Instanced Housing: A Boon For Players And Profits Both

Imagine the following scenario if you will:

Throughout the game there are housing wards that can be found: The Lavender Beds, The Mists, The Goblet, The Empyreum, Shirogane. However, it does not have to stop there. With instanced housing, you can introduce new housing wards easily: Amaurot, Sharlayan, Garlemald, Ala Mhigo, Thavnair, so on and so forth.

How does any of this profit the company? It also allows for the introduction of special homes. Imagine players being able to purchase special housing vouchers off of the mogstation: $25-$35 to purchase special housing such as a Sky Pirate Airship, a pirate ship, an Amaurot suite, a Crystarium home: A fae dwelling on the first.

What more? You could offer players special 'item limit increase keys' on the mogstation, that increases their housing item limit by 50 and 100 respectively.

This will generate a MASSIVE amount of income for the company, as well as giving players a tremendous amount of options for housing.

"But what about my outdoor decorations?"

How it would work:

You would click on the placard outside of the house you want to go to. The placard would then bring up a list of everyone who owns a house at that plot. You can see the house greeting/name from this placard. Simply cick on your friend's name to enter the plot. Tada! Outdoor decorations. Just change the front door to open when (any) player clicks on it and click it again to close it.

It is senseless to just keep adding wards and it seems like more trouble than it's worth. With instanced housing, everyone can get a home. Furthermore, it creates a much needed gil sink for players to spend their gil on. The more gil players are spending, the more they are selling, the more it evens out prices on the marketboard: Crafters will have lots of ways to make gil again with the demand of housing items.

This system CAN work for both the players and for the company. With the revenue instanced housing can generate through the mogstation, the company would have more than enough funds to upgrade their hardware to help support the system in the future.

The lottery has already failed. It's time for instanced housing.

P.S. Please add the ability to add decorating privilege's to another player for free company rooms and apartments.

RMT for housing is bad when players do it. SE doing it won't make it any better.

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Originally Posted by PredatoryCatgirl

RMT for housing is bad when players do it. SE doing it won't make it any better.

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Every other game does it, and it works out VERY WELL for everyone involved, actually. From EverQuest II, to Elder Scrolls Online: Their housing is amazing and they sell special homes on their stores - and item limit extenders.

You can still of course buy plenty of houses in game with in game currency if you're short on funds IRL. I'm not saying to make every house that way, just special houses. Something to save for in the future.

The reason why players selling houses via RMT is so awful, is because it's for absolutely INSANE PRICES (Like $500 IRL dollars.) It takes housing away from people who tried to obtain it the right way, and that money isn't going to the company. It's comparing apples and oranges here.

Offering special houses on the mogstation: Every player has the opportunity to buy one for a reasonable price, the company gets the money so that they can invest in upgrading current and future systems/hardware, and it takes nothing away from anyone else. It doesn't rob anyone else of the opportunity to get that house. They're not remotely the same thing.

I mean if more people had access to housing, more people would likely purchase furniture from the mog station.

Hire me Yoshi p

I would 100% pay fat cash for a legal way to buy houses in this game.

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Originally Posted by Angellos

Every other game does it, and it works out VERY WELL for everyone involved, actually. From EverQuest II, to Elder Scrolls Online: Their housing is amazing and they sell special homes on their stores - and item limit extenders.

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But both of those are dead games.

In fact, as I played EQ2, it started going downhill once that cash shop really started to be populated with houses and the like by SOE.

Maybe we should be careful what we wish for. US$50 houses in Mogstation and would the rush for money make the game die off like EQ2, Rift and others that went that route?

Money is a drug to corporations, and they would plow all their resources into milking $50 houses and put zero resources to new content.

The game isn't dead because they offered houses on their store. EverQuest II didn't take off because they rushed to try and finish it before World of Warcraft dropped - and their launch wasn't great because of it. So everyone had gone to WoW. Then after SOE sold the title to Daybreak, that did it in for good. Elder Scrolls online was a hot mess when it first launched, which lead to a lot of people not caring for it: And the models and physics are a bit dated. Yet, that game didn't hit mega popularity because a lot of people don't like real time aim-based combat with a reticle. They find it very tiring, and not very fun. (That and you have to have a sub just to get a crafting bag, which means your bags fill up before you finish one dungeon.) There's a lot of reasons why those games failed: but none of it has to do with having houses on their store.

Oh, and I didn't say to charge $50.

EverQuest II charged about $20-$25 for their houses and they were hot sellers. No one quit playing EverQuest II because they had housing options. (Because they had LOTS of housing items for in game currency.)

"I'm gonna quit this game because they have extra things on the cash shop that don't give me an advantage over anyone else at all and are purely cosmetic." - Said no gamer ever.

Instanced housing doesn't solve the problem of needing servers to run the houses on. Several servers have reached housing instance capacity during 6.0 and 6.1 - it's really not a joyous experience to be stuck outside your house trying to enter it and just kinda hoping that you manage to get in before someone else gets into theirs.

You can't provide an uncapped supply if you can't even handle your current demand.

I love the idea of instanced housing. I also love the idea of instanced housing in loads of different zones.
But the idea of selling that solution to players... I don't know, dude. Creating a bad (housing) system and then selling players a solution to it is why I left garbage freetoplay games behind. We already pay a monthly sub. Every live letter they talk about how successful this game is and brag about its player count. Square gets enough money from its ff14 players as it is. They should just fix the housing that they advertised without selling the solution to us imo.

Saddest part is, I know it would sell well if they implemented it too. People just want a house that badly. Hell, I'm fundamentally against it on principle but I know if it only cost like 5 bucks or something, I'd be tempted as hell. I hate admitting it but I've gotta be honest.

IMO, paying for something that has been touted as "included" in game for yrs is not smart. I'd suggest Mr. Yoshi change wigs and get with the times, toss the bandaids and make housing better for real.

The idea of SE adding $100+ instanced houses like ESO makes me giggle a bit. All the popcorn in the world won't be enough for this sub-forum.

Ya lost me at extra purchases, bro.

Instanced houses are value enough without having to milk it like some trashy f2p shovelware.

Fully customizable spaces + gpose = free marketting glamour shots.

I do not think they should make housing another RMT transaction. It would be better to just give them a somewhat high gil cost and use them as a gil sink. If everyone can get a house, houses would take far more gil out of the game than they currently do, which would be good for the ingame economy. If priced like existing houses, that could sink tens of millions of gil per player. Sure, it would be a grind to get that much gil in the first place, but the house would be guaranteed once you can afford it. And I would rather have that system over 'grinding' the lottery with tiny chances each week or having to spend real money for a game house.

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Originally Posted by Besame

IMO, paying for something that has been touted as "included" in game for yrs is not smart. I'd suggest Mr. Yoshi change wigs and get with the times, toss the bandaids and make housing better for real.

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I'm not talking about selling ALL housing: SPECIAL HOUSING ONLY. The normal houses in game would be purely for gil, as they've always been. An unlimited amount of those houses as well. The only thing that would be up for sale would be SPECIAL housing options. Not housing in general. I think people missed that part.

And to touch on the issue of server space: Yes, they would absolutely have to upgrade their servers to accommodate: Hopefully the semiconductor shortage issue will straighten itself out soon and they could make those purchases/upgrades.

Wouldn't work out because one time purchases would quickly be overtaken by the server costs to maintain the extra, endless housing.

The Elder Scrolls Online you can use real money to buy a house off there cash shop. I believe all there housing is instant housing.

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Originally Posted by Angellos

And to touch on the issue of server space: Yes, they would absolutely have to upgrade their servers to accommodate: Hopefully the semiconductor shortage issue will straighten itself out soon and they could make those purchases/upgrades.

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The semiconductor shortage is a confluence of a few problems, covid outbreaks at chip manufacturing plants, power shortages in China, a fire in Japan, and extreme weather in Texas, amongst others.

But the latest adding to the pile is that making chips uses about 70% of the world's annual neon production, and ~55% of the 667 million litres of semiconductor-grade neon used each year as buffers for the lasers in semiconductor manufacturing is normally supplied by two Ukrainian companies:- Ingas in Mariupol and Cryoin in Odessa. Most of the rest coming from China.

Right now, we are coming towards the end of stockpiles from before the war, so things are going to get even tighter over the coming 6 months to a year.

But even once that neon is back, and it won't be immediately the war ends with factory rebuilds (Mariupol was basically flattened and neon is a byproduct of Russian and Ukrainian steel manufacture) on top of supply chain reconstruction, it still takes 4 months to make a chip, and that hasn't solved the other issues before the war - a shortage of plants and skilled staff.

This shortage - and needing to rebuild Ukrainian Steel then Neon production - on top of the other problems the industry has is really going to be pushing chip manufacture out 24 months or more, so well into 2024 at the looks of things.

It's so bad right now that some car companies are shipping their vehicles without certain electronics. https://observer.com/2022/03/automak...th-a-shortage/

This shortage is a lot more serious than most people comprehend, because we have been surviving so far on almost depleted Neon stock piles. But they are almost gone, and with 4 months needed to make a chip, the end of this year should be a real shock.

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Originally Posted by Angellos

It is senseless to just keep adding wards and it seems like more trouble than it's worth. With instanced housing, everyone can get a home.

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so you want to create "fairness" by taking away what people already have, to replace it with something less than what already exists?

nice open display of communism. Dress it up however you want. instanced housing (outside of what we already have) won't be added in place of the current overarching housing system.

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Originally Posted by Angellos

The lottery has already failed. It's time for instanced housing.

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....it hasn't even been two months. the Raffle didnt fail. it served the precise purpose it was meant to serve. to sell houses in a far more structured and manageable method so as to prevent bots buying out the market and reselling at inflated costs. If you honestly think that instanced housing is going to replace the current housing system we already have, you're mental.

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Originally Posted by Angellos

Every other game does it, and it works out VERY WELL for everyone involved, actually.

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really? remind me...what MMO got the award for Longest running? Remind me, which game had to stop selling copies of their game, because they were just doing that well? ..Crazy I don't remember any of those titles ever making headlines for that. If those companies want to make people feel special, fine. but S.E has made it to that everyone has an equal chance to win or lose at obtaining a house. Everyone whined and complained for years to get this, they finally get it, and do nothing but whine and complain that they got what they wanted.


I can't help but realize that no one here is understanding that their games code, can't support those kind of additions. It's been 10+ years of the same graphics, against games that have been kept up to date with graphics improvements and we're seeing ONLY JUST RECENTLY S.E. admit, it's time to catch up. and you want them to somehow magically add ALLL these wonky coded areas that would likely break the game across all servers, just so you can say "i have a house, just like everyone else."


That's downright petty.

You didnt get a house? Tough luck. Life isn't fair, deal with it.
You want a house, work hard for the money, and spin your chances again when another opening comes available.