[Suggestion]After Apartments, get ready for... Neighborhoods! (instanced housing)

Everyone's asking for it (for a good reason) but here's my vision for it.

The concept borrows heavily from Apartments, in part to show how the framework for this already exists. Keep in mind this is a basic concept and isn't meant to address every single thing (biggest issue right now is how to deal with house sizes). This also isn't going to address FC houses, although I feel a lot of it applies to that as well. This talks about houses, as in house+yard, to clarify any misunderstandings.

The core concept mimics Apartments. There's a central hub with useful NPCs from which you can teleport to your house. All the relevant NPCs like Junkmonger, Material Supplier, Housing Merchants and the likes, including an FC chest and a Market Board will be available in this space. In this way we might even get more of a community feel than the current Wards enable by pure volume of players having to use this particular area. Apply instances as necessary.

Upon purchasing a plot of land, players will be able to preview the layout of the house as some houses have different yards and house location within the yard based on plot. While instanced houses will be free of actual location constraints, this will add flavor and keep all houses of the same size from being exactly the same.
OPTIONAL: there will be actual view of the ward your house is supposedly in. Houses can be generated at random completely, or selected at random from existing houses in your residential area. How confusing to have your neighbors change every time you load in!

"But what if I want to have people visit me?!"
Having a list of houses in a residential area is going to be horrendous, given that in this utopian setting everyone can have one so long as they can shell the gil for it. Therefore I suggest the action of "Invite to House". Upon accepting the invite, the player in question will have the option temporarily to enter the landlord's house. Instead of having an endless list of houses, each player will see the list of houses they have access to, be it that its their own, their FC's, a shared estate, or if they were invited over as guests.

The visual I get is akin to Wildstar. Although really any instanced housing. It's hard for me to imagine a house just sitting by itself in this game. I like the idea though.

Can we have a garden when using the apartment ? ... or some piece of a public garden ?

I personally don't care much about house (it should be restricted to Free compagny like it was at the beginning but it's my 2 cents)

I am just disappointed that I can't make some funny stuff with a garden ... I just have two pots but I can't make hybrid stuff...so sad

I have to echo the above poster. Your idea is good, and reminds me a great deal of Wildstar's housing system which I was a pretty big fan of. I'm not sold on the community aspect we have shoved in our face right now with wards, so having a place where your friends and FC mates can get to is really all that would matter.

Tried to clarify it a bit in the OP. The idea is that from the hub, similar to how you teleport to your apartment in the apartment building, you'll teleport straight to the gate to your plot, so yes, you'll get gardens.
We can say you don't get to walk around the neighborhood and have to go straight home because loitering is forbidden lol

Bouncing because this is relevant, all the more with them rethinking things for 4.2

It's similar to what I have been saying. I figure you could make the current ferry entry points the common area with the swimming holes, shops and MB. I thought they could go with a standard sized lot and how much land you have left depends upon you house size. A small house would have more exterior space available than the large and allow for a migration path as players got money to buy a larger dwelling. Much like real life. Going this route would not only allow for increasing the exterior item count but for you to pick your view. By the way there are a bunch of these type discussions under the forum housing heading.

The issue with the invite thing is how does one invite the whole server into their house. As you are on Balmung you are most likely aware of the FCs that hold server wide events in their houses, and some FCs use private homes for this as well to ensure they have the space to host the entire server. Inviting people one by one would make this completely impossible and I would imagine most of the RP community would likely be unhappy with such a set up. Even on my own stance with my personal house I just would never be able to bring myself to turn it in for an instanced house. No instance setting will likely give me the same feel as I have with the spot I have in LB. This was a plot I had been trying to get for years for a very specific reason, and will fight to keep for that same reason.

How are they inviting them today? I see no reason you shouldn't be able to enter some type of identifier to go to someone's house if it isn't locked.

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Originally Posted by Vrankyl

The issue with the invite thing is how does one invite the whole server into their house.

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Large scale teleport (Owner of plot/tenants set by plot owner can teleport up to 7 players at once into the plot by using the teleport function similar to how everyone in the group gets a group teleport), or just have a "house ID finder" that is a string of numbers and letters and give them the ID. The players can then enter it at the ward entrances and attempt to join. Have a blacklist in case you want to reject certain people to get in while it is free join, invitation/white list and lock/unlock free join.

It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood.

I like that idea. Could sort of be like how you generate Discord channel invites, for instance. Then you could also set whether or not this token expires, like if you don't want people to be able to access your house after the event is over. It can be spread the same way you spread information about the event, either in forums, tumblr boards, or party finder, to name a few examples.

you do realize even instance housing has its limits. why do you think each appartment only has 515 ish rooms in each ward?

hell look at the start of storm blood.

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Originally Posted by BigRed5392

you do realize even instance housing has its limits. why do you think each appartment only has 515 ish rooms in each ward?

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Housing: 50 houses per ward x 12 wards x 4 housing districts = 2400 houses total
Apartments: 90 houses per apartment building x 2 buildings per ward x 12 wards x 4 housing districts = 8640

Compared to houses, we have more than 3 times the apartments already. Plus, when they released apartments, they said that more could be released at any given time. That's because opposite to adding entire wards, which are a zone in and of themselves that require managing and designing, they simply need to add a couple of more rows to this:

https://image.prntscr.com/image/jpeY...Y30pwetVsw.png

The overall interface wrapping apartments is much simpler and more easily expandable.
Furthermore, because apartments are unrelated to each other, unlike houses in wards, managing resources is much easier. Under the theoretical situation where you have only the one occupied plot in a ward, you need to maintain that entire ward. Apartments, not as much. Much easier to manage. Many of the existing problems with housing would be solved almost instantly if they moved to a similar system.

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hell look at the start of storm blood.

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Different stress tests. Stormblood's release was a the servers straining under the load of all these players logging in at the same time. Instanced housing would require space to save the data. It's still resources but it's different resources.