free companies and housing?

so i was just watching some of the letter from the producer live 2
and i remember watching it from along time ago and being excited about housing and how we would be able to add decorations, a garden, maybe even a chocobo stable. it all just sounded amazing. they said it was going to be available for free companies which, to be honest, wasnt clear what that exactly was.

i had always assumed a free company was just a person acting on his own. like, you are your own company or something. but after some time passed and i watched it again today, i remember that im pretty sure free company is something like a minimum of 4 people. which in not sure how that works with housing, it kinda sucks then, its not really personal housing.

so im looking for whatever information i can about,
what the housing plans are?
what exactly is a free company?
is there going to be any kind of actual personal customizable housing if this is not it?
im also interested to hear what your thoughts are about personal housing and what you would want that to be like

Free Company = Grand Company
Housing = Free Company Estate
Free Company Estate = customizable place, hang out area with friends.

I'm pretty sure Free Companies are still in the works, so the first line of the post above is likely incorrect. It was originally described so long ago as a group of players (like a linkshell is already, which is why it's confusing <_<), but you could only join one Free Company or something...

Hopefully housing will come for both players as well as free companies.

From what I remember, a free company is similar to a clan, but with one main difference. A free company pledges allegiance to one of the grand companies, and those that join the free company don't have to be in that specific grand company. That means that if you are of the Maelstrom, and want to do some Adder's events, you can join a free-company that is pledged to the Adder's Nest.

The events, iirc, are free-company specific. So it's stuff to do with your friends that don't require everyone to be in the same grand company (unlike escorting, etc). I don't remember reading anything about the rewards, but maybe seals redeemable for free-company specific items like Player Housing, decoration, special barding?

iirc, free companies will be analogous to what other games call "Guilds", where as linkshells were intended to be smaller (hence the 128 cap on ls members) subsets of the said Free Companies.

I have to say that I'm worried as well about that. I usually hate it when mmorpg's add housing but only refering to guildhouses. Which is why I loved the moghouse system in ffxi.
I certainly hope they add personal housing. I don't mind them adding both but I really would prefer a personal one that people can visit, over a guildhouse. I loved buying furnishing from my moghouse and even had different interior sets. Besides personal reasons, I also believe that it could help the ingame economy and allow crafters to do something else than crafting the usual stuff.

I think you might be mistaken, the "housing" is suppose to be actual housing and Yoshida is hoping to have it where you have neighborhoods rather then something like a mog House. So basically you could have your house and then 9 other people in the same neighborhood around you.

He did say that if possible he would like to have the core of housing down before 2.0 but only the next VU will tell if that's possible or not, odds are we'll have to wait til 2.0 but I am excited to see how housing turns out, since it's planned atm to be a personal area and a place where you can garden. Most likely there are other concepts in the work but the core idea they have is housing, gardening and I think also a crafting workshop.

Having neighbors would be cool for sure! Although you goto your home and go: "Where's my chocobo?" And then your neighbor Jack Black comes riding down the street, stoned, saying "Oops I thought this was my choco-chocoa."

inb4 people complain about Free Company estates being instanced and how unbearably unreasonable that is, and that they should be in the middle of Coerthas.

This is probably what I'm looking forward to the most.

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Originally Posted by Ruisu

inb4 people complain about Free Company estates being instanced and how unbearably unreasonable that is, and that they should be in the middle of Coerthas.

This is probably what I'm looking forward to the most.

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Yeah that'll definitely happen, before they realize how awful it is to have player towns cluttering zones and eventually turning into ghost towns as people quit.

I'm hoping the Free Companies get some kind of large customizable area to themselves but in addition to personal player housing.

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Originally Posted by RicoJalapeno

Having neighbors would be cool for sure! Although you goto your home and go: "Where's my chocobo?" And then your neighbor Jack Black comes riding down the street, stoned, saying "Oops I thought this was my choco-chocoa."

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Now THAT made me laugh XD

My Ideal:

Large Instanced Area with Lots of Space to let us build a town in any layout we like using our disciple of hands to build housing, halls, forges, etc for the guild. Items gathered from our disciple of lands can go into a large store house so that our disciples of hands can draw from stocks instead of inventories to build said structures.

Let us in some fashion terraform the landscape using our disciples of hands so that we could say have our guildhall up on a hill, our homes across a river we diverted from elsewhere (think darkcloud style).

During the different event seasons (xmas, easter, etc) we can do quests for themes that change certain aspects of our area so it matches the season (xmas with snow, lots of holiday stuff and a death match with a gun knuckle wielding santa hell bent on the destruction of our towns, victory lets us deck our guildhalls with spoils of war! do the same for easter, a giant death bunny with lasers and holidays become badass!).

Disciples of hands can then uses inventory items to build furniture that players can put into houses (sellable on wards as well) and players can put those items within their respective houses in any manner they wish (on a table, on shelves, on the floor, on a wall, etc). Items, gear, earnables out in the world can also be placed in your house by you and players can leave you little gifts on your doorstep or in your mailbox.

Mailboxes can be placed outside your home, every area gets a little postmen (race of postmen decided by guild (moogle, goblin or gobbue, etc..).

Items used in the creation of structures can be put on the wards as well but only if crafted from inventories of players (so DoH can make even more of a living).

The more detailed the house, the more resources consumed in it's creation (so a one story house costs less then a two story). Players should also be given space around their houses to plant trees (decorative), gardens (for cheap food items) and random assortments of outdoor style furniture (fountains, fences, etc).

We should also be able to have a mine located in this large instanced area that is a multi-leveled dungeon that in order to unlock we have to do a series of quests first to unlock it. The mines haunted so we have to cleanse each level of the mine which gets progressively harder as you go down into it's depths (you could have events and even NMs in them). The deeper you go the better the rewards from the nodes (keep certain items from nodes out in the world).

Also making it so you can lose levels is smart, why's it haunted? Because the previous miners that owned it broke into a abyssal plane of some kind and those monsters are slowly coming up from the depths and so the mine was sealed with powerful magics to keep them locked away.

You could also have a instanced forest for botanists that works in a similar fashion that can be raided so you can protect what you've earned by unlocking areas. But instead of powerful magics locking things the majority of the forest is shrouded in a mysterious mist/fog that monsters of varying powers spawn forth from to consume any fool hardy enough to trend in their forest. You go into the mists to fight a powerful enemy with your guild to unlock sections of the forest but the mists come back over time if you don't defend against the mists.

With both of them you could tie in fishing nodes into both areas.

Sounds insane and scatterbrained but that's just me ;)

iirc, a LONG TIME AGO i read info that you could have a company airship...but i think that was pre-yoshi. still it will be interesting to see what they come up with. personally i dont want to think about it much because i tend to get my hopes up on things that dont happen @_@

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Originally Posted by Niqote

Now THAT made me laugh XD

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Your welcome lol.

But I think they need to be instanced, otherwise it could be the longest walk to find your house. I can only imagine the sheer size of the servers neighborhood.

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Originally Posted by Keruvinde

iirc, a LONG TIME AGO i read info that you could have a company airship...but i think that was pre-yoshi. still it will be interesting to see what they come up with. personally i dont want to think about it much because i tend to get my hopes up on things that dont happen @_@

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That wasn't pre-yoshi. It was in a statement he made about player housing and what features he was thinking about adding. It mentioned gardening, chocobo stables, and building airships in the basement.

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Originally Posted by Ryans

That wasn't pre-yoshi. It was in a statement he made about player housing and what features he was thinking about adding. It mentioned gardening, chocobo stables, and building airships in the basement.

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i see =o found it hard to remember since ive read so much info XP thanks for clearing that up for me :D

yeah im pretty sure free company is at least some kind of group because i remember hearing that its a free company that would be able to summon a primal and thats a minimum of 4 people.
but i didnt put that together with the housing until i watched that part from the video again.
i mean it sounds really cool the stuff you'll be able to do but im not as interested if its for a group of us.
im also not even sure how that would work, is the person who made the free company the only one who can edit the design and decorate it?
it was all just confusing kuz it did say PERSONAL housing, im pretty positive its not personal like just for me.
so im also really hoping that we do get some actual personal housing like the mog house was in ffxi. that was fun to have my own house that i could decorate and grown plants in.
i mean its still cool, but i was excited because i thought it was my house, its kinda a let down that its not

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Originally Posted by Ryans

That wasn't pre-yoshi. It was in a statement he made about player housing and what features he was thinking about adding. It mentioned gardening, chocobo stables, and building airships in the basement.

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it was pre yoshi, Yoshi just carried it on as something they still plan to do.

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Originally Posted by RicoJalapeno

Your welcome lol.

But I think they need to be instanced, otherwise it could be the longest walk to find your house. I can only imagine the sheer size of the servers neighborhood.

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Not if it's like Lotro's neighborhoods, which are instanced areas with a maximum of like 12 (not sure exactly) residents within each instance or shard, you could see through a menu which house were for sale in which neighborhood via menu.

My understanding of Companies are they are the equivalent of a "guild" / "clan" / "legion".

A player may only have one Grand Company.
A player may have up to eight linkshells.
A player may only join one player-owned Company.

Not sure about housing.

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Originally Posted by FireBud

My Ideal:

Large Instanced Area with Lots of Space to let us build a town in any layout we like

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quoting this to reinforce player housing zones will have so much more depth if we can build up areas with amenities like small towns rather than having the same type of building throughout the zone

so if we were to have a personal house, how would you want it to be?
what features would you want to to change, what do you want to be able to do with it?
i like the idea of adding a garden to my house, and customizing the room.
i can see for a personal house, changing the roof and adding a chocobo stable might be alittle much, but that would also be awesome.
oh and of course to have a bed in there. i think crafting classes can really have fun making furnishing