The big housing problem, why it isn't the amount of houses

Alright so lets do a little math here to put this into perspective..

4 zones, 24 wards, 120 houses per ward, 2,880 houses per zone, 11,520 houses per server. 48 apartment complexes per zone, 192 apartment complexes overall, 34,560 apartments per server.

With Ishgard housing it will be:

5 zones, 120 wards, 120 houses per ward, 2880 houses per zone, 14,400 houses per server, 48 apartment complexes per zone, 240 apartment complexes overall, 43,200 apartments per server.

I think the issue is not the amount of houses square, I think the issue is the distribution as well as the systems in place.. You don't need more wards. You need instanced housing per player.

This isn't a issue with the number of houses, I mean for the love of god just look at the math and how much of a cluster F this is.. It's about the execution.

also the ability to own a FC house and a private house on a single character means the rich can use alts to buy up all the houses while the poor struggle to find a single one

housing should be limited to one house on one character per account that will allow more people to own a house

Instanced player housing would be a 100% fix, make the wards smaller, take away apartments, and give players instanced housing instead. Would take a load off the servers, cause them to stop having to worry about making more fricken wards which its really tedious to go through every ward and subdivision as is.. And really just help all around.

Personally i would like to see a mix of the two housing systems rather than continuing to add new wards, maybe it could be an upgrade of the apartments system. If it's doable.

100% I get the appeal of doing housing districts. Waaaaaaaay back before there was a housing crisis back when I was on Gilgamesh, we were able to plan where people bought up housing, so different RP FC's could neighbour each other, it worked really well. And when we moved to Balmung, we managed to get some very social neighbours and it was great. But they left for Shirogane when that opened up and it was dead. And when we moved to a large, it feels many of the houses don't get a lot of use from a social aspect.

And we're in a position where one of the biggest appeals of a housing district is negated by the huge demand and lack of supply. People can't neighbour their friends or FC's they're friendly with. And many districts are dead for activity, so it's not like everybody gets to meet and interact with their neighbours.

And in addition to that, instanced housing would be the better option for a lot of people. I would like to see a big of both and for an incentive scheme for people to trade their house in for an instanced one.

My implementation of instance housing I think would also offer something housing districts don't. And that would be to be able to set a background theme/location. Because you'd only be restricted to the space your house is in, I think the backdrop it sits on could be themed around different zones in the game. For example: you could have Yanxia as your backdrop, Azys La, The Azim Steppe, Ala Mhigo and so on.

I think it'd go as far as alleviating requests like "I want a housing District in the Crystarium" or "I want Ala Mhigan housing" and for the upcoming expansion, "Thavnairan housing when?"

And for me personally, I see an RP advantage because you might create an RP set in a certain place. For example, I run a steppes themed RP and I used a person house in the Lavender Beds for it, we're not making use of any kind of neighbourhouod, so instanced housing would not negatively impact us and if implemented in the above way, I could even better create the effect of it being on the Azim Steppe.

I agree and consider where the biggest strain comes from on the housing side right now, rendering all of the houses, npc's, furnishings, players, and whatever else is in each ward.

That takes a TON of processing which can easily be solved by using individual instances to render smaller chunks at a time. That's as much a nightmare for the players as it is a logistics nightmare on SE's side.

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Zitat von ryouma17

also the ability to own a FC house and a private house on a single character means the rich can use alts to buy up all the houses while the poor struggle to find a single one

housing should be limited to one house on one character per account that will allow more people to own a house

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Not to split hairs but it already is. You're limited to one personal/private house per account, as far as I'm aware of there aren't work arounds to this. FCs are a different story but still also have their limitations depending on certain circumstances.

All of this is like trying to make a minecraft server to support 250,000 players on a pentium 4.. It could be done. But you're putting way more strain on your servers than you need to.

The trouble with doing instanced housing at this point is that they would have to scrap people's old houses. Some players have had houses continuously since it was implemented. Beyond that, they'd likely need dedicated instance servers just for housing, because the normal instance servers currently compile per data center for every duty including solo instances. Imagine they implement instanced housing with the instance servers the way there are right now. Imagine Raubahn Savage, but just to get your character into your house.

If you're expecting instances like when they split zones and story hub areas into 1, 2, 3, that only works because it's just a copy paste. It's a lot easier to compress. I don't think everyone wants the same house. If the instanced houses aren't uniform, then the variables that have to be saved don't really change. Are they going to sell large, medium, and small housing instances? Will the object limit in each house be higher or lower? What happens to all of the recipes in the game for changing the outside of your house? Is there going to be a hub where we choose what housing instance to enter? If so, how will you limit congestion of that area?

What happens to yard ornamentation? The exterior furnishings? Mailboxes? A lot of the appeal of housing for me is being in the yard of the house, and making the house look good from the outside too.

It's easy to say just implement instanced housing and fix this cluster flux, but it's not that simple.

I used to be a huge fan of the wards because it felt like a fun neighborhood. However due to the nature of the game and the fact that a lot of homes are own by alt characters/people on hiatus, the wards feel very empty. I would like to see the limitation of 1 house per account implemented as well as more important NPCs being brought to wards to make them more populated. Instanced housing would be dope too but I feel like they're gonna be introducing something like that in the new expansion with the "Stardew Valley" type island paradise instance. We shall see.

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Zitat von RyoXander

the wards feel very empty

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In my opinion this is the real problem with the way housing content is designed. The devs forsaw a community building experience with neighbours and even wards, so they built the system the way it is built. But because there's so little to actually do in the wards, the whole concept fell flat on its face, just like the real world.

While there are FCs and even LS (or Fellowships nowadays) milling around in the wards, they're the extreme minority.

There's just too little reason for the rest of the playerbase to ever visit the wards. Maybe seasonal events could be held in the wards instead?