter of seconds. My boyfriend was sitting in a small queue, but was in not long after.
Our lovely neighbor’s home, built on the crushed dreams of FC’s everywhere.
I, on the other hand, immediately received a login error and had to restart my client. Those few seconds were very precious, and I knew as soon as I logged back in and saw that I was 400 in the queue that I had already lost my dream spot for our FC home. My stomach dropped. I had all of our gil that was meant to purchase the FC home on my character, and I couldn’t even get in. It was at that moment that I really began to steel myself and tried to figure out a new game plan. While two of my FC mates were running around and grabbing their own little personal homes, I started to relinquish the idea of any picturesque view by the ocean in the Mists and resolved myself to getting a home-any home, no matter the cost for our FC.
My character was already stationed outside of the Mists, so I figured while I was there I would poke my head in and at least check. As soon as I entered the zone, I got confirmation that our medium in that ward and its adjacent subdivision were gone, as well as the plot for the little home with the beautiful, flowering bridge.
The beautiful flower bridge was what first drew me to this plot of land.
Almost immediately after, my boyfriend began to shout that there was still a medium plot open in the Goblet and to come to him. I don’t know why I didn’t think about this previously, but in the moment I remembered that we got married two weeks prior, and used my eternity ring to teleport immediately to where he was standing. I managed to snag the medium plot for our FC just moments before someone else got there and the call erupted into laughs and screams of joy. (Sorry, if you’re reading this!)
Our medium home stands proudly in a little corner of the Goblet, warming up in the light of dawn from a chilly night in the desert.
Now that the initial rush was over, I decided to go back to the Mists to see if there was still a ward open that had my little dream home. Sure enough, I checked the subdivision of the last ward and there it was: a small plot of land close to the sea with a beautiful bridge covered in flowers. I ran as quickly as I could and staked my claim, collapsing back into my chair in shock. We did it. We actually did it.
A side view of the new FC home. It’s still a work in progress, but we’re proud of it.
By the time our final friend had gotten into the game, like most others, he was greeted with the sight of a handful of homes in each ward that were now on random timers. These timers come up whenever a home is relocated. So, that meant that someone purchased a home there, and then immediately relocated to another plot (probably one that had a better view). I don’t know if there’s any way to flip a switch and prevent that from happening, but I think it might have led to a slightly more satisfying land rush for some players. The few plots of land that were left would now have to be competed for the old fashioned way, with hours of camping and a random timer that you wouldn’t know popped until someone succeeded in actually purchasing the land from hours of clicking.
The small house plot I’ve been dreaming of since I first found it. It’s empty now, but will soon be overflowing with greenery.
We were extremely fortunate to get those plots, and it instilled such an immense feeling of pride in our folks. It felt like our FC was now really official. Housing is generally joked about as one of the hardest parts of Final Fantasy XIV because it is so competitive. We started our FC from the ground up in August of this year, got it to rank 20 recently, and now had a whole medium house to ourselves that we could host events in. It was just so gratifying to come out on the other side after putting in all of the work and dealing with the constant negativity surrounding a new company. No one thought we could do it, or that it was worth our time, but here we are on the other side and we couldn’t be happier.
Simone browses through HousingSnap on her tomestone, looking for some extra inspiration after a long day of decorating.
Now, to deal with the inflated housing decoration prices. I’ve offset some of the cost by gathering and making a lot of fundamentals for the homes, but even I have to just grit my teeth and buy a few things after hours of farming materials. We still haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of decorating the FC home, but we’re more than ready for the challenge and so grateful for the opportunity to do so. Congratulations to everyone that got a home this time around! For those that didn’t, keep an eye out for patch 5.4 in December. It hasn’t been confirmed that we’ll be getting Ishgard housing then, but it is the final phase of the Ishgardian Restoration so iit has to be right around the corner.
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