I have a legitimate question about housing (not an angry post)

This is not an angry post about housing, but rather an honest question - not asked to be snarky or rude but out of genuine curiosity.

For NA servers, not too long ago we moved data centers from Montreal to California. It was supposed to improve performance and such. But a server is a monstrous thing -- I mean, they do so many things - they're the lifeblood of an MMO. So I can see why we moved. This was done to give us (taken from the original thread) --

Increased inventory capacity
Worldless (cross-world) party matching and friend management
Additional content & increased field size for new areas

Which is awesome -- not complaining about that at all. But what happened to housing in the mix? If we can have open fields for new areas, why are we not able to have more wards? I'd understand if you can't do instanced housing as has been requested so many times, but on my server, which isn't even congested, houses were sold out within minutes. The demand is insane!

My question is just...what is the process behind setting up and creating wards? What is difficult about it? We may not be server admins, but the community has come up with great suggestions in the past to improve different things in the game and many have been implemented.

I think most of the players would gladly forego a dungeon or some other usual content for the addition of more wards or more housing areas...maybe even some from Heavensward. Wouldn't we?

(And before anyone says I'm just complaining because I didn't get a house or something -- I already have one and didn't want to move so I don't have a horse in this race).

Leviathan is actually one of the highest populated servers, in case you weren't aware! It rivals Gilgamesh in terms of active players and I saw a statistic recently that it actually surpassed Gilgamesh.... So I'm not too shocked about housing going so fast there (although I wonder why it isn't locked yet). That being said, I'm not really sure why they can't add more housing wards. It's a bit ridiculous - just look at the forums here. So many people couldn't get a house. There were errors and crashes abound. Why is this happening? FFXIV makes plenty of money, this shouldn't be happening.

I recently made a post about why SE may not realize the extent of the problem on NA servers (compared population of JP and NA servers), but why aren't any representatives for the NA side of things bringing this to the attention of the JP side of the company? I don't understand. It's ridiculous and I say this as someone who DID get a house, granted I'm on the least populated server on NA currently. But still. All medium and large houses were gone even on my server within probably 10 - 15 minutes. Smalls were up for quite awhile after the fact, though.

Oh! I just never see it on the Congested list with Balmung and Gilgamesh which is why I thought it wasn't as populated.

I guess I just thought that this data center move was supposed to give everyone more freedom and flexibility and open space -- including housing wards. I was really surprised that when Shirogane was announced that new wards in the old areas weren't announced in addition.

I think Shirogane in itself was the expansion to the housing system, and it genuinely is a huge addition to it.

It just still isn't enough. We need anywhere from 3 to 10 times the amount of wards per server, and that STILL may not be enough if FCs amd private homes remain on the same system.

The neighborhood system SE came up with requires an astronomical amount of data to load at once just from everyone's exteriors. Then you add in the fact each house has to be able to hold up to 200 individual FC rooms, plus however many apartments, and now personal housing storage, you have a intensely bloated system.

A quick breakdown of the limitations of the housing and ward system as it's implemented from an educated observer.

The biggest issue with the wards and housing are exactly the external features of homes. What color house, what type house, what type of fence, what color, what are the decorations in the yard, how many, what color, what position, are they in a state of being moved? All that information needs to be calculated in real time; certainly a ton of that can remain static since it's not being used, but the details of all that takes a ton of server space and server calculation time. If the server is handling the inside and outside of your house (state of objects), then that's even more server load. At some point you just have to make a decision as to how much server resources you're going to provide for housing. Does 1 server handle housing (eg sarg server handles all of sarg housing) or does each server have a secondary server dedicated to housing? Does it make sense financially to provide another server for housing. If so, should it be 1 server per district or 1 housing server per server (eg 1 for sarg, 1 for midgard, 1 for tonberry etc)? Does it make sense financially to provide 1 server per ward? If so, then ward size could dramatically increase. There will always be trade-offs on server resources and instanced dungeons and open world content will always take priority over housing until there's a financial incentive to provide more housing. Just like you can spend extra for extra retainers, would you be willing to pay extra for instanced housing and the dedicated instance servers required?

I would provided that we got to keep it (and it wasn't a monthly fee, for example).

I wonder how it's currently handled. Is there like a big housing "server" that's just partitioned into worlds? Or does each world have its own housing sub-server section...

Not to mention it is easy to say expend the server for housing. What happen when population drop and they need to lost some server and there are a couple of housing left in a ward? People keep on mentioning cloud sever...I still blame microsoft crackdown 3 presentation for cloud server.

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Originally Posted by Xellos2099

Not to mention it is easy to say expend the server for housing. What happen when population drop and they need to lost some server and there are a couple of housing left in a ward? People keep on mentioning cloud sever...I still blame microsoft crackdown 3 presentation for cloud server.

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Cloud servers are great, to an extent. 5-15 minute provision time, cost based on server uptime etc. However, with a game like this; cloud server expenses can quickly skyrocket. Not only do you have to provision cloud servers, but you also need load balancers and firewalls. Cloud firewalls and load balancers s*ck b*lls horizontal scaling usually ends up being MORE expensive than vertical scaling (more smaller servers usually end up costing more than fewer larger servers). Not to mention the accounting nightmare when you try to figure out what portion of the expenses were for what aspect of the game. Fixed provisioning makes it much easier to figure out how to allocate resources for the monthly fee we pay. And any time you're in a system like this, you've likely already got private cloud provisioning for instanced content (you'd likely be sitting on a fixed utilization here too). Unfortunately, cloud servers don't solve all the problems and often times add even more complexity and points of failure.