Can we cut the ward system and finally go for instanced

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Originally Posted by Pablomaldito

All they need to add are instanced house exteriors and a directory for accessing them. That's really all that is missing for us to get instanced houses. The interiors are already instanced, so those are pretty much ready to go.

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This!!!!!! This is 100% the only issue here that is causing problems is the exterior housing. Like give us an instanced area where we can choose The background and have the interior connected to the exterior. I bet they could just increase the interior housing map size to include an exterior and bam, done. How can they instance a whole area like Bozja but not housing zones? Also why the size difference? If they can load mansions sizes as instance, why have all these different sizes? It's adding competition for no reason. If it's server issues, get the servers??? Or subscribe to a cloud based server system (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) to dynamically scale when needed.

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Originally Posted by Yuniko

I've lost 75 houses now. I've had a small for 4 years. SO i know how you feel hun. i truely do.

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So lost click fighting on gameplots for 3 years, since then the lottery?

Lost 75 houses medium and up, how can you lose it when the lottery system is new and before you had to clickfight bots?

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Originally Posted by CheshaSolttiri

This!!!!!! This is 100% the only issue here that is causing problems is the exterior housing. Like give us an instanced area where we can choose The background and have the interior connected to the exterior. I bet they could just increase the interior housing map size to include an exterior and bam, done. How can they instance a whole area like Bozja but not housing zones? Also why the size difference? If they can load mansions sizes as instance, why have all these different sizes? It's adding competition for no reason. If it's server issues, get the servers??? Or subscribe to a cloud based server system (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) to dynamically scale when needed.

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It’s not easy to get servers. There’s still a global chip semiconductor shortage. They cannot just add servers easily.

There will always be a shortage. Even if it clears up, I doubt they will lower prices, and will start to hold back inventory to inflate prices, why wouldn't they?

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Originally Posted by Ayan_Calvesse

Not all of us got their home in the lotto - some of us had to compete for months in click off's and could not simply walk up and ask a friend to loan them 3 million gil. You can literally beg for millions of gil now with almost zero effort. I agree a totally RNG system blows - but there are still homes to bid on even after this.

The reality is there is a shortage of supply - I would address the causes of the shortage in the system BEFORE building a entirely new system. Shell FC's in my opinion should not be a thing.

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Just because some of us have been around long enough to have suffered under an even worse system isn't justification to make newer players also suffer through a bad system.

The cause of the shortage of supply is SE choosing to use a ward system in the first place. It is not very flexible nor able to adapt to a rapidly growing players base. Instanced housing can.

The best way to fix the supply is to go with a full featured instanced housing system. Other games have done so successfully. They don't have the drama over housing that we have. Any player could get any housing location they wanted through their own effort and merit instead of relying on RNG to maybe gift them with a location they really want.

Keep it going everyone mega thread style

I like having neighbors, your best bet is to move to Dynamis since you can at least visit the other NA data centers and get a home there. The new wards on Dynamis have not opened for bidding yet, so you still have time to think about moving and you also have a very good chance to grab a larger plot when I won my large with my bid being the only one in Seraph which is the fullest of the new worlds. Otherwise, instance housing already exist in apartments and FC rooms and to a smaller degree, Island Sanctuary.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

Just because some of us have been around long enough to have suffered under an even worse system isn't justification to make newer players also suffer through a bad system.

The cause of the shortage of supply is SE choosing to use a ward system in the first place. It is not very flexible nor able to adapt to a rapidly growing players base. Instanced housing can.

The best way to fix the supply is to go with a full featured instanced housing system.

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I would not claim that "It was harder for me so tough luck" - the reason I bring it up is to clearly identify how I got my home so that folks do not make assumptions - I've been trying to upgrade to a medium unsuccessfully since the lotto came in. C'est la vie.

There is not a shortage of housing in the literal sense - there is a shortage of plum plots of some servers, a shortage of housing on overcrowded servers. I agree the system is not flexible and the overall technical overhead for Instanced housing will be worse then what the engine is currently dealing with. However its not like Square is going to come out and explain how awful their engine is at handling DB queries.

I disagree that the best fix for supply is to go full instanced - its merely rolling over and giving everyone exactly what they want so that they can stop playing when they check off that box and no longer have anything to strive for in that regard. At the same time those that did manage will essentially have their efforts undermined when SE hands over instances to all the people who could not manage to secure the plot they wanted. We need to stop speaking like there are no houses because the reality is that is not true by a long shot. As I pointed out in another thread many of the other games people love to cite have no where NEAR the level of engagement that the FF 14 community has in the housing system; its the reason I refuse to use them as "how to do it" examples - especially given how many are free-to-play. They don't have drama over housing because housing is not something those players care about - its a small facet of the gameplay.

I think the root causes of the loss of housing in the current system need to be looked at rather then building a entirely new system. Fixing the existing problems would probably do it; correctly limiting service accounts to housing limitations will help. accelerating the lotto process and the demo being active will also probably help a great deal. In a perfect world "housing" wards would be a "world" rather then a zone - to alleviate the problem we see with some worlds having fierce competition and others having none. I would also like to see wards treat bids as priority rather then limited. So rather then have a FC only ward; simply have a ward where FC bids are checked before private bids.

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Originally Posted by CatStarwind

Those are the Fight Club sub farm wards.

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I got my medium in a non-single ward owner. I have seen my neighbors like… 5-6 times in 7 months.

Honestly if the «*server capacity*» is the excuse, add specific wards that will generate duplicates when the last one is full or half filled, accessible with a premium fee. Plenty of people will go for it and it will feed costs the server for it, easily.

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Originally Posted by Hycinthus

It’s not easy to get servers. There’s still a global chip semiconductor shortage. They cannot just add servers easily.

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That's actually why fully instanced housing is better than the current ward system.

The interior of everyone's FF house, apartment, etc, sits as data stored on a server when unused. It doesn't take up server resources for processing and memory until it has to spin up an instance when someone wants to enter. When no one is inside the instance anymore, it can then clear the instance and let the home sit inactive as data again, freeing up server resources.

Housing wards however, are instances that need to remain loaded 24/7, and they're also much larger processing and memory footprint as they need to load significantly more items at once due to all of the exterior housing decorations of all of the homes, and the homes themselves, market board, aetherytes, etc. Every time they add new housing wards, they're having to dedicate more server resources towards keeping more and more housing wards always loaded, which is where that statement about the semiconductor shortage delaying adding more housing came from.

Fully instanced housing doesn't have the same problem as wards. The interior and exterior of homes would just sit as data on a harddrive when inactive, and data storage is still relatively very cheap and easy to come by even with the semiconductor shortage. They could theoretically let every single character have their own instanced home, and it wouldn't stress the servers any more than they currently are, unless everyone tried to be in their home at the same time. Which we've seen similar issues with certain major content patches, i.e. when Island Sanctuaries were released and everyone wanted to try them out, as Island Sanctuaries literally use the same server capacity as housing does. Even then, SE has load balancing in place that will restrict too many instances being opened at the same time.

How about we dont go for "fully instanced housing" ? That sounds like a good idea, people have worked for their houses as much as a lot of you have, they dont deserve their houses taken away from wards because you cant get one. You have multiple options to get a house, you can move to Dynamis, or to a less populated world in which there is more availability.

It really is time to stop this nonsense of wanting to punish the ones that got a house because you dont have one.

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Originally Posted by Stormpeaks

How about we dont go for "fully instanced housing" ? That sounds like a good idea, people have worked for their houses as much as a lot of you have, they dont deserve their houses taken away from wards because you cant get one. You have multiple options to get a house, you can move to Dynamis, or to a less populated world in which there is more availability.

It really is time to stop this nonsense of wanting to punish the ones that got a house because you dont have one.

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They could and probably should just leave the existing wards for people that want to live in a ward, and add fully instanced housing as an additional option.

Having to change servers just to be able to get a home also has a lot of draw backs for people, mainly in that it makes it more difficult to play with friends. Yes there's server and data center travel now, but those still have limitations like not being able to use your retainers and not being able to join an FC on another server.

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Originally Posted by Krakksie

Here is an example of 'soul'
https://i.imgur.com/pqTTeSD.png

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Beautiful................

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Originally Posted by SassyAssassin

Beautiful................

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It's certainly unique!

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Originally Posted by Xylira

They could and probably should just leave the existing wards for people that want to live in a ward, and add fully instanced housing as an additional option.

Having to change servers just to be able to get a home also has a lot of draw backs for people, mainly in that it makes it more difficult to play with friends. Yes there's server and data center travel now, but those still have limitations like not being able to use your retainers and not being able to join an FC on another server.

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It's not just housing though. The servers aren't evenly populated, and they need to be. As the player base expands, all they can do is add new servers, they can't make existing servers bigger.
What do you think is going to happen come 7.0 when nobody on Crystal can play the game? Stuck in a 6 hour log in queue while everyone else is making their way through the MSQ.
Evenly distributing players across worlds is something that needs to happen, and housing is as good a carrot as any. There's actually nearly enough houses for everyone who wants one, if they would just move off their congested worlds.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

It's not just housing though. The servers aren't evenly populated, and they need to be. As the player base expands, all they can do is add new servers, they can't make existing servers bigger.
What do you think is going to happen come 7.0 when nobody on Crystal can play the game? Stuck in a 6 hour log in queue while everyone else is making their way through the MSQ.
Evenly distributing players across worlds is something that needs to happen, and housing is as good a carrot as any. There's actually nearly enough houses for everyone who wants one, if they would just move off their congested worlds.

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Housing is not nearly enough of a good enough incentive to spread out the playerbase, If it were it would have already alleviated the problem. People want to be able to play with their friends without inconveniences and restrictions, and transferring servers goes directly against that unless entire friend groups choose to do so. Do you think anyone that does already have a house is going to want to lose their current home if they transfer servers along with their friends that don't? I highly doubt they would, resulting in distancing friends and splitting up communities. Unless SE can break down all of the barriers of server/DC travel limitations, or manage some kind of 'mega server' approach that many other MMOs have pulled off, there will always be a tendency for friend groups and communities to want to stick together, which inevitably leads to some servers ending up much more populated than others.

As for server overpopulation during expansion releases, yeah it sucks, but it calms down after 2-3 weeks. At least now with server/DC travel, players can choose to temporarily move to less populated servers to play, and then move back to their home DC/Server once things start to calm down. Which isn't ideal, but it's more tolerable than a full server transfer.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

It's not just housing though. The servers aren't evenly populated, and they need to be. As the player base expands, all they can do is add new servers, they can't make existing servers bigger.
What do you think is going to happen come 7.0 when nobody on Crystal can play the game? Stuck in a 6 hour log in queue while everyone else is making their way through the MSQ.
Evenly distributing players across worlds is something that needs to happen, and housing is as good a carrot as any. There's actually nearly enough houses for everyone who wants one, if they would just move off their congested worlds.

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It's up to players to make that choice for themselves, not for SE to force it on anyone. Housing is evidently not enough of a carrot for some, despite all their complaints.

Many players have this strange idea that everyone else is the problem and that the others should be the ones to move instead of accepting that they too are contributing to the problem. Problems get solved when those who see the problem do what's necessary to fix it. If they expect others to fix it for them, they're going to have a long wait.

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Originally Posted by Xylira

Housing is not nearly enough of a good enough incentive to spread out the playerbase, If it were it would have already alleviated the problem.

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Except a year ago, the game was in a very different state. There was no data center travel. There were only 5760 plots per world.

Now we have data center travel. Now there are 9000 plots per world (except on the new worlds), a 55% increase. But the data center travel is still new and many players are skeptical about how using it often will impact their game experience.

As one of those who had been skeptical and has moved characters to Dynamis, I can say it's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Then again, I was already used to using world visit a lot for hunts so I was experienced with a lot of traveling between worlds.

I think a lot of the hesitation would go away if SE could implement communication channels between logical data centers on the same physical data center. There's very little difference between world visit and data center travel other than losing access to FC chat and cross world linkshells. Wait times for data center travel have been generally short (usually less than 3 minutes and mostly under a minute) except patch week. If your social circles tend to rely on Discord instead of the game chat channel, there's really no difference between the two.

1 year and 2 months later a winning bid finally came through for an upgrade of small to medium. Do i still stand by what I said on my first post? 100% I do stand by it.
On multiple occasions during this lotto cycles I was considering dropping the game due to the frustration the bid system causes (the prior system was not any better either).

I still honestly want to see an instanced housing system to be implimented to allow all players to take part in the housing content. So no londer do players have to suffer from the endless supply of refund days for the housing plaque board.