The Housing Situation

[BreathlessTao]

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.

I really am not convinced about this part. I'd chalk it up to this being server-dependant, but really... If I want busy, at any time, I just go to one of the city states, Coerthas or MD. Lots of people around, at market boards, at NPCs, at Aetherytes - all either idling or crafting or just running about minding their own business. Community? Interaction? Not really. Unless it's within linkshells and/or FCs... I really don't see much of this. And while I've been in an FC and thus spent time in housing areas, I didn't experience anything different either. Point is, I don't think people need an excuse such as "neighbourhoods" to interact and be friendly with each other. But for the sake of it, I'm sure they could keep FC housing in wards as they are now - that could still be there for the neighbourhood atmosphere. And just change/move personal housing to something more viable that doesn't lock out most of the thousands of players on every server.

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.

Major content, which gates game features at that. It can be argued that it's "purely cosmetic", but then it becomes a double-edged sword, like in case of the cash shop. Can be brought up as an argument pro and contra. In any case, the way it was handled did catch most of us off-guard. Many of us felt (still feel?) insulted/fooled by it. Yes. As for adding more wards - Yoshi did say in one of the live letters that for the time they feel they met the demand, so it's put on backburner for now. Obviously something that can very much be argued. (Also, I imagine, with GS getting added and Heavensward around the corner, it really is low priority right now.)

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.

Again, not so sure about that. Some would definitely complain that they have too much money and couldn't spend it on large plots.

On the whole... If anything housing really brings to the surface is the fact that yes, SE very much needs to upgrade its servers and network infrastructure and everything else with that. It's just one of those things (one of, if not the biggest) that makes it painfully evident how much upgrades are needed. And at this point, whoever says "upgrades won't solve everything" is just deluded. Take a look back at the live letters and a look around the forums: count the issues you find that aren't getting fixed or ideas that aren't getting implemented because of "server/infrastructure limitations" and/or a "need to save space/bandwidth". When it's so constantly being brought up, by the devs themselves... not much place for us to argue. Ok, perhaps wouldn't solve absolutely everything, but the list of things upgrades could solve is growing basically with every patch. I can accept that they hadn't expected certain numbers. But it's been one and a half year now, and in some ways, we're barely better than right after launch. Which is simply ridiculous, in 2015, for such a large company, in case of such a title as FF (and for XIV, ARR is already a 2nd run to get things right).

Don't get me wrong, on the whole, the game is awesome and the devs do deserve a lot of praise. But there certain aspects that should be minor details but have outgrown themselves and are jarring, glaring problems for whatever reasons - and the more time passes by, the more disturbing they're gonna be and that much harder to fix.


(Another non-spam post that's restriction annoyed the hell out of the poster for no legit reason.)

[Bluevann]

(Sorry to those who have already seen this, but I'm making it a point to post this in every housing thread in the hope that SE takes notice)

A suggestion I've been suggesting for a while, but that I doubt will be considered since it'd require a general overhaul of the housing system:

Step 1) Make instanced housing. This allows everyone to have a house, especially if instead of gil it asks for GC points or Main Scenario progress like for most of other games. I'm thinking of an instance similar to the Demon Doors in the Fable games, with house, yard with field, well and whatever. It would start with small, and will be able to be expanded through further accomplishments.



Step 2) Make the housing wards, limited as they are now (since they don't have the servers do add more currently). For a fee (like the current fees we have now), you'll be able to move your instanced house inside the ward. So for example, 4M to move your instanced Small Hut into a Mist Small Plot. Of course, the price will raise with your instanced house's size, and you'll need to select a plot your house can fit in.

This way, all those who want a house can have a house, and all those who actually care to have a neighborhood (and will use it), can have a neighborhood. Houses for all, and no more ghost towns.

[Wulfyn]

Be nice if you can upgrade the plot size instead. It was their decision to make plots fixed sizess which was a mistake imo.

[Renik]

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.

The problem here it's not only housing, but the whole game as i said. You know enough to understand that it's all about stored data and nothing else, wards don't take much memory, as they are all shared data across servers, you should be able to understand why instancing housing wouldn't solve it, and don't forget we were told where the problem was, it's in 2 of the live letters.

We can't know what kind of machines are they using, or the server structure, but we know it's a memory problem, and if we can't believe the devs... well, who knows.

Even if we weren't told about what the problem was, i can't think in any other explanation, i'm not a game developer, but it's kind of my hobby, including server development, i know what i'm talking about, it's not made up stuff, and i can say for sure that instancing housing we would not solve it.

For sources, you have 2 of the live letters between the XIV and the XVIII, i don't remember which ones, and i think they answered to the instanced housing idea in one of the live letters from the last e3.

snip

Please, stop posting this idea, because it's false, as i said instancing houses is not going to magically create more memory, unless this instanced houses are just presets without stables and gardens, and of course very minimal to no furniture allocation.

[Bluevann]

Please, stop posting this idea, because it's false, as i said instancing houses is not going to magically create more memory, unless this instanced houses are just presets without stables and gardens, and of course very minimal to no furniture allocation.

First of all, ideas cannot be "false", at most they can be impractical or near impossible to realize, both of which I do not know if they would apply to ARR since I'm not a developer and I'll keep offering my suggestion till one of them tells me why it cannot be done.

But either way, wouldn't it be much like how Personal Rooms are handled? An FC house can have up to 512 of rooms, and there's 900-ish possible slots for FC houses in every server. That is enough memory space for 450,000 personal room instances. An housing instance wouldn't take that much more space to make it impossible to give an instanced plot to everyone.

[Fenral]

The real issue with the current non-instanced housing is that it puts a hard limit on the number of players with access to a ton of game features. That's only marginally different than allowing only the first 1024 players to beat Titan HM into the Binding Coil on any given server. Sure, you don't have to raid to enjoy the game, but raiding is something everyone signing up thinks they'll be able to do without restrictions. Why should housing be different?

I'm not saying it should be free, or even easy to access, but there should never be that sort of hard limit enforced on any sort of game content. Especially in a big MMO like FFXIV.

[Bishop81]

The problem here it's not only housing, but the whole game as i said. You know enough to understand that it's all about stored data and nothing else, wards don't take much memory, as they are all shared data across servers, you should be able to understand why instancing housing wouldn't solve it, and don't forget we were told where the problem was, it's in 2 of the live letters.

...

For sources, you have 2 of the live letters between the XIV and the XVIII, i don't remember which ones, and i think they answered to the instanced housing idea in one of the live letters from the last e3.

Link to the letters?

Personally I find unlikely that memory is the problem. I have already explained why.

What is the problem? Beats me. But instancing might be a way around it. It worked for FFXI. Also oddly enough, there are no limits for FC rooms (instanced?) ...

[Renik]

First of all, ideas cannot be "false", at most they can be impractical or near impossible to realize, both of which I do not know if they would apply to ARR since I'm not a developer and I'll keep offering my suggestion till one of them tells me why it cannot be done.

But either way, wouldn't it be much like how Personal Rooms are handled? An FC house can have up to 512 of rooms, and there's 900-ish possible slots for FC houses in every server. That is enough memory space for 450,000 personal room instances. An housing instance wouldn't take that much more space to make it impossible to give an instanced plot to everyone.

Make instanced housing. This allows everyone to have a house

This is the false statement, which makes the rest of the idea impossible.

If you make personal instanced housing like personal rooms, just interior with no content, i guess it would be possible, rooms take much less memory it would work as ffxi housing.

But you can't just remove all the houses some people already have, and had to pay with time and hard work.

Link to the letters?

Personally I find unlikely that memory is the problem. I have already explained why.

What is the problem? Beats me. But instancing might be a way around it. It worked for FFXI. Also oddly enough, there are no limits for FC rooms (instanced?) ...

The letters are here in the forum http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/forums/644 there you can find the transcriptions, unfortunately the letters from the e3 where the response to the instanced housing is, are not archived here.

But in one of the letters between the XIV and the XVIII, they talk about the lack of memory and how they wanted to solve it with software adjustments (server structure i assume), before having to spend a lot of money upgrading the servers or adding new ones.

[Bluevann]

This is the false statement, which makes the rest of the idea impossible.

That's a little better than how you worded it. Can you please explain me why? Again, I am no developer, and you seem to know some of this stuff, so I'd like to know. I have always assumed that, since one small house (including the basement and garden) has about thrice the size of a personal room, it'd occupy about thrice the memory space, and so I assumed that a server able to host 450,000 rooms could host at least 100,000-150,000 instanced homes, which greatly surpasses the maximum population cap of a single server. You are making me guess that this math-based guess is wrong though, and I'd like to understand why.

[Intaki]

rooms take much less memory it would work as ffxi housing.

No, they don't. There is literally no difference between an instanced room and an instanced house zone. They are both just virtual boxes of marginally different size.