Until 2022, buying a house in Eorzea was a Kafkaesque ritual. When a plot came free, usually after 45 days of the owner’s inactivity, it went up for sale on a principle as cruel as it was crude: first come, first served.

In a game where supply is deliberately capped, this produced absurd scenes. Some players camped in front of the placards for hours, eyes fixed on an invisible timer, fingers clenched on the mouse, ready to click to the millisecond.

During the 2020 pandemic, Square Enix suspended this system so that players wouldn’t lose their homes in the middle of lockdown. More recently, in January 2025, after the California wildfires, demolitions were paused on the North American servers. A detail that says a lot about how much these virtual properties matter: for many, more than a mere luxury, a genuine refuge.

That is how housing Savage was born, an ironic nickname coined by the community after the game’s hardest fights, the Savage raids. For days, silent queues of characters waited in front of the placards. Behind the screen, players took turns on watch and clicked frantically, sometimes to the point of exhaustion.

The forums were full of stories. A sleepless night for a plot that never appears. Six hours of nervous clicking in front of a timer at zero, only to see, at dawn, a fresh random delay of another six hours.

Other, more worrying stories surfaced along the way. Some people took time off work for these clicking marathons. Others fought with their partners, the virtual property obsession spilling over into real life. On Reddit, the community got organised: strategy guides, the best times to log in, which districts to target, anything went to scrape an edge. A full-blown science of clicking developed, as stupid as it was ruthless, eerily reminiscent of the desperate tactics of buyers in overheated property markets.