What do you supposes the actual cost of a Housing Ward is for Square Enix

As the title suggest, what do you think the actual cost to spin up and maintain a housing ward on 1 server actually costs Square Enix?

What I'm getting at is a bet it's not very much, and if the option was actually made to players to make a one time payment $10-$20 for a guaranteed plot which I suspect is WAY more then the actual cost for Square Enix to Spin up and Maintain a single Plot in their Data Center the housing issue would be completely solved.

I can only observe that they seem to have developed an implementation that is vastly more costly than any other MMO or MMO-like game's housing system I've ever seen, even those that have wards or similar systems providing neighbors. Or if not that, and a little more tin-foil-hat-ish, they want it to be elite and exclusive for some reason.

I'd rather not have official RMT involved with it, in any case.

Fixed DC costs are about $6100 per month per rack for tier 1. This is floor space, security, fire suppression
Maintenance costs are about $5000 per month on top per rack - this is power, UPS, Cooling, Generator, data (a huge ongoing cost)
Soft costs (labour) are about $4500 per month on top of that per rack

So, maybe $16000/month for 21 servers in a tier one DC. (servers not worlds... each world needs many servers - from the photos we've seen Materia's 5 worlds had 60 servers at least)

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Originally Posted by Nikito

if the option was actually made to players to make a one time payment $10-$20 for a guaranteed plot which I suspect is WAY more then the actual cost for Square Enix

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You'd be surprised at how those ongoing costs for power, cooling, maintenance, security, fire, diesel, staff, and so on add up.

People, who own a house, have to pay a sub, or they loose progress.
People who does not own the house, have to be jealous for people who own one, coz its not that simple to get one.

Each item in house has 4 coordinates, id and color, if coordinates are 64bit numbers (but I am sure its =<32bit one), it must be 64bytes for 1 item (in worse case), and 300 items gonna be ~20KiloBytes of data (u can afk in lumsa 10 seconds and receive more amount of data).
Generic forum thread weights more than generic large house. Plus u dont have to keep house loaded 24/7 inside server memory, if nobody visiting it.

So these limitations were made on purpose, to make housing exclusive on purpose, not coz its limitations of hardware/software. People can simple open a dutyfinder dungeon for one player, anytime. And have own rooms.

I don't know but I'm very sad that I still don't have a house. Even though I really want a house, I would actually prefer an instanced house with an outdoor area if that was available. Isn't it much cheaper to have instanced areas since they only take server space when someone is using them? Or is it the same whether it's instanced or not?

I think it's both server costs and wanting it to be an exclusive feature, hence why housing is set in wards and doesn't just send you to an instance with your own plot of land.

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Originally Posted by Remolia

So these limitations were made on purpose, to make housing exclusive on purpose, not coz its limitations of hardware/software. People can simple open a dutyfinder dungeon for one player, anytime. And have own rooms.

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This is false, only a limited number of instances can be opened at a time. While it is fine now, when population spikes up—such as when a new expansion launches—all the sudden queue times and errors exist for things that it normally shouldn't.

"Raubahn Extreme" is a great example as it was an early Stormblood solo duty that bottle-necked everyone due to the limited number of people that can be doing it at a time. It's why Stormblood and Endwalker splits the population into two zones early, does not have any solo duties and takes a long time before you get to the first dungeon.
Gold Saucer GATEs have no role or party requirements yet sometimes you'd be waiting a while to get into Leap of Faith or Air Force One.
Trying to enter your house would often times give you an error because the housing instance servers are full.

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Originally Posted by Remolia

So these limitations were made on purpose, to make housing exclusive on purpose, not coz its limitations of hardware/software. People can simple open a dutyfinder dungeon for one player, anytime. And have own rooms.

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Housing and wards were originally meant for FCs only. That's why it was limited. When people asked for personal access, it was already too late to change the format without having to demolish every existing house.

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Originally Posted by Shibi

Fixed DC costs are about $6100 per month per rack for tier 1. This is floor space, security, fire suppression
Maintenance costs are about $5000 per month on top per rack - this is power, UPS, Cooling, Generator, data (a huge ongoing cost)
Soft costs (labour) are about $4500 per month on top of that per rack

So, maybe $16000/month for 21 servers in a tier one DC. (servers not worlds... each world needs many servers - from the photos we've seen Materia's 5 worlds had 60 servers at least)



You'd be surprised at how those ongoing costs for power, cooling, maintenance, security, fire, diesel, staff, and so on add up.

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Assuming each plot was individual. Out of 21 wards 1260 people? Roughly $13 a month to maintain the $16000 a month.

Honestly not as bad I initially expected haha.

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Originally Posted by Axious

Assuming each plot was individual. Out of 21 wards 1260 people? Roughly $13 a month to maintain the $16000 a month.

Honestly not as bad I initially expected haha.

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Not counting inflation and a subscription that isn't rising.

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Originally Posted by Wasselin

I don't know but I'm very sad that I still don't have a house. Even though I really want a house, I would actually prefer an instanced house with an outdoor area if that was available. Isn't it much cheaper to have instanced areas since they only take server space when someone is using them? Or is it the same whether it's instanced or not?

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They would still take up a small amount of space as the locations of your furniture, etc. would need to be stored in a database.

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Originally Posted by PirateRyanG

They would still take up a small amount of space as the locations of your furniture, etc. would need to be stored in a database.

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Sure. But if f2p games will store it forever for you, without any monetization/payment, then you know it's gotta be cheap.

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Originally Posted by Deveryn

Housing and wards were originally meant for FCs only. That's why it was limited. When people asked for personal access, it was already too late to change the format without having to demolish every existing house.

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People didn't ask for access. We were told we were getting player housing that would be different from FC housing. In fact this situation led to one of the first lies to legacy players. We had gil taken away and was told not to worry.



Whatever happen to original plans no one knows. But multiple comments leading right up to opening up FC housing to players implied they were working on a separate system.




And to the OP. SE has set out that we rent storage in this game when others had one time cost. It would be a monthly fee. You would be better look at how much does SE have to pay for retainer and what they charge us. Also take into account other cash shop practices. This wouldn't be a gift to players, it would be maximizing profits just like 30 dollar mounts.

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Originally Posted by Espon

This is false, only a limited number of instances can be opened at a time. While it is fine now, when population spikes up—such as when a new expansion launches—all the sudden queue times and errors exist for things that it normally shouldn't.

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Players can run instances when ever they want (trust, undersized etc...)

I just said, that it has nothing to do with extra server load, since its mostly all about how many connected players server has, and you dont have enough amount of players to fully stress housing system, most wards usually have 0-2 players.
AFK players in capitals costs many times more of server load than housing.

So it has nothing to do with "how much it costs to run", its all about "how much it should be exclusive and restricted".

If FFXI (a 20 year old game) can give housing to every player that includes a garden, upstairs, downstairs, and fully furnishable idk how FFXIV cannot. Granted it's instanciated and not wards but come on it was done in the past and don't give me that crap about "neighborhood" we all know most housing wards are dead aside from player hosted events.

Feels pointless to speculate considering none of us know anything about SE's setup, the deals they get, or their actual overhead costs. And the people working there who could give us actual insight won't bother. But of course people will pretend to know and people will just agree with whoever suits their headcanon best. Loving how the replies in this thread are ranging from "oh, about 20 bucks" to "oh, about 5 grand." Like, what's the point of this. Even if one of you lands on the magic number, it's not gonna change anything.

What we do know with relative certainty is that Square is worth roughly 2 billion US dollars and that FF14 is one of their most consistently profitable titles. Which makes their decision to consistently ignore us really really weird. I remember when the housing lotto system began and like... people here were begging square to open more wards to individuals, since it was obvious there wouldn't be enough free companies to fill 18 wards. And SE had said they'd change the system based on player feedback, but in the end they never communicated back with us at all and just let the system rot for months before barely fixing it after it was too late on the most crowded worlds. At this point, just stop bothering and go to dynamis if you're on na and want a house. It's what everyone I know has done. FC's lost another bunch of people over this, as if the first push for solo fcs wasn't bad enough, and half the CWLSes I'm in now have people in them who aren't even on this DC and can't communicate with us because of the technical limitations, but who cares! They get an uncontested box on Dynamis that they can barely customize because the housing customization options in this game are ass. 9/10 of the great houses you see are done using glitches and third party tools, the base vanilla game options suck; you can't even put a couch on a loft by their design. I could go on but I won't, there's just no point. Housing sucks in this game, and the community-destroying lengths SE has incentivized people to go through for one are bad for the game's overall health imo and not worth the effort. But congrats to anyone who feels otherwise and got a dynamis house yesterday. I harbor no ill will towards the players, only towards the radio silence from square.

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Originally Posted by Nikito

As the title suggest, what do you think the actual cost to spin up and maintain a housing ward on 1 server actually costs Square Enix?

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More than they're willing to pay.

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Originally Posted by Remolia

I just said, that it has nothing to do with extra server load, since its mostly all about how many connected players server has, and you dont have enough amount of players to fully stress housing system, most wards usually have 0-2 players.
AFK players in capitals costs many times more of server load than housing.

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(italics mine as I will address this point)

Experience we have had with the IS release has shown this italicised thought of yours above to be flawed. People were recently being locked out of their house because the housing instance infrastructure was full. IS clearly shares that same infrastructure. Even when there was nobody else in the ward we clicked and clicked on the door until an instance was free and we could get in. The same thing was seen during EW release when people were AFKing inside their homes. We had to click and click on the door until an instance was available and we could spawn it with our data.

While this was happening, people were loading their dungeon instances without delays, so one does consider that housing/IS instance infrastructure and dungeon instance infrastructure is separated.

Logically the ward isn't given 60 instances, that would be a waste of money, the EW/IS experiences suggest those are likely shared between all wards on the world, and IS on the world too. But adding more wards means you still need to bump up the number of housing instances people can enter from their door.

There is contention, of course, adding 4 more wards and thus 240 houses doesn't need 240 more instance capability. But it does need a spike.

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Originally Posted by Remolia

So it has nothing to do with "how much it costs to run", its all about "how much it should be exclusive and restricted".

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* Cost is /always/ a factor. Budget is a requirement of business and sets what hardware is bought, what hardware is refreshed, and what ongoing-forever operating costs are committed to. Budgets are also normally done yearly or biannually. And of course, it was just said that the next periods budget is now approved and more wards are coming in or before 2024.

But yes, there is some level of exclusivity in the current architecture, whether by design or system constraints. IS was likely an attempt to lessen that, not everyone wants a house, many people are not into housing.

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Originally Posted by Remolia

Players can run instances when ever they want (trust, undersized etc...)

I just said, that it has nothing to do with extra server load, since its mostly all about how many connected players server has, and you dont have enough amount of players to fully stress housing system, most wards usually have 0-2 players.
AFK players in capitals costs many times more of server load than housing.

So it has nothing to do with "how much it costs to run", its all about "how much it should be exclusive and restricted".

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Stormblood broke at launch because there was an instance bottleneck.
WOW died at the launch of WOD (and they gave everybody a few days free sub) because their game couldn't create enough of the garrison instances, and everything broke. It was another bottleneck.

A game cannot create unlimited instances. This is why there will be a limit on the number of instances a player can make per day. In FF14, I believe it is something like 200? Which may seem like a massive figure, but people have hit it spam-killing Ifrit for the mentor thingy.

Other MMOs limit the number of instances you can create an hour, although that is gradually being relaxed since server tech is improving.

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Originally Posted by PirateRyanG

Stormblood broke at launch because there was an instance bottleneck.
WOW died at the launch of WOD (and they gave everybody a few days free sub) because their game couldn't create enough of the garrison instances, and everything broke. It was another bottleneck.

A game cannot create unlimited instances. This is why there will be a limit on the number of instances a player can make per day. In FF14, I believe it is something like 200? Which may seem like a massive figure, but people have hit it spam-killing Ifrit for the mentor thingy.

Other MMOs limit the number of instances you can create an hour, although that is gradually being relaxed since server tech is improving.

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Garrisons were a core and mandatory feature of WOD, its was like a local MSQ, everyone was forced to use it during launch.

Game already have unlimited rooms, with instances and etc, and nobody opens unlimited instances with these rooms. Houses contain very small amount of data and we dont have unlimited players, to create such stress, to justify hardware/software limitations ONLY for housing, but not for everything else.