An open letter from Mateus’ Goblet Ward 12
And so I'm inspired to write my first, and hopefully only, tumblr post.
It's come to my attention that certain cranky people are quite suddenly extra cranky about Mateus' housing situation. That is to say: Mateus, which up until now has had the distinction of being the smallest server replete with open housing plots, suddenly has none left. This is in no small part due to the fact that SE has recently locked Balmung (among other worlds) and marked us as a "preferred server," causing many from Balmung--which hasn't even had so much as an apartment open in close to a year, if I understand correctly--to see us as the new promised land of milk and honey and housing. As such, we have officially unofficially been designated a secondary roleplaying server.
Do I feel sorry for Balmung's housing woes? You know what--no. Not at all. They crammed something like 25,000 people on a server intended to hold about 7,000, assuming the population was appropriately spread throughout the datacenter. Which, okay. That was their choice! But people don't seem to realize that it was a choice. Either you get to have the bustling community of dozens if not hundreds of characters everywhere you go and the rich market board full of any product you could dream of buying... or you get to have a small server with open spaces while tolerating an atmosphere I've heard described as "depressing" or even "skeletal" and a low-supply economy that may force you to be more self-sufficient than you'd prefer. They made their choice, and yet many felt entitled to have their bustling server AND open spaces of their own. SE did a fantastic job of obliging with the addition of apartments, which saw housing woes healed on basically every server but Balmung.
"But random internet person," you say, "what does any of this have to do with Mateus?"
Many people feel entitled to own a house. They feel that even knowing there are only 2,160 plots (soon to be 2,880) on any given server, they can and should be allowed to go at their own pace and have free access to any content they like, including housing. They want a house of their own, but they don't want to accept that lots of other people want it badly enough to work harder for it than they did. As such, when all the housing plots evaporate out from under them on account of people who wanted it badly enough, they get upset. And they find other places to direct their irritation--soandso is denying me a home--instead of directing it inward. At the end of the day, that upset person has had literal years to acquire a house of their own. Now that opportunity is lost, and it's no one's fault but theirs.
So Mateus is out of houses, and people are complaining because they feel like they lost out forever. That now they're at the mercy of vicious plotflippers or camping for auto-demos. That this dream that hasn't mattered to them enough to act on will now never come true.
"But random internet person," you say, "what does any of this have to do with you?"
Well you see, fellow random internet person, a fair amount of the hate people are feeling is being lobbed toward myself and my friend, because people see something we did as very unfair. They don't have the courage to speak to us directly about this, of course, but they talk a lot of crap behind our backs, and we're not stupid and find out about it.
A little about me first, so you might perhaps come to understand why I care so much.
I've played FFXIV a long while. I had a legacy character from 1.0, but I restarted on Gilgamesh on zero-hour of 2.0 beta phase 4, in which any character you created was going to be carried over to the real game. I watched as it grew to immense proportions. You see, it had been designated the official BlueGartr and Reddit and, somehow, generally raiding server. Gilgamesh was where you went when you wanted to get shit done. I didn't pick Gilgamesh for that reason. My husband was friends with some people who wanted to be there.
So it was crowded, and I wished it wasn't. I didn't really have a basis for comparison, though, having only really played on Gilgamesh in 2.0+.
I obtained a house in Gilgamesh when the subdivisions were first added, which was not long after they were first-first opened up from being FC-only to allowing for personal homes as well. My house was in the Goblet--ward 8 plot 54. Despite there being plenty of homes available to choose from, I chose the last ward's subdivision quite on purpose, looking to carve out my own little sanctuary of peace and quiet. Well, a noisy FC moved in next door that liked to trample all over my fence and roof, so... so much for that. Still, I loved that house and put a lot of effort into the decor, which was tons of fun. I like to think I did a great job, but everyone thinks that, I guess.
So fast forward a bit--we're in Heavensward now. I started a project that called for leveling an alt with the same name and appearance of my main. I picked Behemoth. It was still a big...ish? server, but it was nowhere near the size of Gilgamesh, and I finally felt like... I had been holding my breath without knowing, and finally I could breathe. So when a third alt was required for my silly project, I actively sought out the smallest, quietest server I could and transferred/fantasia'd my old legacy character there.
That server was Mateus, and to me, Mateus was perfect. Mateus felt like home. Random encounters with people were rare but incredibly friendly, and with Mateus’ inflated economy, I soon bought a home of my own with the money I'd made from PotD drops. For my home I chose a literally entirely empty ward. That first night, I watched the Moonfire Faire fireworks for hours from atop my roof, over a sea of empty plots, feeling at peace.
That screenshot is dated August 11, 2016. Less than a year ago. Housing was released to Free Companies on December 14, 2013, and expanded to allow for personal purchases on September 16, 2014. And yet, nearly two years after literally anyone could buy a home of their own, on Mateus, many wards of the Goblet were like this. Even the more in-demand areas of Mist and Lavender Beds had areas that looked like this.
Mateus showed no signs of getting bigger. At all. Homes were bought by whatever newbies were curious to play with them, and yet they were being demolished at roughly the same rate, as people streamed away from this "corpse" of a server toward the promised lands of savage modes and ex primals and real economies. Meanwhile I spent more and more time on Mateus, to the point where my small cluster of Gilgamesh friends were concerned that I was on the brink of leaving. Because to me, Mateus was perfect. Mateus felt like home.
Around this time, I got to chatting with a lovely person from Leviathan with whom I share some unique/niche interests. In September, we started alts on Mateus together, and we bought them houses together in the Goblet. Ward 12, plots 14 and 20, across the Brimming Heart from each other. We made a free company for ourselves, to share materials and gil, and when we leveled that up and saved up enough money, we bought ourselves the medium in the same area, plot 19.
We decided we really loved playing together--and that we really loved playing together on Mateus--so having no real attachments to Gilgamesh or Leviathan, we transferred our mains. And we bought them houses, too, once we were able to, seeing as how our savings had been wiped out by the transfer limits. But we worked together to earn the money, as we had the previous three homes, and we bought them. And we decorated all five houses together. Coming up with ideas, making lists, splitting up the work, placing things and playing with them until we got just the desired effect. It was the most fun we'd ever had playing this game. Our own tiny paradise, carved out just the way we liked it.
We finished those first alts to 60, and we started another pair. Because you see, our alts have a specific theme to them--a set of characters from this game, of which there are 15--and we wanted to have them all. It didn't start out being about houses. We just loved making and leveling alts together. So I'd have 7 and my extra character for my side project, and she'd have 8. We had always planned it that way. And, well, we were only two houses away from owning all seven around the brimming heart, so we completed our collection when the second pair of alts hit 50.
Or so we thought.
We did some really amazing things with houses six and seven. Made rooms and scenarios unlike anything we had ever seen. Things we thought would be impossible with the items available in XIV. We had found our true love in this game, and it was decorating. We began to talk about what this or that character's house would be like. When we wanted a break from leveling, we would pick a ward or five and ride around and look at every single house there. I'm serious, if you owned a house on Mateus at that time, we visited it. All of you.
The few other homes in our ward kept auto-demolishing. The mansion in 30 went first. We worked and saved and worked and saved, and it devalued and devalued for weeks, because there was no demand for it at all. We both had alts at 60 on another server--my aforementioned Behemoth alt, and hers elsewhere. We moved them both to Mateus and bought the mansion just before Christmas.
The next house to disappear was 27. That had been a cute little female elezen who always ran around in WHM AF, who was only like level 53ish... but one day their theretofore pristine chocobo stable stopped being cleaned, and a little over a month later their unsightly orange and blue default-colored house had evaporated. We only had three not-us neighbors left, and many of the other wards were in the same boat. We decided on an ambitious project given how disconnected our new mansion was to the Brimming Heart, where the rest of our homes were: we would claim the entire eastern half of the ward with our 16 characters, once they were all at least 50.
I mean, hell, clearly no one else wanted them. People were leaving, not moving in.
So we leveled and bought and decorated, leveled and bought and decorated. These homes were not just being claimed and left unused. They were, and still are, loved. We always go into a house with an idea. A theme. An intent. Furnishings are chosen with care. There are meanings in everything that no one will ever know but us. Symbolism. Look, we're nerds, okay? The weirder it looks, the more symbolic its intent. Probably. These characters we're paying homage to, we love them.
The next house to evaporate--and this was a huge surprise to us--was the mansion at 13. We knew for a fact the owner of 13 was still actively playing. He simply didn't want the house anymore and let it go. He never did anything with it, so perhaps he just didn't enjoy decorating as content. We knew exactly which character to put in it--someone who deserved a mansion but only had a cottage. Now that we had the chance....
So we took someone out of the Brimming Heart and moved him up there instead. And we were left with a hole where once there had been a sea of 17 beautiful matching black stone homes.
We wanted to fill the holes, and we still had so many ideas, and there were still at least a thousand empty houses on Mateus. That's when started to make extra free companies and move certain characters around to new plots in order to expand on their ideas.
Today, there are no more plots left on Mateus.
But long before that happened, there were no plots left in Ward 12. We own 28 houses -- 16 personal, 12 companies. Two of these thirty homes in the ward are not ours. We owned the whole ward even when this was posted, drawing sudden attention to the fact that this so-called corpse of a server had some meat left on its bones -- food for carrion birds, should someone desire a feast.
And then SE closed Balmung and Gilgamesh, and Mateus was invaded. And suddenly, people care about Mateus housing for the first time in nearly three years. Suddenly, people think we are *the* worst people. Because how dare we enjoy the game in the manner we chose to enjoy it.
How dare we?
How dare you.
You, who finally deign to set foot in my home. You, who hated Mateus for all the same reasons I felt it was perfect. You, who would take away the last year of memories I've made with one of the best friends I've ever known. You, who don't care about the fact that we have cultivated something unique, interesting, and amazing, because you feel it denies you the chance to throw up a hideous paissa wall and plop a chocobo stable and a garden plot in front of an otherwise unused black hole with Dragonsong screeching away in the background. You, with your head so buried in your cliques that you thought we came from Balmung within the last month and achieved all this thanks to SE’s allowance of free infinite gil transfers, not realizing we wanted to be here, that we love it here, that we worked our asses off for all this from nothing but the million gil each we were allowed to bring with us from our mains.
How dare you.
If you would look at something other than the placards in your impotent rage that the same FC tag is on a few of them, you just might notice you're standing in one of the best goddamn wards in the entire game. But more than that, you might just realize you're walking through the last year of our lives. You're seeing what we love, our passion, our reverence, our teamwork, our achievement.
And you demand we just give it all up. Because suddenly, these houses that have been here for years waiting to be loved… suddenly, now, you want one.
No.
Anyway, you're welcome to come look. We aren't quite done. We have a few closed homes, even (to our shame) a couple of yards that still need done, and some homes that want for some added detail since the doubling of furniture slots. It's all on hold for just a short while thanks to Stormblood. But we have ideas, plans... and we'll be right back to our housing obsession when we're done leveling our first few things to 70.
Please look forward to it. I know I am.
Final notes:
1- I don't claim to speak for my friend. For all I know, she'll be horrified I've posted this. If you take issue with anything I've said, take it up with me. My main is Seraph Altima.
2- We are not affiliated with any similarly named individuals on any other server. If you think you can send a tell to someone on Balmung and be speaking to me (or someone who can speak sense into me), especially after I've gushed about how much I love Mateus, you are an idiot.
3- As our houses are our passion, we are both happy to answer any questions you may have about our ward. Just talk to us.
4- While we do not roleplay ourselves, you are welcome to explore our ward and use it for any roleplay event or storyline you like. You have open and ongoing permission. If you take notice of the theme of our ward, you can see it's a perfect place to go if you'd like to write something about your OC being tricked, lured, or tempted by something otherworldly.
5- I'm well aware I'm not going to change any minds with this. People will say "but we couldn't save in time" or "but my friend just started" or "but if you love decor so much, why not give others a chance to love it, too." But we built this together, and I'm not giving it up, and you're not changing my mind, either. I just want my perspective out there, because right now we're just being demonized. Every story has two sides.
6- If you really want someone to demonize, the people in Goblet 12sub -- all those homes owned by FCless characters, whose homes are closed or, in some cases, entirely unbuilt -- actually did what you thought we did. But you know what? Whatever. They still put the work in before those without homes.