Mog House Thread [dev1002][dev1017]

[Psion]

Greetings yet again, on our new shiny forums, now with more subdivisions~♪

First off, before you begin reading, this is a rather long post, so long it took two posts to fit it all. Sorry about that, it's a bad habit of mine to elaborate. I tried to make it an interesting read, though.

Secondly, I'd love this to be a thread for all mog house related ideas, not just mine. If you have your own ideas on what mog housing should be, post them here! If you want to discuss mine or the ideas of someone else, post em! If we have one centralized thread on mog housing, it will probably be easier on the mods to communicate these ideas to the dev team, as well as give them a good idea of how much in demand such housing is. So without further ado~

Introduction

As the old general thread is now the more of an actual general talk for anything now, and we have new areas to post actual game suggestions, I thought I'd make a thread on my mog house idea that hopefully won't get smothered to page 20 in half a day from the flood of great ideas from fellow posters! (and Belgianrofl attacks <.<; )

One of the biggest concepts from FFXI that I miss to this day, and very many fellow Eorzeans as well, is the humble prison...er, abode we called the mog house. With it's four walls, leaky roof full of mice (and stars, and apparently chicken drumsticks?), and our ever faithful spinning moogle friend. It was a place to call home, a place to store our loot, a place to decorate like a palace while we pretended that one day our friends would want to see it! Oh wait, I'm supposed to make this thread a request to add mog houses in, not make them look bad. Right.

As a place to hide in while crafting, or just to relax in a chat free area to talk to linkshell buddies, the mog house was something that everyone used, and many enjoyed, even with the limitations we had. But we are in a new era! The mog house can be reborn!

The Quest

The basic idea is this. A quest we can embark on, an epic journey that takes us from our first tiny plot of land to a beautiful mansion that can become a hub for linkshell members and friends to come over and play, a place that can be a central area to call our own that can be connected to other content as well. Whether you decide to just use the land for gardening, to put a ramshackle roof over your head, or make a manor that makes fellow Eorzeans green with envy, it can be something that is unique to each individual and useful as well!

Of course, we should start with an actual quest, and half the fun of a mog house was our ever useful mog that changed our job, cared for our plants, and slept in our bed and shed fur all over the blankets. However, in Eorzean lore, moogles in this game are residents of Gridania's forest, and what kind of moogle would want to live in a desert like Ul'dah? But never fear, we have some other adorable mascots, The humble and ever comical mammet and the lovable qiqirn! Both are native to their own lands of Ul'dah and Limsa Lominsa, and can provide some variety of options to what kind of buddy a person wants. Our first quest would be a fairly simple one, where we save the caretaker of our choosing in the nearby forest/desert/cliffs, or the like, and somehow wind up the owners of a plot of land in the nearby city and a new companion. (OK, maybe the story writers should be the ones to do this, not me. ^^; ) The end result, however, would be us owning a plot of land in the city, the start of our new abode. An interesting side effect of having moogles exclusive to Gridania, is that nostalgia might wind up making it as popular as Ul'dah from all the players wanting a moogle.

The House

Of course, it's just a plot of land. There's no actual house yet, but never fear! The cities are full of willing craftsmen ready to build for a little compensation, and as an adventurer materials are easy enough to come by. First, every house needs a foundation. The first type could be made of a cheap material, such as some mudstones or the like. (OK, building a house on mudstones is a very bad idea, but we're cheap here.) Naturally, it would take quite a few stones to build a foundation, even for a small shack like what we're starting with. Perhaps 30, or even 50, would be needed, along with a crafter to make them, and gil to pay the crafters, perhaps 20,000 gil in this case for the first option. Once you have traded the items and gil, it's time for the crafters to play a role!

In this case, there are a few different options:

The first is simply having your moogle/qiqirn/mammet buddy, from here on out to be called Mog for simplicity's sake, magically make the item. This option would be simplest to implement, and removes both the items and gil from the economy (this is good!)

The second is to have it simply open market, where you get a slip for the item you want to make, a cheap foundation in this case, that you can put up in the bazaar of your retainer or in your own, along with the amount of gil you are willing to pay. A crafter then sees your request, and if they are the appropriate level, they make it. To avoid the pain of losing so many items, it's probably best that failure in crafting doesn't cost any materials or at least loses only a couple at worst. No one wants to lose 30 mudstones in one go because a helpful goldsmith got disconnected from the game, much less future and more expensive items! This option would remove items, but because it is direct player to player, no gil is lost in the economy, just exchanged.

The third option is through a crafting workshop, one in each city, where crafters can go to pick up work and earn some experience and gil. This is where Yoshi-P's idea of multiple crafters working together can come into play! The gil and items a player gives to Mog are then sent to this workshop, and a list of available requests from players to be crafted is shown. Naturally, the lion's share of the gil goes to the workshop for its role in providing a building area and handling fees. Basically, it's gone from the economy. In our foundation example, 15,000 gil might go to the workshop, or is lost, while the remaining 5,000 is the reward earned by the goldsmith who makes it. In this option, some items will also require multiple crafters of different types, and the reward is split evenly among the crafters who will build it. A simple maple chair might simply require a carpenter to make, but a rosewood chair covered in gold gilt might require a carpenter and goldsmith of much higher levels! Once the right crafters are all ready and have chosen to build that item, they work together to build the actual item at the workshop for all to see! To help prevent a single set of crafters from monopolizing all the items, it would take time to actually make the item, and the higher the reward the longer it takes to build! Like the picture that was shown of multiple crafters, the item would slowly take shape from scratch, giving a sense of immersion to the game. As the crafters build the item, they gain skill points, with a bonus amount for staying till the item is finished. If a crafter has to leave early, the item will remain in its unfinished state and that crafter who leaves obtains a portion of their gil payment corresponding to how much work they did. Another relevant crafter can then jump in and finish the job, collecting the remainder of that reward. Once finished, the item can then be sent back to Mog and become available for the player's use. This option is probably the most involved, and gives crafters an option for making gil and adding an interesting twist to the game. Items are also removed from the economy in this option, and much of the gil as well, providing a useful gilsink to a game that currently has almost none.

Wow, all that from a foundation that will crumble in a hard rain! Of course, now that we have our foundation, we need a floor, walls, a roof, and windows! . . .Eh, this is a shack. Maybe some walls, a door, and a roof. Walls can be made of cheap arrowwood lumber and nails, a door from the same and a doorknob, along with some hinges, and a roof can be made of straw. (I wasn't kidding about the shack part!) Like the foundation, you need the items and gil, and it gets made. One interesting possibility in this game, however, is wall "sections" instead of just a box. With sections of wall, maybe some that have windows or some that do not, a wall section with a door, and so on, you can customize your house to have lots of windows, none, multiple doors, or inner wall sections to create multiple rooms. Let's think outside the mog box, and make an actual house!

Now, here's where things can get interesting. As you get the cheapest option for things like foundations and walls, you open up new options, better ones, for new looks and bigger houses. For instance, once you have your mudstone foundation a new option might open up, a limestone foundation, which can support heavier walls and a bigger house. Likewise, making some arrowwood walls might open up maple walls and oak walls, which require a level 2 foundation like limestone to support them. Obtaining either oak or maple walls might open up even more options, such as rough stone, brick, and mahogany walls for level 3 options. The idea is each level of options increases the amount of different types of materials you can choose, allowing for greater customization of your house's look. Higher level building parts might even provide bonuses of some sort, similar to moghancements in FFXI. Some building options might even require certain quests to unlock, or various achievements to be done. For instance, unlocking the ability to make a house that resembles Gridanian buildings, would require you to beat Gridania's storyline up to "Fade to White".

And since this idea is too big to put on one post, apparently, this is continued on the second post! ^^;

[Psion]

The second half to the mog house epic I'm composing!

The Support Facilities

Along with options for making your basic house structure, there would be a second set of options, those of supporting structures. These would be things like a blacksmith's forge, or a garden outside you could harvest from. Like housing options, each level increase includes more options than the last, with different looks and better bonuses. A simple blacksmith's forge that gives basic guild support for free (hey, you already paid for the forge) might open up a couple different looking options for better forges, that give advanced guild support instead of basic. Along with various guild facilities, you can also make landscaping options, allowing a safe place for disciples of the hand to gather wares. For instance, you might first buy the ability to create a grade 1 harvesting node in exchange for lots of gil and some items like moko grass for their seeds, which has basic crap items. Buying this option would open up the ability to create grade 2 nodes using grade 2 items and gil, and the ability to improve the results of your grade 1 node for gil and better grade 1 items. So your grade 1 node might only have moko grass at first, but you can add more items to it by bringing more of that item and some gil to seed the nodes with those plants. Of course, to balance this out, it would be pretty costly to make this safe haven of gathering paradise, and you probably would have to make a sort of minimum spacing requirement to keep people from placing a few harvesting nodes right next to each other and leveling super quickly to 50 botanist, but I'm sure the development team can think of how to do that. ^^

Of course, not just harvesting nodes can be created, but all nodes. Trees you can plant that let you log (obviously before you can create any node you need a place for the node to be gathered from!), rivers and ponds you can aquascape to fish and spearfish from, an entrance to an extensive underground cave and boulders you can mine and quarry from. But not only can these be places to gather from, they can also be used for aesthetics too! You might give items and gil to mog to create visible fish that swim around in your pond, a miniature bridge to cross your river, birds to roost in your trees, glowing crystals and stalagmites to decorate your cave. You could even have things like underground rivers and ponds as well, and things like fungi to grow in them.

The Furnishings

The last type of items would be furnishings, and like FFXI, these would be simply crafted and sold on the marketplace and no requirements are needed to place them in your residential area. Of course, because this wouldn't just be a room but an actual house with an outdoor area, the type of furnishings you could make can be quite varied, from a simple bed, to a couch, to an outdoor patio complete with iron-wrought chairs and table to gather with friends at. Some items might give moghancements as well, or do interesting things, such as a music box that lets you change the area's music to any song you've heard in the game before and bought the record for.

Interaction with Other Players

As for the house itself, it would probably best to keep it to an instance, providing a low lag area and quiet place for the player. However, they can invite people over to their house, opening up interesting options! For instance, you could choose to make your house open to friends and linkshell members of your choosing, so that whenever they want to drop by they can do so. You could also create entrance tickets that you can then trade or put in your bazaar, for rental purposes. That is to say, if you have a great mog house that has superior crafting facilities that surpass even the guilds, or high grade nodes with lots of items, you could sell tickets that give x amount of hours to enter your house and make use of the facilities and nodes. This could create a new market for people who spend the huge amounts of gil, items, and time to create the best places to gather and craft in, or those who have a gorgeous mansion and want to lend them out to people wanting a great place to have a linkshell meeting or event in. These tickets would have an option that a potential buyer could view to see what facilities and other relevant information that house has, a preview picture of the house, and a comment from the seller.

There is a possible problem from RMT, which is abuse by having a bunch of them pooling gil and resources together to create a mega crafting/gathering facility and using it to bot from, but because it's an instanced area, it should be easy to detect such bots. If someone has been gathering and crafting and such for the last two days nonstop for instance, it's obviously a red flag to check for botting behavior! And of course, in this case, it wouldn't just be one RMT but a whole cluster of them, allowing for the Special Task Force to clear them all out, get rid of the house in question that cost them a large investment in, and put a major hurt in their operations!

The Future, and Conclusion

Whew! After all these words, you might wonder if such a system would be worth the time to create. My answer is, of course! There are many players who play a game simply to "play house" so to speak. Look at the popularity of "The Sims", or "Minecraft", and you can see there's a large market for players who simply like to decorate their homes and live their life. You could potentially attract a large playerbase from this alone, as the graphics and potential of FFXIV is far higher than other games of this type, and an added bonus of other activities you can do along with it. It would also generate a large amount of content to do, and remove lots and LOTS of items and gil from the economy. This is always a good thing, especially as the game currently lacks itemsinks and gilsinks. Because the items would come from all sorts of sources, it would provide new ways for disciples of the hand, land, war, and magic to all make gil. On top of that, you can also connect future content to mog houses. For instance, if you add the ability for players to breed chocobos in this game, you could have the option to build a chocobo stables to the support facilities category, and let the players raise chocobos in their own home, taking their darling chick through strolls in the garden, letting it fall asleep on the couch, and showing it off to friends. A delivery box system could be put in place with Mog to receive packages, you could do gardening like with FFXI... there's so many possibilities with this system!

It would take a lot of work, but let's not get stuck in the same old boxes we called home in FFXI. A system like this would have vast potential to add content to this game, allowing for new synthesis systems, new quests, customization, a place for players to relax in, a boon to the economy, attract new players, and more. With the amount of threads that appeared in the feedback forums already requesting mog housing, it's clearly a hot topic, so let's give the players what they want!



On another note, here is the previous thread on this forum before the forums got split into new catergories:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ate-residences

and the original thread on Zam's feedback forum that started it all:

http://ffxiv.zam.com/forum.html?foru...6283820&page=1

Finally, I'm really sorry this took up so much space. I have a tendency to ramble on. But I'd love feedback as well, and this could also be a thread for other ideas on mog houses!

[Randis]

interesting ideas!

On a side note: If you want to pitch an idea, keep it short and easy to grasp.
Developer are japanese, not all speak english and i would not assume that they let all threads be translated and summorized.
You have a LOT of text here.

[Psion]

I know, I didn't want to write that much either, but it sort of got out of hand. Plus, the idea is kind of a big one, since it involves not just mog houses but a new way of crafting, new items to make, and more. >.<;

I'm not too worried about translation though, since this could be a centralized thread for all mog house ideas, not just mine. Plus, English is taught in Japan alongside Japanese, so most people are able to understand English there, though many don't like to admit it. I think it's because they don't want to make a mistake or something and look bad, though from what I've seen they do far better than most native born Americans. <_<; At any rate, if the community representatives decide it's a good enough idea, they will let the development team know, and they can always summarize it, probably a lot better than I can.

[Arcell]

But to that same end, if a thread is too short then they may not think much of it. An idea that is fully fleshed out is easier to understand than a vague one.

I love your ideas and they mostly mirror my own sentiments.

To keep people from abusing their own gathering nodes maybe have a limit like, they can only go up to R30 or something like that or it has to do with the level of the housing. Monster Hunter actually did a bit with this where you could harvest raw materials from a farm in the village but there were still a lot of things you couldn't get there and the nodes had a very limited number of uses. To upgrade the facilities you'd have to spend a great deal of points you got from completing missions and some of the upgrades only popped up after a certain point.

I'd also love it if we could choose which major city area it could be set in and choose from a variety of backgrounds for the houses to be set against. Like say for Limsa it could be in the fields, on a cliff side or even on a small island. For Ul'dah it could be dunes, an oasis or at the end of a canyon path. Things like that would just add more customization options and you can never have too many options.

[Coombah]

Give me a house SE, I feel like a hobo..All we need is some cardboard box signs lol

[Grit]

I haven't met anyone who is opposed to the idea of a guild hall or Mog House. Everyone likes to have a piece of in-game property to call their own.

Some say that there is no "need" for a mog house, because our retainers store items and we can switch classes on the fly. But there are SO MANY other features that can be linked to a mog house, as the OP explains.

[Lienn]

I wouldn't worry about mog house. Its already made...just need them to unlock it.

MH = Inn near adventure guild. You even enter at gridania's MH during r30 GS quest (and they are very similar to FFXI MH in style).

I believe they're holding it because actually MH, AH and DB were near the same structure. Maybe they're holding this a bit for some reason since AH is also already made (Limsa near docks). I believe that, at correct timing, all three will be released at same time.

[Psion]

I wouldn't worry about mog house. Its already made...just need them to unlock it.

MH = Inn near adventure guild. You even enter at gridania's MH during r30 GS quest (and they are very similar to FFXI MH in style).

I believe they're holding it because actually MH, AH and DB were near the same structure. Maybe they're holding this a bit for some reason since AH is also already made (Limsa near docks). I believe that, at correct timing, all three will be released at same time.

That might be the case, and might not. Myself, I'd avoid jumping to conclusions that they already have the system. Even if they do, it might not mean they are closed to new ideas. They might either wind up using the mog house they got already for quest cutscenes and the like. If they already have such things though, that means they probably have a variety of furnishings and other models already designed to be used... which means if they rework the system to allow full customization of our mog houses with multiple rooms, and an outdoor area, they already have many of the building blocks to do it with.

And regarding Arcell's comment on RMT abuse of harvesting, I don't think there's much issue provided there's some thought put in how they make the nodes customizable to some extent, but perhaps a minimum distance being needed and a certain amount of nodes being placed, or the like. As it is, we have gathering fatigue that keeps you from harvesting on one class after a few hours or so till you wait for a while, like a day or maybe half a day if you do other things. On top of that, there's the randomness of nodes popping, and server side confirmation, which might not prevent botting but probably stops speed and position hacking. All this explains why I've probably yet to see any RMT botting on their botanist, miner, or fisherman, and I doubt it's because of the monsters since I've seen people botting that can somehow stop monsters from attacking them while they regen their health back.

Of course, if that's not all enough, there's the fact that it would cost a LOT of gil and items to make a gathering home that's worthwhile, too much for a single RMT to find worth it. For efficiency's sake, they would make one mega house and invite all their buddies to gather at that house, which means any suspicious activity, such as a character constantly using DotL classes and crafting at a house for days on end, would be easily spottable, and the damage dealt from finding all the RMT in one spot would be severe to them.

Of course, it would be costly for players to make their own secret gathering spot, especially the highest nodes and items. Imagine having to spend 2,000,000 gil and 50 gold ore to unlock gold ore on your grade 5 nodes, for instance. This would mean a player would either want to do it as a long term investment, or linkshells would band together to make someone's house the best, and use their home as a meeting ground and haven for crafters and gatherers of the linkshell.

[Skyline45]

YES!! For the love of God, where is my Mog House SE?!?!?!??