Regarding the New HQ Turn-in Feature and Housing Situation

I am a newer player and when I play an mmo I like to have a goal, and that goal isn't raiding because I am a carer in real life.

I would love to have my own house, and am fine with this being a long term goal, but now I just feel that it will be impossible. I can't stand around for days spamming a placard. Players should only be able to own one house.. how on earth did that person on twitter manage to buy so much up?!

I'm really worried it'll be FC+Relocators first, then weeks later it'll open to first time buyers (if anything is left) like in the past when wards were added. That doesn't help newer players/returners :( Yes, it'll open plots in the old wards, but then we have to fight the very long hidden timer again (as we already are doing) & more people :(

I understand FC's going in first of course, but relocators too? Maybe 1 ward in each area could be just for the new/returning/other players who haven't got a home at all, for a week? We keep camping+clicking placards for many hours & 10-20 people per placard for 9-18hrs-ish, it's the only way at the moment :( The chances are very low that way, and the invisible timer being estimated 22hrs or even more at max, if someone is determined to get a home, its a very long time to wait and click and hope, and then for one reason or another you lose it and you have to start all over again. I'm worried for peoples health, cause some of us can be really stubborn!

The only way I can think of it working for a while maybe, is if 6 wards are opened? 3 wards = 720 plots, 6 wards = 1440 plots. That way if FC's and relocators get in first, surely 1440 people don't take that many plots in a week, and if they do or close to it, that's at least more plots opening up in old wards so that the amount of people at placards waiting, is spread out a bit more. And it would give us a little less reason to panic if we're new home owners and are not allowed into the new wards first.

I love the feeling of the community suburb feel, and I understand why it's wanted :) Some don't really want it, and that's another whole discussion/thread for that. But I am glad they know there's stress on housing at the moment and are trying to fix it a bit now, in the crazy world we're in at the moment.

(Splitting post due to character limit again)

From the latest Lodestone topic:

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To support the addition of housing plots, all data centers will require additional servers.

We are making preparations to account for the cost of these additional servers, but due to restrictions on shipments from Japan to other countries due to COVID-19, as well as the potential necessity of quarantine upon entry and re-entry to different countries, work to ready the servers is slow-going.

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First of all, thank you for acknowledging this problem, and I understand that the current working conditions make it difficult to address it in the best way possible.

However, I do not think that this is a good long term solution:

1/ As people have expressed here the biggest issue with housing, and the lack of available plots, is the system not the quantity itself. We have pointed out that one person has possession of an entire ward in Spriggan. From what I've heard it's also common practice on Japanese servers. It's also very common for people to make characters on several servers with a private house, meaning that a single player can very easily have A LOT MORE than a house + FC house + apartment, and therefore prevent other players from getting even one small private plot.

2/ On top of having limited available plots due to other players monopolizing them as mentioned in 1/ , the system makes it particularly unfair to new players who have to wait for hours to try to get a plot, and compete against other players who might have more free time to spend clicking a placard every few minutes. Not to mention people who relocate right under their nose, or people who use third party tools to know when the timer is done (this has happened several times on Cerberus, witnessed by me and others: a person arrives right on time, clicks on the placard the second none of us are, and acquires the plot under our eyes. No relocating, just "assisted luck").

(1/2)

3/ Since 5.3 and its new crafting recipes, people have been farming Tomestones of Phantasmagoria to buy their materials. The most efficient way to achieve that is to join a hunt train (people scout A ranks in Shadowbringers maps, announce in linkshells and on social platforms such as Discord that a train is starting, and people join to kill the A ranks in a predetermined order).
Since the addition of the cross-world visit system and the expansion of cross-world linkshells, this practice has become the norm, and hunt trains have become overly popular AND populated.

Current hunt trains congest the cross-world visit queue.
Current hunt trains congest instances of Lakeland.
Current hunt trains congest Shadowbringers maps where there are no instances as well.

Last Saturday a hunt train on Cerberus had over 300 people. Many were late because the instance that was announced was congested, many couldn't even see the A rank and target it because there were too many people. Imagine what the mental state of these people was, and how players interacted in chat. This can happen on every server on the Chaos data center. There are at least 3 hunt trains per server on Chaos everyday. Meaning that the chances of new players (and players who are not interested in hunts) not being able to access an instance or a map on their home world are very high, and will impair their game experience.

Adding more servers will create more cross world hunt trains with more people from all servers and make congestion worse on all servers.

Adding more servers is a necessary step for any MMO as the player base grows, but this will not address these issues properly and instead create more issues to solve.
- The housing system needs to be redesigned to provide everyone with the same chances of getting a plot. Some solutions mentioned here and elsewhere: wards only for FCs, instanced housing like apartments with an interior and an exterior, restrict housing per account/player and not per character, etc.
- The hunting system needs to be redesigned as well to provide new hunters a chance to hunt on their own server, and prevent congestion on all servers. Some solutions that have been mentioned on various platforms: sync the level of players to A and S ranks (so lvl 50 ones don't die in less than 3 seconds), restrict hunt rewards and kill counts to local B, A and S ranks (the way you can't access Firmament or your retainers from another server).

I understand that these are solutions that are difficult to put in place without facing technical issues, a lot of production effort that you might not have at the moment and potential backlash from some of the player base, but it would improve every player's game experience a lot more than just adding additional servers.

(2/2)

(and again I have no idea if those threads are ever reported to the dev team which is really depressing...)

How nice it must be to believe that HQ turn-in is one of the two things that asked for a special message from the producer...

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Originally Posted by SchwarzwaelderTorte

Adding more servers will create more cross world hunt trains with more people from all servers and make congestion worse on all servers.

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I suspect you may be misinterpreting the "additional servers" part. I don't think they're adding new worlds (although they might be). It sounded to me more like they are just trying to add more hardware to handle the housing load. Which makes clear to me why "just add more wards" is always more complicated than it sounds, constantly requiring yet more hardware to keep up.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

I suspect you may be misinterpreting the "additional servers" part. I don't think they're adding new worlds (although they might be). It sounded to me more like they are just trying to add more hardware to handle the housing load. Which makes clear to me why "just add more wards" is always more complicated than it sounds, constantly requiring yet more hardware to keep up.

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I agree that I might have misinterpreted this, so everything related to hunts might not be affected, but the issue of housing still remains: more wards won't solve the problem of plot shortage if the housing system is not partially or entirely redesigned, for the reasons I mentioned.

the game does need additional servers, most if not all worlds are full on a regular basis, even during the extended patch downtime at off peak times

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Originally Posted by Recon1o6

the game does need additional servers, most if not all worlds are full on a regular basis, even during the extended patch downtime at off peak times

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They're not adding more servers to play on, they're adding physical servers to have more capacity for extra wards.

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Originally Posted by SchwarzwaelderTorte

You mean a single person?

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I dont wanna say piece of t##### but dam... go and play sims or smt >_>

I mean, its is kinda sad if a mod registered at Oct. 2019 and has now, a 3/4 year later amazing 7 posts lol