The Housing Situation

[Renik]

snip

You got me editing mi post with this

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.

I'm not a developer, but i have some knowledge, as i said to Bishop81, we were told by the devs (3 times) that it was a memory issue, we can believe them or not, but from what i know i think it's true.

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.

Yes there is, one saves more data and the other saves less, one has gardens and a stable, and the other don't, one has exteriors and the other don't.

[Caoihmin]

Ignorant question -- what benefit does owning a house have?

[Radaghast]

You won't be a homeless bum.

[Bishop81]

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.

Only found,

A: Kasuga: At the moment all I can say is that we are looking into it, but we're at the point where Yoshida will make a judgment call.

Yoshida: First, we'll be adding land in patch 2.38, and it will then be possible to purchase personal housing, but the issue of how many plots to add will be under discussion until right up to the last minute. Just the other night we had a meeting which included Kasuga about even more additional plots and what kind of plans they have in order to accommodate them. At the same time we've been looking into whether we can increase the number of plots by juggling our graphic resources. Currently, we're working out all the parameters and then we'll be deciding how to do it and at what time based on the results.

Kasuga: The quick answer as to why it's not so simple to add more land is because of the infrastructure. Compared to our initial plans for infrastructure, the current demand for land has far exceeded what was predicted, and in the event that we decide to go forward with the current infrastructure, we would have no choice but to address the issue with software. And if we were to rely on a software solution, it would be difficult to secure the time required to test everything out, further delaying the release of new land.

Yoshida: Of the ideas we have at the moment, we are trying to make the final decision as to which solution is the quickest and would allow for the most land, as well considering the amount of time and resources it will take. Of course there have been those who have suggested spending millions to enhance the servers, but this would be the last resort for our engineers. We're currently looking into exactly how much we can increase the amount of land with our current resources and we'll be doing this right up to the last minute. If it appears that all other avenues have been exhausted, then I'll make the call to beef up the servers. At the very least, we will be increasing land in patch 2.38 and you'll also be able to start purchasing private housing.

Says nothing about memory.

I'm getting the impression that the "neighborhood" is what holding everything back. Rather have an stand-alone instanced house - i.e. no neighborhood - then no house at all.

[Fenral]

Ignorant question -- what benefit does owning a house have?

Chocobo stabling, 1-3 garden allotments (as many as 24 plants at once, and many rare items can only be obtained though gardening), and an extra dirt-cheap teleport option close to the city of your choice. Stabling is required to increase the level cap of your chocobo companion, as well as change its color.

Not "essential" features, but still an important part of the FFXIV experience.

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

If that's the reason you've been defending the current system, then FULL STOP.

I don't think anyone is asking for anything to be taken from anyone else, just adding a new form of housing as an option for people who never got a shot at the housing wards. Adding new systems usually doesn't involve taking away from the old ones, though I'm sure someone will find a retort for that statement just for the sake of retorting.

If other games are capable of this, Final Fantasy XIV should be, too. It may not be a priority for the developers, for whatever idealized aesthetic reason they have, but we'd like it to be.

[Hexy]

I don't like being homeless

[Zelas]

I don't like being homeless

Me neither, little buddy. Me neither. ; ; -Curls with under some bridge-

[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.