The Housing Situation

[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?

[Theresa]

The best housing sistem I have ever seen are the Heaven Bags from Wakfu. Also, I just got a bit pissed when I went to buy a house today and couldn't find an empty plot.

[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.

[Shougun]

I imagine that a suitable fix will take quite a bit of resource movement, but it is annoying to have most recent dev cases on this read something like "we're happy with what we have". When FC and Players are excluded from a system that is not purely vanity. Can make money, important for FC to have just to get players into your group ("you don't have a house? no thanks"), and will be part of airship building in the future which sounds like it involves gear, money, and content so more reasons not to be part of the houseless FC.

A change on position would be nice.. Or at least a cheap band aid like "may transfer from full servers to housing available servers" but then I suppose all the other servers going "haha its not us its you" would then actually complain.. lol

[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.

[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...

[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]

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.

[Chasely]

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.

FFXI is 13 years old.