The Housing Situation

[Cherie]

I'm pretty sure there will always be people without. But not everyone wants a house. I played for more than a year before I decided I wanted one and there were still some to choose from.

On leviathan server there aren't tons of houses left, but there are some to be found if don't mind farming money. I mean, spiritbonding for just a hour you can make a million fairly easily. Even if only mediums houses are left, you can get one with no special skills and a much smaller time sink than getting one of those zeta relics. I see lots of people with the relics so I'm not sure why all the medium houses aren't filled too.

My assumption is people really aren't into this vanity item enough to farm a few days for it. The small houses are all gone because you can just nab that pretty easily without saving for very long. Most people wouldn't want to farm a week or two for some vanity house I guess.

People that want houses are just a smaller minority than people that want fancy relic weapons... a significantly smaller one. I'd suppose this is why it hasn't gotten a new ward yet. But in time it will, even though the existing ones aren't full yet.

[Renik]

Whether it's an apartment in a building or landed property, it probably doesn't really make a difference to the servers.

The server primarily has to store the items (and their location) in the housing area, tables, chairs, plants ... etc. What the housing area actually looks like, be it a room or a wide open field, probably doesn't impact the server much if at all.

If storage space is the issue, then instancing the house won't fix anything, you will still run out of storage space.

This, in 2 threads at least i have explained this, but people keep supporting the ignorant idea of instanced housing, which would only serve to have an inferior quality housing system, without solving the lack of plots. Yoshi have also answered to the idea of instanced housing explaining that it would not solve the issue.

This is a server issue and they are working on it, give them time, if you want to give constructive feedback ask them to place more wards on populated servers and make some plots reserved for FC housing only.

[Natsuno]

Is there really a strong enough sense of community that it should be chosen over having enough houses though?
If instancing could fix it that is.



Then we should at least have enough to fit the needs of the apparent few that want it.

Then let's keep the current housing area, and put up a 1 house 'apartment block' somewhere else for those that want that kind of thing.

It's the removal of the current areas as they are now that I am opposed to.

edit: it seems instanced housing is a no go anyway, so this whole conversation seems pointless. :/

[Gramul]

Then let's keep the current housing area, and put up a 1 house 'apartment block' somewhere else for those that want that kind of thing.

It's the removal of the current areas as they are now that I am opposed to.

I'd be down for a new, separate hosing style area. So long as it has outdoor furnishing capabilities so I can garden and junk.

So this whole conversation seems pointless.

Nonsense. I love to talk about game development.

[HitoYuudai]

the problem with just adding new wards is that it will just create even more ghost towns...
I'd love to have a small house, but I don't want one in a ward where you rarely see anyone..
but that's probably the way SE continues

[Quesse]

the problem with just adding new wards is that it will just create even more ghost towns...
I'd love to have a small house, but I don't want one in a ward where you rarely see anyone..
but that's probably the way SE continues

As a personal house owner I have a few thoughts.

First, I really love being in a neighborhood and would hate to see housing go instanced. Maybe I'm lucky but I have 3 close neighbors and the 4 of us are always at our market board / bell and frequently interact. I almost wish housing was a little more dense so that there would be more opportunity for this type of interaction. I'm in a subdivision so mainly it is Personal housing, not FC. In my FC neighborhood there are always 5-10 people standing around the market board or in nearby yards. It feels really active. I like it.


Second, I am really opposed to how personal housing was handled in general. The cost, the limited plots, and the mixing with FC Housing caught me completely off-guard. I felt like it was the opposite of what Yoshi had been promising all those months. Obviously they planned to do it one way then changed their minds without telling anyone and did it a different way. Even though I have a house I'm really upset about having to pay so much for it and that I can't expect to have friends move in at any time - because there are no S/M plots left. The way this was handled, for a subscription game, was insulting. Everyone is paying an equal amount for a sub and should have an equal chance at the content. Major content shouldn't run out. I was pretty sure, as well, Yoshi said they would continue to add houses but they added a couple wards and subdivisions and stopped there. Why? There has been no information on this.

Third, this issue could have easily been lessened by having more small house plots in the subdivisions. Making them have an equal ratio was a poor decision. There are quite a few large plots left at 40+ million each on my server. You could fit 5 or more small plots in this area.

For the most part housing is well done for what it is and instancing would kill some of the really best parts about it. SE just needs to step up and add more divisions.

[Bishop81]

If storage space is the issue, then instancing the house won't fix anything, you will still run out of storage space.

This, in 2 threads at least i have explained this, but people keep supporting the ignorant idea of instanced housing, which would only serve to have an inferior quality housing system, without solving the lack of plots. Yoshi have also answered to the idea of instanced housing explaining that it would not solve the issue.

This is a server issue and they are working on it, give them time, if you want to give constructive feedback ask them to place more wards on populated servers and make some plots reserved for FC housing only.

Well, instance housing worked just fine in FFXI from what I heard.

Also I don't think it's a storage space issue. FFXI is nearly 10 years old, it's from the era where PCs had 64MiB of RAM and 1GiB hard drives. We have 8GiB of RAM now and multi-TiB hard drives. Technology has improved a ton.

[Slirith]

I blame the ps3. Most likely won't see any major storage increase(inventory or housing stuff) till ps3 support goes bye bye :/ *slightly sarcastic*

[Renik]

Well, instance housing worked just fine in FFXI from what I heard.

Also I don't think it's a storage space issue. FFXI is nearly 10 years old, it's from the era where PCs had 64MiB of RAM and 1GiB hard drives. We have 8GiB of RAM now and multi-TiB hard drives. Technology has improved a ton.

It's not about the system itself, it's about the whole game, this game stores more data than any other, specially the housing system, we have a very large range of options, customization and contents related to housing.

When it comes to housing, it doesn't matter where you place the house as long as you keep the same number of option it will take the same memory, the reason it worked in XI is the same reason most people never cared about it back then, it was very limited and served only as storage, and the game in general saved a lot less data than this one.

There's only one solution, adding more physical memory (HDDs).

[Bishop81]

It's not about the system itself, it's about the whole game, this game stores more data than any other, specially the housing system, we have a very large range of options, customization and contents related to housing.

When it comes to housing, it doesn't matter where you place the house as long as you keep the same number of option it will take the same memory, the reason it worked in XI is the same reason most people never cared about it back then, it was very limited and served only as storage, and the game in general saved a lot less data than this one.

There's only one solution, adding more physical memory (HDDs).

I can't say I know exactly what is going on at SE's data centers but computing power and memory has increased several fold over the last decade.

The way I see it, based on what I know about how computers function - as limited as it is - the server only has to store,

1. item ID
2. location and orientation of said items

That doesn't take up all that much space. Assuming, conservatively, a 64 bit item ID, 64 bit per axis, we have 3*64 for position, and 3*64 for orientation, for a total of 448 bits = 56 bytes per item. That's a drop in the ocean with GiBs of RAM and TiBs of hard drive space.