Perhaps personal housing should be scrapped in favour of personal rooms
So my friends and I had a good laugh when the patch notes were posted and personal housing was simply FC housing for an individual. We changed our plans for personal housing and purchased a small house for our FC instead. (Yes, we managed to snag a plot. FYI, all the small plots in Lavender Beds were snapped up in 10 minutes. No exaggeration.)
Still, we were curious about SE's reasons for the way things are. After reading Yoshida's post, I think perhaps the solution is to scrap personal housing altogether.
SE's reason for the way things are:- Server limitations.
- Efficient utilization of plots (hence no separate wards for FCs and individuals).
- Players want core FC housing features for personal house (hence why they are almost the same thing).
SE's proposed long term solution:
The problem: Assuming SE is adamant about making every house part of a ward (i.e. no personal instanced house for every player a la Wildstar), then really, adding more wards will not do much to mitigate the situation. Demand far exceeds supply. I think it'd be impossible extremely expensive to implement wards to cater for just 20% of subscribers even. It isn't sustainable.
It'd make a lot more sense to restrict plots to FCs and have personal rooms take the place of personal housing.
This achieves the following:- Better server resource utilisation as a house now caters to many players instead of just one individual.
- Adding a ward provides a lot more homes for players. One big house can accommodate a few hundred players instead of just one player.
- No worries about providing separate wards for individuals and FCs.
- Players are encouraged to be part of a community.
- FC rank 6 is a pretty good way to discourage multiple house ownership.
- Players have access to all housing features. No worries about which features should be FC or personal.
- Players still get their own little piece of heaven to decorate and mess around with.
- Server resources can be directed to supporting better/more housing features such as more gardening plots, more slots for decorations etc instead of being spent just so one individual can own a house.
- Personal rooms are affordable. FC housing prices seem to be accepted by the playerbase as it is something that many people can work together to achieve.
- An NPC run large house can be placed in each ward for players who abhor the idea of joining a FC to buy their personal rooms. So yes, it's kinda like an inn... but you can decorate... and you have neighbours.
- The system is already in place. SE doesn't need to redo anything. They just need to make it official that personal rooms = personal house.
Hopefully SE will be able to sort this soon so they can move on to provide a better housing experience rather than struggle to provide the basic housing experience.