Buying a house in Final Fantasy 14 left me a broken woman

pcgamer.com:

I'm a millennial: I like my avocado on toast and I'm all too guilty of paying out my ass to get iced coffee delivered to my doorstep. As we all know, these are the two fundamental reasons I'll never be a real-life homeowner, or at least not for a long while anyway. But you know, I've got dreams of owning a space to call my own—one I can use to tell people I'm «a plant person» as my fourth pothos of the year wilts away on the windowsill. One where I can throw up every egregious wall hanging I've collected from decorating old university rooms. One where I can speak louder than a meek whisper for fear of waking up any family member who has the audacity to be asleep before 9 PM.

Living with your parents is great, by the way.

So I was intrigued when someone in my Final Fantasy 14 free company (its version of guilds) dropped this message in our chat on New Year's Eve: «There's a small house going in the Mist right now if anyone's interested.» I was interested. I'd recently stumbled upon a small mountain of gil and was looking for a way to burn it. What else was I going to do on the final day of 2021, spend it with my family and friends? Pipe down.

You see, buying a house in Final Fantasy 14 isn't as simple as going «yeah, I fancy a house now» and forking out the gil for one. The game's housing market is nearly as dire as real-life property hunting—there's a scarce number of plots available that rarely get vacated. When one does, it's slapped with an invisible timer that can lift at any point between 30 minutes and 24 hours later. Until that point, you can't buy shit. You're stuck clicking a placard over and over again, waiting for this magical clock to decide you're allowed to be a homeowner. Apparently I'm a masochist,