Why not just add instanced housing?

Its simple: Leave the plots how they are, and from the same area you access normal housing, add an option to enter an instanced housing area specifically for yourself. In place of the Ward selection, have it list everyone on your friends list, party, or simply a search bar for someone's name, so that you can enter it while they aren't there.

Just reuse the same assets from the original housing areas so no new assets have to be crafted for it. Just make it at a distance far off that overlooks the normal housing wards or something.

There, everyone has a house, no new assets need to be created, and this whole availability thing becomes something of the past.

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Originally Posted by kamikrazy

Its simple: Leave the plots how they are, and from the same area you access normal housing, add an option to enter an instanced housing area specifically for yourself. In place of the Ward selection, have it list everyone on your friends list, party, or simply a search bar for someone's name, so that you can enter it while they aren't there.

Just reuse the same assets from the original housing areas so no new assets have to be crafted for it. Just make it at a distance far off that overlooks the normal housing wards or something.

There, everyone has a house, no new assets need to be created, and this whole availability thing becomes something of the past.

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Instanced housing isn't the be-all end-all solution that many think it is. Current instances are not saved (e.g. nothing in the Inn Room is saved). In an instanced housing model SE still need to make sure all that data gets saved (object placement, character location etc.). This means that regardless of wards or instances SE is still going to have to purchase/setup hardware and storage.

Here's a quote about it:

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Finally, I’ve seen a few posts on the forums saying housing would be better if it was instanced like inn rooms are, so I want to point out that instances aren't saved. Nothing in an inn room needs to be saved; player housing, on the other hand, necessitates personal save data for things like furniture placement and character location. So, it would really amount to adding more land anyway.

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I talked a bit about this here.

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Originally Posted by Syrehn

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That's not quite accurate. The amount of data storage necessary for saving instanced housing would be drastically less than for creating an entire zone which simply works as a hub to access housing that is already instanced anyway.

Its the archaic and, frankly, rather odd approach SE has taken to housing that has turned it into such a debacle when perfectly working models exist both in other MMOs (Rift, WoW), as well as their own game (FFXI).

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Originally Posted by Shirobi

Its the archaic and, frankly, rather odd approach SE has taken to housing that has turned it into such a debacle when perfectly working models exist both in other MMOs (Rift, WoW), as well as their own game (FFXI).

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Well, some other MMOs have had neighborhood/community hub setups for housing like Wards in FFXIV, but they 1. launch with housing reclamation and 2. automatically add new wards when they get 80% full or so.

FFXIV's is definitely the worst implementation I've seen.

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Originally Posted by Syrehn

Instanced housing isn't the be-all end-all solution that many think it is. Current instances are not saved (e.g. nothing in the Inn Room is saved). In an instanced housing model SE still need to make sure all that data gets saved (object placement, character location etc.). This means that regardless of wards or instances SE is still going to have to purchase/setup hardware and storage.

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If the instance is only available to the owner, that stuff can be stored client side. Several things are already stored there (inventory sort, hotbars, macros) and all that would have to stay server side is a list of what furniture has been placed (but not where it was placed).

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Originally Posted by StouterTaru

If the instance is only available to the owner, that stuff can be stored client side. Several things are already stored there (inventory sort, hotbars, macros) and all that would have to stay server side is a list of what furniture has been placed (but not where it was placed).

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Honestly even stored server side it's not that much data, or shouldn't have to be. A single image-laden email would be far bigger than a list of items & positions and even a longer text email could easily be bigger. But, SE seems to have some very questionable architecture... :/

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

But, SE seems to have some very questionable architecture... :/

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AMEN

I cannot begin to the fathom the sort of inefficient in coding or the sheer antquity of their hardware that something as tiny as player housing, especially instanced player housing, has such a huge premium in server space and resources attached to it.

Something is terribly, terribly wrong with SE's architecture in this game, be it the coding, the actual hardware, or both.

I have to agree. I know it's been stated before but there are things that drive me crazy when I hear "we cant its too much memory" such as housing and whatnot. In FFXI -everyone- every main character, every alt has a two floor mog house, for free. this mog house also gives you more inventory. You can decorate your two floor house as you see fit with event items and craft-able just the same but -everyone- has one and it was free. You can mail rare/unique gear to your alts for them to use things you can no longer when your finished(not to mention sell the non rare/unique to people when your done to make back some money). We can mail our alts things in a game hit by PS2 and XBox360 restrictions vs our ps3. Im not saying FFXIV should be FFXI-2 but those things worked just fine and continue to do so, why is it so bad for these things? I would much rather give up my personal house for a instanced one without a yard if everyone could have the option to have one too. This game is heavily borrowed things from other games including FFXI, I wish they had kept those original ideas too as they worked for everyone, rather then who was fast enough to log on with deep pockets.

**Oh not to mention I log on FFXI every once and a while and it's nice to go back after a year and still have my cute cozy little house with all its seasonal events and unique furnishings not destroyed or just gone because I wasn't playing.

**On a third note im getting hit with "Unable to move, the server is congested" when entering my fc/personal a lot lately. There was never a time I couldn't enter my mog house in FFXI. Not only that but imagine that server load when all the inactive houses are gone to active players and were all trying to enter out houses. It's not gonna be pretty.

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Originally Posted by Kyri

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Exactly. SE is acting like this sort of thing is brand new to the industry and they are pioneering it like its 2002 or something when they had a superior, perfectly functional system in a game they made IN 2002.

Their rationale doesnt make any sense. This is like someone who built a Ferrari from scratch suddenly not being able to build a go-kart.

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Originally Posted by Kyri

I have to agree. I know it's been stated before but there are things that drive me crazy when I hear "we cant its too much memory" such as housing and whatnot. In FFXI -everyone- every main character, every alt has a two floor mog house, for free. this mog house also gives you more inventory. You can decorate your two floor house as you see fit with event items and craft-able just the same but -everyone- has one and it was free. You can mail rare/unique gear to your alts for them touse things you can no longer when your finished(not to mention sell the non rare/unique to people when your done to make back some money). We can mail our alts things in a game hit by PS2 and XBox360 restrictions vs our ps3. Im not saying FFXIV should be FFXI-2 but those things worked just fine and continue to do so, why is it so bad for these things? I would much rather give up my personal house for a instanced one without a yard if everyone could have the option to have one too. This game is heavily borrowed things from other games including FFXI, I wish they had kept those original ideas too as they worked for everyone, rather then who was fast enough to log on with deep pockets.

**Oh not to mention I log on FFXI every once and a while and it's nice to go back after a year and still have my cute cozy little house with all its seasonal events and unique furnishings not destroyed or just gone because I wasn't playing.

**On a third note im getting hit with "Unable to move, the server is congested" when entering my fc/personal a lot lately. There was never a time I couldn't enter my mog house in FFXI. Not only that but imagine that server load when all the inactive houses are gone to active players and were all trying to enter out houses. It's not gonna be pretty.

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The second floor of the mog house, being able to visit someone's MH and adding new features to the game (like the mog garden) has only happened now that the population has dwindled and it's not stressing the servers too much to implement. The amount of players is different as well. You can't compare the two.

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Originally Posted by Raxxon

The second floor of the mog house, being able to visit someone's MH and adding new features to the game (like the mog garden) has only happened now that the population has dwindled and it's not stressing the servers too much to implement. The amount of players is different as well. You can't compare the two.

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Considering its still a game with -much- much less options, older graphic and memory issues, still locked to ps2/xbox problems even though they are un-continued and some of those features have still been around for years, I think I will continue to hold my point on the subject, thank you. Im all for defending FFXIV as I love this game but yes. When a game designed with more limits can pull off something this one can't after completely rebooting it's a little silly. Especially when the cries for these changes aren't limitied to FFXI, they are things people see in almost all mmo's these days. My points went to FFXI because that's the games housing I have more experience with, and it's made by the same company. Other people are pretty much stating the same things in other games they played while I played FFXI and that it's still lackluster here with various excuses on why it's this way. Honestly how many MMO's should do this feature right before people can complain Yoshi's team did it poorly..?

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Originally Posted by Shirobi

Exactly. SE is acting like this sort of thing is brand new to the industry and they are pioneering it like its 2002 or something when they had a superior, perfectly functional system in a game they made IN 2002.

Their rationale doesnt make any sense. This is like someone who built a Ferrari from scratch suddenly not being able to build a go-kart.

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Actually I want to know what overlap there was between XI' devs and the people who worked on 1.0 (and subsequently got pinkslipped with Tanaka)

To be fair, it's not like these features can't be improved. They can only develop and implement a feature within the scope of the time they can afford (time and resources are finite). There's also, I'm sure, a series of standards that the game needs to be able to perform to, before a new feature is distributed to the public. It doesn't really matter how well a game is designed, if it doesn't run to an optimal standard (lag, crashes, etc.). They're not going to just throw a feature haphazardly, and then plop it into the game. This practice has been the ruin of many a game. I'd rather have a less than ideal feature added, than one that caused the game to crash. Again, they can always improve it later.

Also, just because another game may "do it better," doesn't mean that the devs of this game have access to their competition's design structure (they're not going to hand over their "blueprints" to the competition). They still have to figure out how it is going to be implemented in their own. There's no waving of the proverbial magic want that causes a new feature to be added instantly, perfectly designed and perfectly optimized (and perfectly received by the players). These things take time to design and develop, and even more time to perfect (partly based on user feedback, of course).

That being said, since we are paying customers, and they have provided us with this lovely forum, it's up to us to provide them with constructive feedback. We shouldn't allow them become complacent. Laurels are nice, but they don't pay their bills. We do. However, I'd say it would be a much better time for all to keep your expectations in check. It's perfectly acceptable to want better, but it's really not worth the energy to take it personally.

@OP

Not going to happen.

This is 1 of 100 threads on the housing forum just like it.

They said they will not do instanced housing.

They will not rehaul the system.. they are just going to make improvements to the current one.

We already have something approaching instanced housing with the personal chambers in FC housing, presumably they actually did budget the memory and storage requirements for every player having one of those. They just really need to make a version that isn't locked to being in an FC that owns an estate.

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Originally Posted by DarkDedede

... Again, they can always improve it later.

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This housing system was released in December of 2013 and in development well before that. It's already "later". They've had two years to fix this mess and they haven't done a single thing for it. (They've updated it a few times, but never with anything to address the problem.)

Ill be honest if they simply added a garden patch in the from of a Flower pot(s) or one of those wooden gardening boxes being able to be placed in our personal FC room.
It most likely solves quite some issues that people are having.
For me this has been the sole reason I never bothered buying a personal FC room I want to have access to gardening but without a own house I have not been able to.
Airships will be available for people outside of the FC and people that are in the FC but don't have worship rights.
Stables are available for everyone in a FC and its hinted it will come for people outside of an FC as well.
So that only leaves access to gardening.

I know people do want there own house hell me too, but if SE makes it possible to have access to gardening in my personal FC room. Then it definitely would take the heat of things and I just might settle with that instead.
I am still surprised why they never added a small garden to the private room to begin with or a closed veranda (greenhouse) attached to your personal room >_>

Guess it has something to do with the plant timers I guess but such a pity :(

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Originally Posted by Malackai

Airships will be available for people outside of the FC and people that are in the FC but don't have worship rights.

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Will they? I must have missed that. (I've got a personal house, but my FC doesn't have a house, so I've missed out on all the FC specific stuff so far. I'd love to have a personal workshop.)

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Originally Posted by Malackai

Ill be honest if they simply added a garden patch in the from of a Flower pot(s) or one of those wooden gardening boxes being able to be placed in our personal FC room.
...
I am still surprised why they never added a small garden to the private room to begin with or a closed veranda (greenhouse) attached to your personal room >_>

Guess it has something to do with the plant timers I guess but such a pity :(

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Plant timers wouldn't prevent their being in an instanced area like the private rooms (or a full sized instanced housing area either). Plant timers can already handle the instance being shut down and then re-started later from stored data. Currently that only happens during server maintenance, but that's often enough to prove SE has already coded how to make it work.

Stored data for a garden plot would need to remember what's planted there, when it was planted, when it was last fertilized, and when it was last tended. (It might also remember the total number of times it's been fertilized, but the simpler way would be to just adjust the time planted variable each time you fertilize it to make it appear further along in its growth cycle.) It's information that normal furnishings don't need, but it's only a limited amount of additional information.

And yes, I'm surprised it's not available in private rooms yet, too. A little private greenhouse area would be a great addition. Or even just an indoor planter with room for a couple plants. (The gardening system is too strongly based on intercrossing for single pots to work. Two plant beds would be the minimum, and be a reasonable size for an indoor planter box.)

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

Will they? I must have missed that. (I've got a personal house, but my FC doesn't have a house, so I've missed out on all the FC specific stuff so far. I'd love to have a personal workshop.)

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I think this refers to people being able to explore the airship islands even if they don't have an FC with airships. You take an airship from Ishgard instead

This is the only thing I can remember reading about airships for non-house owners

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Originally Posted by kamikrazy

Its simple: Leave the plots how they are, and from the same area you access normal housing, add an option to enter an instanced housing area specifically for yourself. .

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The more you post on the housing issues, the more I believe you've never read a single one of the 100+ threads from the past two years that have asked for this very same thing.

I've asked myself that same question for months... Why oh why do they insist on keeping the god damned wards which will always be insufficient.

By now they should allow us to just buy a floating island (of the size we can afford and have Cid tow it to the housing ward of our choosing in a cute cutscene) and then we'd build our house there just like we do on the regular wards... And we'd get an "Island Number" as our address.

As such our homes would be individually loaded and not have to be "always loaded in memory" on a ward server. They'd be loaded when someone teleports to them and unload when the last person leaves them (just like dungeons do). And they'd only reachable by teleport.

If you want to make it a neighbourhood then allow said islands to be linked to 4 more other houses (north, south, east, west) by "allagan jumping pads" or teleports (linked to the island number of our friends). Both tenants would have to agree they want to be linked and could unlink at any time. That way you'd have a neighbourhood with your friends, and not complete strangers...

I really don't care if the residential caretakers and other NPCs are stationed near the big aetherites in the large cities and that we don't have marketboards, we can go to a city for those.

But nooo... they have to keep them frigging wards... *sigh*

TL;DR They should let us buy islands from abalathia's spine and tow it to the housing areas an let us build there isolated (instanced separatedly) from the wards.

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Originally Posted by EthanParcival

I've asked myself that same question for months... Why oh why do they insist on keeping the god damned wards which will always be insufficient.

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Short answer: Because neighborhoods are purty.

Long Answer: they did wards because the devs have a thing with aesthetics and Neighborhoods are by far more aesthetically pleasing then instanced hosuing, especially when the gardens are customizable.

It's Fashion over Function, the same reason why the Devs put huge emphasis on 1.0 graphics to the detriment of everything else

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Originally Posted by Morningstar1337

It's Fashion over Function, the same reason why the Devs put huge emphasis on 1.0 graphics to the detriment of everything else

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Well, at this point I'm sure there are lots of players that want a house and don't care to live in a ward. I know my FC would not mind if we got 0 neighbours or not, but they'd like to have their own house (as a home base), their own private chambers, and their own airships... So Devs would do good to allow such players to build their houses apart and let whomever likes them pretty ward neighbourhoods to sit and wait till a plot opens up and they can move there.

Devs can have their fashion over function as much as they like, but at some point they should also provide an alternative for those gated functions.

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Originally Posted by Morningstar1337

they did wards because the devs have a thing with aesthetics and Neighborhoods are by far more aesthetically pleasing then instanced hosuing, especially when the gardens are customizable.

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Well instanced housing with customizable gardens in a choice of beautiful settings can be quite aesthetically pleasing too, if it's designed to be.

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

Well instanced housing with customizable gardens in a choice of beautiful settings can be quite aesthetically pleasing too, if it's designed to be.

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Maybe but the point is more to show off and lets be honest, how many people would come to an instanced home anyway? The players already avoid going into other peoples houses as it is.

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Originally Posted by Morningstar1337

Maybe but the point is more to show off and lets be honest, how many people would come to an instanced home anyway? The players already avoid going into other peoples houses as it is.

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Which is precisely my point...


Players already avoid houses other than their own. The wards are empty instances where people just teleport in and out of their houses, coz there is no reason to traverse the ward other than to get to a caretaker or a MB... I've already owned a house on Hyperion, and tbt I only spoke to one of my neighbours while the other 6 houses around politely ignored eachother at the MB. When was the last time you walked across the ward to say "oooh, nice lawn!"...

So as aesthetically pleasing as they are they're also wasted resources... People want their houses to share with their friends, not with strangers you were forced to move next to because that was the available plot. The only steady group of visitors you'll get in a house is the FC members that own the house...

I rather have my own space in a secluded floating island than have to wait forever till someone quits the game, or gets evicted for not playing to snatch an overpriced plot to build a house that in the end only I and my close friends will care for.

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Originally Posted by EthanParcival

TL;DR They should let us buy islands from abalathia's spine and tow it to the housing areas an let us build there isolated (instanced separatedly) from the wards.

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Because that was already answered on the first page: "Finally, I’ve seen a few posts on the forums saying housing would be better if it was instanced like inn rooms are, so I want to point out that instances aren't saved. Nothing in an inn room needs to be saved; player housing, on the other hand, necessitates personal save data for things like furniture placement and character location. So, it would really amount to adding more land anyway. - Yoshi-P"

The wards are nothing but a hub. I'm no programmer but when you talk about saving data like furniture placement and so on you can either do it server side or user side. FFXIV has to save almost everything on the server side because of PS3/PS4 users and their limited hard drive space. That takes up a lot of resources.

Yes FFXI also had instance housing but it was very limited by only being able to place certain items at certain spots. Also it was only much much later that other players could enter your houses. FFXIV housing grants much more freedom but that freedom comes at a cost.

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Originally Posted by Syrehn

Instanced housing isn't the be-all end-all solution that many think it is. Current instances are not saved (e.g. nothing in the Inn Room is saved). In an instanced housing model SE still need to make sure all that data gets saved (object placement, character location etc.). This means that regardless of wards or instances SE is still going to have to purchase/setup hardware and storage.

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Oh no! SE may have to get their hardware up to par with other MMOs! The horror!

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Originally Posted by Syrehn

Instanced housing isn't the be-all end-all solution that many think it is. Current instances are not saved (e.g. nothing in the Inn Room is saved). In an instanced housing model SE still need to make sure all that data gets saved (object placement, character location etc.). This means that regardless of wards or instances SE is still going to have to purchase/setup hardware and storage.

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You know, SE is gonna have to update their servers eventually, unless XI's servers lasted as long as the content did (which would explain a lot)

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Originally Posted by Naunet

Oh no! SE may have to get their hardware up to par with other MMOs! The horror!

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Originally Posted by Morningstar1337

You know, SE is gonna have to update their servers eventually, unless XI's servers lasted as long as the content did (which would explain a lot)

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SE never said they wouldn't update/add new hardware etc. Obviously they are or we never would have seen additional wards/sub-wards. Regardless of their reasons why (finances, hardware etc.) they're just not doing it fast enough for some players. Even once they do start adding more wards/storage they're not likely going to change their current ward model to an instanced model, much to the annoyance of some players that want instanced housing, and have given their reasons why.

Side Note: I'm pretty sure they mentioned the next time we're going to see more wards is after they finish the Housing Transfer feature they're working on; then after that, maybe some Ishgard wards.

I have this impression that the current housing system was a mod of a half-baked 1.0 architecture which didn't managed to see the sun due to the mountain of problems. Then now it's set in stone and yoshi and gang are lacking the resources (thanks to budget constraint) to overhaul the entire housing system.

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Originally Posted by Dyvid

Because that was already answered on the first page: "Finally, I’ve seen a few posts on the forums saying housing would be better if it was instanced like inn rooms are, so I want to point out that instances aren't saved. Nothing in an inn room needs to be saved; player housing, on the other hand, necessitates personal save data for things like furniture placement and character location. So, it would really amount to adding more land anyway. - Yoshi-P"

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It already saves housing data from the current wards. They're usually kept online 24/7, but they're shut down, saved to a database, and then reloaded from that data when needed. (Currently that only happens during server maintenance, but that it can ever happen means that SE has already coded for it and set up that database.) With individual instancing, that same pattern simply happens more often, saving processing on the servers by making them keep only currently used houses loaded rather than all of them. At any given time, only a small percentage of houses are actively being used, so instancing them saves the server from having to keep handling all the rest of them. The rest are just a negligible few bytes in a database until someone enters them again.

Ancient Alien Experts would tell you FFXI is getting a grand finally same day as out patch as a *wink-wink-nudge-nudge* to FFXI players to gtfo so FFXIV can re-purpose their servers.