Solo Instanced Housing is easier to make than Island Sanctuary

Island Sanctuary is so much more complicated and nuanced than solo instanced housing and still lacks the things people want from housing. At this point it feels like the devs are laughing at us showing us they can do it but they refuse to. The entire island is practically bigger than any housing ward, it has it\\'s own separate crafting/gathering, it has a completely different currency system, you can move entire buildings with ease, capture and raise animals (feed them, harvest from them, name them) and you can let minions free roam. It\\'s an insult at this point knowing we want more housing yet they, instead chose not to give us housing but instead wasted way more server space just to reward us with items through what is essentially another boring time sink. If 7.0 doesn\\'t have a new housing system people are going to be even more furious.

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Originally Posted by saxman09

If 7.0 doesn\\'t have a new housing system people are going to be even more furious.

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Not really, people will keep on the copium and hope for new wards.

Says the game developer professional, I am sure.

I find this to be one of the less-favorable things people do. That is, complain about something and then declare with gusto that the fix they have in their head is "super simple," and "why don't they just do it like this, it's much easier."

Do folks even understand anymore what it's like to learn something and then do it professionally, accumulating thousands of hours doing this thing? Do people actually believe that with six seconds of thought and a forum post, they've "out-smarted" the game developers?

I see this everywhere, not just game forums. How did humanity become so oblivious and ignorant?

/shrug

You're right and that's why they've done instanced-housing long time ago.
Even two of them actually.

Apartment and FC Room.

I agree that Housing is a major issue that needs to be fixed, but to be fair the issue only really blew up after 6.1, and Island Sanctuary was likely already deep into development there. Besides I do think you are perhaps underestimating the ease at which such things are created.

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Originally Posted by Hurlstone

I agree that Housing is a major issue that needs to be fixed, but to be fair the issue only really blew up after 6.1, and Island Sanctuary was likely already deep into development there. Besides I do think you are perhaps underestimating the ease at which such things are created.

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I moved entire servers when they announced Shirogane with the hopes of getting a house. People were complaining even back then of how bad it was. I guess after Shadowbringers with the huge influx of people it probably only got worse over time but people have been complaining about this issue for a long time.

That said, I'm hopeful that Island Sanctuary might be a testing ground for more expansive instanced personal housing. Similar to how we only got female Viera but seeing their popularity, they added male Viera. (Though to be honest I really believe Yoshi-P intended to add males from the get-go despite what was said since concept art of male Viera had been shown as early as Heavensward).

people complaining about not being able to get into island Sanctuary now times that by 1000x with instance housing.

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Originally Posted by Duskane

people complaining about not being able to get into island Sanctuary now times that by 1000x with instance housing.

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Why do you assume it would be 1000x worse? Players can only be in one place at a time.

Players who want to spend all their time in housing would already be doing it. There would be a brief surge in server traffic when any major housing update was introduced, just as we're seeing now with Island Sanctuary, then things would go back to normal.

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Originally Posted by saxman09

Island Sanctuary is so much more complicated and nuanced than solo instanced housing and still lacks the things people want from housing.

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There are significant similarities between IS and what an instanced housing solution would look like. Getting instancing right is a hard problem. Layering user customizable spaces on top of it is another hard problem. My best guess is that they only had the resources (budget, schedule, and people) to solve one of the two and to justify it they slapped a mini-game on top of the instancing project, called it IS, and released it as a 6.2 feature.

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Originally Posted by Duskane

people complaining about not being able to get into island Sanctuary now times that by 1000x with instance housing.

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Slow down there, that's sound logic you're typing there, that type of thing is a no mans land here on the forums.

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Originally Posted by saxman09

Island Sanctuary is so much more complicated and nuanced than solo instanced housing and still lacks the things people want from housing. At this point it feels like the devs are laughing at us showing us they can do it but they refuse to. The entire island is practically bigger than any housing ward, it has it\\'s own separate crafting/gathering, it has a completely different currency system, you can move entire buildings with ease, capture and raise animals (feed them, harvest from them, name them) and you can let minions free roam. It\\'s an insult at this point knowing we want more housing yet they, instead chose not to give us housing but instead wasted way more server space just to reward us with items through what is essentially another boring time sink. If 7.0 doesn\\'t have a new housing system people are going to be even more furious.

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Never happy, it's not bad for housing instancier, but like everything else it has to be earned, and it's chill content.

You absolutely want your chocolate and whipped cream dessert, even if you're offered another dessert that's quite well made.

Plus it's a relatively easy and effortless way to get materia and other in-game goodies.

I think it's really cool plus the orchestrion even though it's localized and it's on a song, the sound is better than the one in the housing.

It also lacks an aetherite, but it's an instance like Eureka.

The best part is it seemingly shared the same resources as housing, since too many people in island sanctuary led to congestion in just two places: island sanctuary, and houses. No other resource in the game that I heard about at least, had a similar congestion issue.
After all this, I'm not saying they could easily do instanced housing, but I am interested in knowing why they still supposedly can't when their major talking point for years has been that it's a resource problem. Is the housing setup so antiquated that moving furniture takes up more resources than unlimited islands with their own economies? Genuinely curious, not being rhetorical. We'll probably never find out either.

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Originally Posted by Breakbeat

I see this everywhere, not just game forums. How did humanity become so oblivious and ignorant?

/shrug

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I agree. It's also really annoying when people want answers about an advertised feature that might as well not exist, and they get tech explanations from people who don't work at square, don't have any background in the game engine they're talking about, and are basically just guessing like the rest of us, and most of the time they're wrong because why would they be right? They lack the same critical information the rest of us are lacking. I see that a lot here, and it doesn't really add anything. Everyone's just guessing and square never replies. This whole place feels like a massive waste of time and energy.

All they really need to implement are instanced house exteriors. The interiors are already instanced, so half the job is practically done. If they could build island sanctuary, they can definitely piggy back instanced house exteriors to the already existing system of instanced interiors.

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Originally Posted by Duskane

people complaining about not being able to get into island Sanctuary now times that by 1000x with instance housing.

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Since quite a number of people have brought up this point- instanced housing = congestion, let us remember the following:

1. Ward housing consumes more server resources than fully instanced housing as the exterior of houses/wards are always loaded 24/7.

2. Even in late 2019, several NA servers were facing ward housing shortages.

3. SE only started caring about ward housing shortages when it started to affect JP servers in 2020/2021

So, I would rather that SE invest in more servers for fully instanced housing/Island Sanctuaries than sinking even more costs into ward housing.

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Originally Posted by Hurlstone

I agree that Housing is a major issue that needs to be fixed, but to be fair the issue only really blew up after 6.1, and Island Sanctuary was likely already deep into development there. Besides I do think you are perhaps underestimating the ease at which such things are created.

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Housing availability has been an issue for years - long before Island Sanctuary was on the radar. What 6.1 did was shove it into the players' faces that even an entire housing district was just a fraction of what was needed to deal with the supply issue. On most servers, the personal wards instantly filled up after the first round with 10% or less of bidders getting a house. The great thing about the lottery is that it doesn't just show you who got a house. It also shows you who didn't get a house - and boy were there a lot of people not getting a house. It made the housing shortage seem a bit less abstract.

But there is nothing new about the housing shortage. Just look at this quote from a 2017 thread about Ishgard housing. Shouko hits the nail on the head with this prediction.

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Originally Posted by Shouko

The problem is SE caved into the players giving them personal housing, when in reality it was only meant for FC's originally. Because of this it created a massive shortage and people now are whining about the mistake they made. Adding a whole new housing area won't help much, it'll fill up in a manner of minutes, just like Shirogane did. Also I believe the 30 day no login for losing your house is suspended currently.

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Shouko's post was half a decade ago! Yet it almost looks like it could be a post from a thread today.

Personal housing should have been instanced from the beginning. It's mind boggling that there is still some resistance to the idea after ward housing has continuously fallen far short of demand year after year.

The customization for Island Sanctuary is highly limited. That's why everyone can have one. There's a set number of places you can place things (plots) and you can't place any items within those plots. Whereas if you are talking about an actual house - yes there is only one place to put your actual house... but inside that house is a huge number of "plots" for each item you want to place. Items that can be placed anywhere in the x,y,z axis and rotated to fractions of a degree all while also being dyed.

There's more going on in just 1 apartment than an entire Island.

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Originally Posted by dspguy

The customization for Island Sanctuary is highly limited. That's why everyone can have one. There's a set number of places you can place things (plots) and you can't place any items within those plots. Whereas if you are talking about an actual house - yes there is only one place to put your actual house... but inside that house is a huge number of "plots" for each item you want to place. Items that can be placed anywhere in the x,y,z axis and rotated to fractions of a degree all while also being dyed.

There's more going on in just 1 apartment than an entire Island.

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The item ID, xyz coordinates, rotation, and dye color for several hundred objects could be stored in a matter of a couple hundred kilobytes. Even if we also consider the wall decoration for the room as well as blank partitions, the floor decoration, picture frame images, fish tank decorations & fishes, and item storage, it's still a pretty small amount of data. Besides, this super complex house interior you're talking about is already instanced anyway. The part that needs to be added for instanced houses is an instanced exterior, which only has 30 objects (though they could probably afford to be more generous with exterior furniture limits if you only have 1 house exterior in an instance vs 30 houses in a ward subdivision).

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Originally Posted by dspguy

The customization for Island Sanctuary is highly limited. That's why everyone can have one. There's a set number of places you can place things (plots) and you can't place any items within those plots. Whereas if you are talking about an actual house - yes there is only one place to put your actual house... but inside that house is a huge number of "plots" for each item you want to place. Items that can be placed anywhere in the x,y,z axis and rotated to fractions of a degree all while also being dyed.

There's more going on in just 1 apartment than an entire Island.

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There's also more happening on the island than what's available in housing. All the creatures roaming around, rare spawns, hundreds of gathering nodes active at the same time, weather changing, etc.

Each has its own additional data to be stored and communicated.

We know instanced housing is not a big deal. It wouldn't be the housing system of choice in other games if it was, nor would those games be allowing every character to own multiple housing locations.

Why do people keep putting up excuses for the lack of a solid instanced housing system when other games demonstrate they're wrong?

I respectfully disagree. It isn't only the storage of these items, even though it is a factor. It is having to transmit all of this data to every player that steps foot in their instanced house. Here's 400 items, where they are located, how they are arranged, dyed, etc etc. Sent all at once. The island isn't that. The placement and options are highly limited. Hell, they could probably store the configuration of just the buildings and their limited options in a byte or two. There aren't many permutations. The nodes on the island are static. The mob placement is static, with a set roam distance. That's not to say the island isn't complicated.

You know how certain content in the game looks different to different players depending where they are in a quest line? We might not all have our own instances. They might just be overlapped and flags are set on objects in the instance that only a unique player can see. In theory, if another player was in the same theoretical instance as you, but your workshop/granaries/landmarks are displayed for you and their workshops/etc are displayed for them... and you can't target each other. And node/animal spawns are flagged as visible by each individual player... how would you know where you were in your own instance?

How would that be any different than 100 players in Thavnair questing or killing hunt marks... just with flags set to see other players and the effects they have on the environment? Gathering nodes work just like the paragraph above. I don't take your node, you don't take my node. You don't even SEE my node. But a flag is set so I can see you.

/headexplode

If the islands weren't in our own instances, they wouldn't have placed such a load on the resources for house/apartment interior instances.

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Originally Posted by Pablomaldito

If the islands weren't in our own instances, they wouldn't have placed such a load on the resources for house/apartment interior instances.

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I don't see how that proves or disproves anything. Maybe it is 1 instance per 5 players or 50 players or 500 players.