After a relatively short time, I managed to win the opportunity to buy a house in Final Fantasy 14. I know people who have been trying for well over a year to get a house in one of the few player housing zones in the game, but I got incredibly lucky and won on a housing plot in what turned out to be a relatively unpopular area, based on how few bids there were. Personally, I think parts of that area are incredibly underrated, which is why I added them to my list of possible locations. Normally, getting a house of some kind wouldn’t be as big of a deal as it has been this past year, but there’s been a few events in the US that had the local housing market locked in a way that it normally isn’t. Typically, if you do not enter your home for forty-five days, your house will be automatically demolished, your things put in storage, and some amount of the house’s cost refunded to you. This is to prevent players from purchasing and sitting on the nicest housing plots long after they’ve stopped playing the game. Sure, it’s still incredibly easy to just log in every so often to keep your house occupied, but that means you have to buy a subscription every month and a half, at minimum, and Final Fantasy 14 loves that. They want your money. So, prior to the massive floods and damage to North Carolina last year, this process happened regularly and houses would go back on the market at a fairly normal rate. Once those floods happened and huge portions of the US (well, not that huge in proportion the the US itself but still huge compared to most parts of the world) were unable to access secure internet and gaming time, Square Enix decided to put the timers on hold. A decision they relented on in December of 2024 and them immediately put back in place during the L.A. wildfires. As a result, until incredibly recently, most houses only became available because people actively sold them or moved into new housing of their own.
Now, though, housing has been unfrozen and a huge glut of plots have begun to hit the market every week. The number has been steadily increasing, but where there would sometimes be as few as five or as many as twenty plots available, we started hitting a point shortly after the housing freeze ended where there were easily a couple dozen available at a time (and now that number is in the hundreds). As the number of available houses went up, the number of bids per house went down. Where it once would not be uncommon to see a triple-digit figure of bids on every property previously, now it is not uncommon for some of the less desireable plots to not leave the single digits and few plots get more than forty (and they’re usually some of the hottest spots available anywhere). In preparation for this (since they announced the unfreeze before it happened), I spent a little time going to each area I was interested in living and created a list of the plots that I would enjoy getting (they’re numbered, so it’s pretty easy). That way, I could skip plots that weren’t to my liking geographically and just focus on finding a plot that I enjoyed based on the ambiance of that particular instance of player housing area (no really weird or visually unpleasant houses). Thanks to that list, I could tell at a glance if there was anything I might want to bid on and then I could go bid, based on the preference order for the list I made. Which, in this case, meant being one of less than two dozen bidders for one of my top picks in the third tier of preference. So not my first choice at all, not what I’d like if I could have anything, but definitely still a solid option since I’d rather have no house than one in an area I didn’t particularly like.
I genuinely didn’t expect to win. I was so stunned that I stared at the “you won!” message for ten minutes while trying to figure out if I REALLY wanted that plot of if I’d just bid on it so I could feel like I was working towards a nice home. I ran around the property a little bit to make sure it was what I wanted and my thoughts were vindicated when I shared the news with my friends and had a bunch of people show up skeptical (since the area is perhaps the least favorite housing area out of them all) and leave after remarking that, huh, this actually was a really nice little plot of land. After that, I was faced with the daunting task of actually doing something with the plot and the realization that, based on my energy levels and general interests in the game at the time, it would likely take me months to slowly set something up. So I did what any player of in-game means would do: I hired someone else to figure that stuff out for me. I have a good friend who has expressed her willingness to that kind of stuff (and also other things like photoshoots) for in-game currency, so I told her I’d hire her, we talked about what I had in mind for the space, and she spent the next day getting a concept together. After that, we decorated the outside, figured out the inside, and I spent a whole bunch more money on furniture and stuff since apparently actually buying the land is the least expensive part of homeownership in Final Fantasy 14. All said and done, I think I put over ten million gil into the house and ten bucks of real money (for special items from real-money store that were a key part of the the exterior’s decoration).
I have no regrets about spending that money, real or fake. It was difficult to actually do at the time, since it happened over the course of two days in which I was completely exhausted and drained (plus I have a difficult time spending money even if it’s fake game money), but I don’t regret it. I kinda wish we’d taken a bit more time to do all that work and set things up since I was just dead-tired at the end of it all, but there’s definitely value is just being done with it. It’s nice to have a cozy, comfortable place all my own to go in the game. Hell, I could even set it up so only a few people would be allowed in! Keep it an entirely private space. I mean, in-character, it is a place of business that my character will run their healing/apothecary business out of, but I’m not currently running a business in or out of character, nor am I making a lot of things to sell with that particular skill, so it’s all a bit of a moot point at the moment. Still, it’s been a lot of fun to imagine what I can do with the space and it has resulted in a slow shift of my priorities from pushing forward on the mechanical portion of the game to turning my attention toward the roleplaying side of the game. The RP stuff has always been on my mind, but I’d decided to mostly ignore it until I was through all the expansions of the game so that I could keep my attention focused and not lose entire months to carefully arranging details. Plus, I always had so much of the game to play and so much of it felt urgent that it was difficult to tear myself away from it for RP events or anything that wasn’t a part of progressing the game. Now, it all feels decidedly less urgent and I’m taking the moment created by winning and occupying this house to slowly but surely switch gears towards all the RP stuff. Which is very exciting! That’s one of the reasons I picked this MMO as the one I’d actually play a lot of, after all.