The Housing Situation

[Renik]

snip

This is what i was talking about, infrastructure is referring to physical servers, hardware, Yoshi talks about how they want to solve it with software before having to "beef up" the servers.

IF you think about it, adding more ram or processing potency will not improve housing availability, unless the server are actually suffering because the amount of activity going on in the neighborhood which i doubt, open world ares where happens occur have much more activity.

Just to explain how neighborhood works, they just design an area an save it in the servers, this area is unchanging what makes it consume almost no memory, this data is shared between the rest of the servers-data centers-wards as a simple copy. Inside these areas are the houses, with various options and features (stables and gardens) houses take a lot of memory, not one, but all of them. If we were to instance houses, in order to open more availability, these houses would only count with interiors, which means not features, and no exteriors, again this would not be much for a single house, but if we talk of 100k-200k, the amount of memory not used is really big compared to full houses.

If you have read one live letter where someone asks where we appear out of the house when we log out, it wasn't like that before, at some point SE decided to teleport us out to the neighborhood so the system can avoid saving the data pertaining the position of our characters inside the house, if this is a measurement to free up server memory, see how desperate they were.

Of course we could remove the neighborhood to free memory, but it wouldn't be even close to give a house to everyone and every FC.

snip

Of course i'm interested on keeping my FC and the neighborhood it occupies.

But this doesn't meant i'm against Bluevann's idea, i just know neighborhoods are not the problem, and instancing houses will not solve the issue, i'm just trying to make you understand.

Anyway, they will probably enhance the servers with heavensward and more wards will be added, but as long as more new players keep joining overpopulated servers like Balmung, we will never have enough plots for everyone, instancing houses or not.

EDIT:

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.

After reading your post more in deep, i noticed i should give you a more exact response.

It's not all about the size of the plot, yes it does matter, here i'll talking based on assumption of how i think they store the data.

The size matters, bigger size just means more coordinates, here comes the number of exterior and interior variations, and outdoor and indoor furnishings, they are not only saving what we place in our houses, but also reserving the memory we could use, which means every coordinate, every direction and every item possible, this is obviously unchanging unless they make the instance client-side, which is possible and unlimited, but also susceptible to hacking, so no gardening nor chocobo nor FC crafting, just a house.

I can only say we can't really make any math without working directly for SE.

PS: i'm tired and i don't think i have more info to share or explain related to this topic, so i'll leave it here.

[Fenral]

If you have read one live letter where someone asks where we appear out of the house when we log out, it wasn't like that before, at some point SE decided to teleport us out to the neighborhood so the system can avoid saving the data pertaining the position of our characters inside the house, if this is a measurement to free up server memory, see how desperate they were.

Actually, it wasn't. It was a countermeasure to prevent characters from getting stuck inside furniture before they gave up and implemented noclip. There were also cases where houses were demolished with people inside, rendering them unable to log in.

Of course we could remove the neighborhood to free memory, but it wouldn't be even close to give a house to everyone and every FC.

Of course i'm interested on keeping my FC and the neighborhood it occupies.

But this doesn't meant i'm against Bluevann's idea, i just know neighborhoods are not the problem, and instancing houses will not solve the issue, i'm just trying to make you understand.

"Making" someone understand is impossible. Fostering understanding can happen, but only if you allow yourself to understand the opposing argument.

He was never asking to demolish or replace anything, just trying to make a comparison based on the current assumed specs of the housing server. Obviously, instanced housing would be operated on a separate server (keeping in mind that worlds are not servers, but server clusters). It would not be a cheap upgrade, but if they are already at the limit of the current servers, they will be adding more eventually either way.

I believe his suggestion entailed keeping the current neighborhoods as they are, but having a different way to place houses in new wards after instanced housing is implemented. The feasibility was never really the point of discussion, it was just a suggestion.

No more math. Please. Since we know nothing about the backend, there's really no point.

[Bishop81]

This is what i was talking about, infrastructure is referring to physical servers, hardware, Yoshi talks about how they want to solve it with software before having to "beef up" the servers.

IF you think about it, adding more ram or processing potency will not improve housing availability, unless the server are actually suffering because the amount of activity going on in the neighborhood which i doubt, open world ares where happens occur have much more activity.

Just to explain how neighborhood works, they just design an area an save it in the servers, this area is unchanging what makes it consume almost no memory, this data is shared between the rest of the servers-data centers-wards as a simple copy. Inside these areas are the houses, with various options and features (stables and gardens) houses take a lot of memory, not one, but all of them. If we were to instance houses, in order to open more availability, these houses would only count with interiors, which means not features, and no exteriors, again this would not be much for a single house, but if we talk of 100k-200k, the amount of memory not used is really big compared to full houses.

If you have read one live letter where someone asks where we appear out of the house when we log out, it wasn't like that before, at some point SE decided to teleport us out to the neighborhood so the system can avoid saving the data pertaining the position of our characters inside the house, if this is a measurement to free up server memory, see how desperate they were.

Of course we could remove the neighborhood to free memory, but it wouldn't be even close to give a house to everyone and every FC.

So ... what you are saying is, the houses are instanced but the neighborhoods aren't.

Houses are just like FC rooms, instanced. There is no limit to the number of FC rooms - i.e. everyone can have one. It's therefore logical to conclude there isn't really a limit to the number of houses either - both are instanced.

The only thing holding back houses is the lack of neighborhoods AKA wards.

The neighborhood system doesn't scale well. At the very least it doesn't scale to accommodate the whole server's population.

Solution:

Let us have houses without neighborhoods - include the "outside" as part of the house instance so we can have gardens, ponds, trees, and what not.

[Fenral]

Let us have houses without neighborhoods - include the "outside" as part of the house instance so we can have gardens, ponds, trees, and what not.

But not necessarily remove/change existing neighborhoods, right? While I think you only mentioned overhauling neighborhoods as a means of keeping the current system alive (if they can't add on to it), people on this forum tend to react very strongly to the idea of their special shinies being taken away. I think most people could get behind adding some sort of alternative housing if it doesn't impact the people using the current system.

Maybe amend the OP?

[Renik]

God, and i wanted to forget about the topic.

snip

In the end what we need are more or better servers (not worlds, as you say, actual machines), we agree that they can't solve it with the current servers then, they never expected this demand for housing so they were unprepared, but if they can add more server or improve the ones they have, they can just add more wards, enough for everyone, no extra development needed.

snip

No what i say is rooms take less memory because they have less coordinates, less possible items and no stable nor garden, you can have more of these for less memory, the moment you add the garden and house you go back to the original house size and memory required.

And, a neighborhood have a number of items, this number is static with minimal variation, it could take the memory of various houses, but being static means it has to be saved only once per server (i assume, i could even be saved in just one server) the removal of neighborhood can free up memory, but it's not enough to cover even the number of houses an actual subdivision have.

The removal of neighborhood would have a plus, no empty plots, but in servers with high housing demand there are no more than 20 large empty plots per area, due to the size of the house, not enough free memory to cover the demand, to keep the actual houses, new or better servers are needed, and they are not going to scrap all their work, so they will most likely add several wards once the servers are upgraded, and if they do it well this time, they will give more wards only to the servers that needs them.

[Fenral]

God, and i wanted to forget about the topic.

Then stop responding? You mean well, I think, but you can let the devs deliver their excuses themselves.

Having enough wards for everyone is an unattainable goal, especially on servers like Balmung or Gilgamesh. While there is no downside to the current system for people who already have houses, at some point they will need to find another solution. Ideally the current system will remain largely intact, with a few more wards added, but they will also implement some better-scaling alternative.

Whatever they decide to do will require resources and a certain amount of development time. Instanced housing, as seen in many other MMOs, is something we would like the developers to consider going forward, even if it was not considered before.

[Renik]

snip

The thing is, it's not an unattainable goal, if we are having a lack of wards, it's because the dev team was expecting a playerbase of 500k(this was said be Yoshi when the servers were having issues due to an unexpected amount of players), who would have a minimal interest on housing, the game launched with around 1.5m, so they had to upgrade the servers during the next months. Months later housing launched, the number of players raised to 2.5m, and they had to adjust the software to add more plots several times. The problem is they are providing housing with a server capacity for a playerbase not bigger than 2.5m players, but we are currently more than 4m, i know registered and active accounts are not the same, but an unsubed account can have a house, and to this we have to add FC houses.

We are not out of plots because it's hard to add more, it's because they have not upgraded the servers, i'm sure they are upgrading them for the expansion, and the EU datacenters (located in EU) will open soon, they will add several wards, and it will be done faster than making a new housing system.

[Bishop81]

But not necessarily remove/change existing neighborhoods, right? While I think you only mentioned overhauling neighborhoods as a means of keeping the current system alive (if they can't add on to it), people on this forum tend to react very strongly to the idea of their special shinies being taken away. I think most people could get behind adding some sort of alternative housing if it doesn't impact the people using the current system.

Maybe amend the OP?

Would be weird having that 8 wards ... for the 1% that were lucky enough to acquire enough cash to buy a house before it ran out.

Joined recently? Tough luck.

In the end what we need are more or better servers (not worlds, as you say, actual machines), we agree that they can't solve it with the current servers then, they never expected this demand for housing so they were unprepared, but if they can add more server or improve the ones they have, they can just add more wards, enough for everyone, no extra development needed.



No what i say is rooms take less memory because they have less coordinates, less possible items and no stable nor garden, you can have more of these for less memory, the moment you add the garden and house you go back to the original house size and memory required.

And, a neighborhood have a number of items, this number is static with minimal variation, it could take the memory of various houses, but being static means it has to be saved only once per server (i assume, i could even be saved in just one server) the removal of neighborhood can free up memory, but it's not enough to cover even the number of houses an actual subdivision have.

The removal of neighborhood would have a plus, no empty plots, but in servers with high housing demand there are no more than 20 large empty plots per area, due to the size of the house, not enough free memory to cover the demand, to keep the actual houses, new or better servers are needed, and they are not going to scrap all their work, so they will most likely add several wards once the servers are upgraded, and if they do it well this time, they will give more wards only to the servers that needs them.

Seriously, how much space could a house, a garden, a stable, outside furnishing, and inside furnishing take?

You add it all up, it would probably come to less than a MiB.

Look you have no idea how SE stores all that stuff either. My opinion on how things work is as good as yours.

[Fenral]

Would be weird having that 8 wards ... for the 1% that were lucky enough to acquire enough cash to buy a house before it ran out.

Joined recently? Tough luck.

So all the houses in them should be destroyed with no recompense towards the players who do have houses already? Or simply convert all existing houses to instances and tell the people who wanted houses next to each other that sorry, but majority rules? That's called Communism, and it's far past where I draw the line.

I've already said all I can. You guys have fun refusing to give ground to each others ideas.
Now where's that Unsubscribe button...

[Bishop81]

So all the houses in them should be destroyed with no recompense towards the players who do have houses already? Or simply convert all existing houses to instances and tell the people who wanted houses next to each other that sorry, but majority rules? That's called Communism, and it's far past where I draw the line.

I've already said all I can. You guys have fun refusing to give ground to each others ideas.
Now where's that Unsubscribe button...

Not Communism. Dictatorship. Yes, in case you haven't notice, you can play the game only because SE allows you to. They can refuse to provide you service anytime they want, for whatever reason.

The reality is, at least it appears that way, neighborhoods scale very poorly and SE has great difficulty increasing the number of them.

So either,

a) they buy new servers costing millions (something they have stated in the LIVE letter as a last resort) or
b) instance it all and use the neighborhoods for something else.