What does Heavensward actually bring to the table as an expansion?

[DawnSolaria]

Well, because my way doesn't come at the expense of everyone else. You are arguing that the current housing system is perfect and fine the way it is despite many people not being able to even own houses. That's pretty much the definition of a selfish attitude - "I got mine, everything's fine, screw everyone else".

If the servers can't handle enough wards for everyone to have a house, it's time to take another look at the system. It's just not fair that you have access to content that I and others don't, all because you managed to scoop up a house right after a reset or are on a dead server. How you can even call me selfish when I'm asking for everyone to have equal access to something is just baffling.

I did not say "everything is fine, screw everyone else", nor did I ever say "current housing system is perfect". I would rather SE add more wards to give everyone equal opportunity, than to instance the house to give everyone equal opportunity. Your way does in fact come at the expense of people who want to keep community housing, thats quite a bit in the "everyone else"
Way to assume that I dont want to let everyone have a house just because I have one. All I want is just to keep the house uninstanced. Instanced housing is extremely anti-social, as evident in WoW's garrison.
You are also assuming that the cost to change current system to instance would be less than adding hardware to accommodate more wards, how can you possibly know this?

[Kaurie]

I did not say "everything is fine, screw everyone else". I would rather SE add more wards to give everyone equal opportunity, than to instance then house to give everyone equal opportunity. Your way does in fact come at the expense of people who want to keep community housing, thats quite a bit in the "everyone else"
Way to assume that I dont want to let everyone have a house just because I have one. All I want is just to keep the house uninstanced, there is a problem with housing, but i would rather them add more wards. Instanced housing is extremely anti-social, as evident in WoW's garrison.
You are also assuming that the cost to change current system to instance would be less than adding hardware to accommodate more wards, how can you possibly know this?

Personally I would like more wards, so that everyone can purchase a house but it not be instanced as well. On that note, I'd rather have the insides of the houses also not instanced.

[Souljacker]

I did not say "everything is fine, screw everyone else", nor did I ever say "current housing system is perfect". I would rather SE add more wards to give everyone equal opportunity, than to instance the house to give everyone equal opportunity. Your way does in fact come at the expense of people who want to keep community housing, thats quite a bit in the "everyone else"
Way to assume that I dont want to let everyone have a house just because I have one. All I want is just to keep the house uninstanced. Instanced housing is extremely anti-social, as evident in WoW's garrison.
You are also assuming that the cost to change current system to instance would be less than adding hardware to accommodate more wards, how can you possibly know this?

I know this because I work in IT and work with virtualization every day. The costs of adding more wards, both in terms of maintenance (cost) and the necessary raw server\connection power are prohibitive. That's why we don't have more wards. If it was as cheap and easy as just slapping a couple more servers on, they would have done it by now. Instancing it fixes the problems, both with demand and the sheer amount of data the game has to serve up just to keep these virtual neighborhoods always on whether there are active players there with houses in use or not.


It was fine when it was just Free Companies, but when they decided to just make player housing the exact same they didn't take into account the actual demand and the load that this would be on the servers. The servers are already at capacity. The lag is real. There's nowhere to go with this system. It's clunky and at some point either the game will go back down to population levels that are sustained by the pitiful number of wards, or they will have to introduce instancing of some sort to meet the demand. It's their choice and so far they've chosen to do absolutely nothing, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop asking. I'll ask until the other grievances pile up so much that I do finally leave. And then you will have what you want: my silence. And SE won't have my money. So you can enjoy your empty neighborhood.

I get that you like that "neighborhood" experience. It's a nifty idea. It's executed horribly and it sucks that I can't have a house and folks like you are arguing that it should stay this way because you have based your entire gaming experience around watching strangers run around a ward. No one needs a housing system to be social. Garrisons weren't a failure because instanced housing makes people antisocial. Garrisons put too much game content inside instead of it just being a fluff house, and it locked crafting behind your garrison's progress - the whole design was flawed from the beginning. XI had instanced, individual mog houses, which is what I actually suggested SE base the player housing here on, and that game was the most social experience you could ever have in an mmo.

I only even brought up garrisons because SE has said in the past that instancing would be challenging, yet they did it in their previous mmo and Blizzard managed to make an entire personal city for each player. I wasn't saying garrisons was great content. I left very quickly after WoD dropped and have been playing this game exclusively since. I was saying that an entire personal city wasn't out of reach for that game and mog houses weren't out of reach as far back as XI. Why is it so out of reach here?

And finally, why do you feel your artificially created social experience (that you could have anywhere else outside the wards) is worth me (and others) not getting to have a house at all?

[DawnSolaria]

I get that you like that "neighborhood" experience. It's a nifty idea. It's executed horribly and it sucks that I can't have a house and folks like you are arguing that it should stay this way because you have based your entire gaming experience around watching strangers run around a ward. No one needs a housing system to be social. Garrisons weren't a failure because instanced housing makes people antisocial. Garrisons put too much game content inside instead of it just being a fluff house, and it locked crafting behind your garrison's progress - the whole design was flawed from the beginning. XI had instanced, individual mog houses, which is what I actually suggested SE base the player housing here on, and that game was the most social experience you could ever have in an mmo.

"No one needs a housing system to be social" this is strictly your opinion, so please stop using word such as "No one". Garrisons is a mobile game, there is very little content beside sitting there click a few button then wait for missions to finish. Anti-social wasnt the whole reason, but it sure is one why Garrison failed.

I do not want nor do i care for your silence, what I do care is SE changing the experience that I and some other players(may not be the majority and may be, i dont know) enjoy.

"Why do you feel your artificially created social experience (that you could have anywhere else outside the wards) is worth me (and others) not getting to have a house at all?" And why do you feel taking away my(and many other's) social experience is worth you getting a house? Its a MMO, its meant to be social. Want a real house sim? play sims 4.

Lastly if its as you said, that instance is more cost efficient, than why havent they done so yet(and from the start)? I will say im no programming expert, but im in progress of obtaining a degree in said field, so i would like to see more concrete evidences of resources usage. Which i dont believe we would ever see.

[Colorful]

"No one needs a housing system to be social" this is strictly your opinion, so please stop using word such as "No one". Garrisons is a mobile game, there is very little content beside sitting there click a few button then wait for missions to finish. Anti-social wasnt the whole reason, but it sure is one why Garrison failed.

I do not want nor do i care for your silence, what I do care is SE changing the experience that I and some other players(may not be the majority and may be, i dont know) enjoy.

"Why do you feel your artificially created social experience (that you could have anywhere else outside the wards) is worth me (and others) not getting to have a house at all?" And why do you feel taking away my(and many other's) social experience is worth you getting a house? Its a MMO, its meant to be social. Want a real house sim? play sims 4.

Lastly if its as you said, that instance is more cost efficient, than why havent they done so yet(and from the start)? I will say im no programming expert, but im in progress of obtaining a degree in said field, so i would like to see more concrete evidences of resources usage. Which i dont believe we would ever see.

Unless they can work out a method for everyone with the appropriate amount of gil to purchase a house (which is impossible due to server load, from what we've been told) then it should be made instanced, period. If they even have 1 million subscribers then the majority (by a long shot) don't have access to a house, and will never have a house. Or would you rather pay an extra amount per month for the money spent on developing housing content that the majority can't access, you do seem to want to keep it available to the minority because it's... social? I hang around my FC house the majority of the time, and the only people I interact with are the FC members, if FC housing was also instanced that wouldn't change, but I believe FC housing should retain the ward system and player housing should be made instanced.

As to why they didn't do so from the start, who knows? They've shown they lack the foresight to imagine that more than 5% of players would want a house, that mudra lag would be a problem if someone didn't live right near where the servers were located, that inventory just might become a problem with the continuous addition of new classes, etc. As for evidence, no one but SE can provide that, but we can compare it to preexisting systems. The reason we can't use our retainer's inventory on the go is to lessen server stress, they're not saving the data of retainers every so and so unless summoned. I'd compare it to running an app in the background of your phone, it takes far less resources. The same could be done with housing, if no one's in the house it doesn't need to be taking so much server resources, but with the way it's set up that's always going to happen. There's always going to be at least one person in a ward.

[Daralii]

Unless they can work out a method for everyone with the appropriate amount of gil to purchase a house (which is impossible due to server load, from what we've been told) then it should be made instanced, period.
They've shown they lack the foresight to imagine that more than 5% of players would want a house, that mudra lag would be a problem if someone didn't live right near where the servers were located, that inventory just might become a problem with the continuous addition of new classes, etc. As for evidence, no one but SE can provide that, but we can compare it to preexisting systems.

2.X on is built on 1.0's server infrastructure, which was probably the worst of any MMO period. It was so bad that the entire server could hitch from someone changing zones. It definitely limits what they can do, and tbh I'm amazed they've gotten it to work as well as it does.

[Souljacker]

"No one needs a housing system to be social" this is strictly your opinion, so please stop using word such as "No one". Garrisons is a mobile game, there is very little content beside sitting there click a few button then wait for missions to finish. Anti-social wasnt the whole reason, but it sure is one why Garrison failed.

This comment makes no sense to me. So you can't be social in an mmo without the wards? Now you are just reaching forstraws.

"Why do you feel your artificially created social experience (that you could have anywhere else outside the wards) is worth me (and others) not getting to have a house at all?" And why do you feel taking away my(and many other's) social experience is worth you getting a house? Its a MMO, its meant to be social. Want a real house sim? play sims 4.

Because I am paying for the same content you are and I don't have access to said content. That's why. This isn't about playing a house sim. Of course I don't want to play a house sim. I want to play FFXIV and have access to all the content my subscription is supposed to entail. Housing is a part of that. It was never pitched as content that only a select few that were on the servers first will be able to access, but gosh SE does love to make content more than half its players can never see.

Lastly if its as you said, that instance is more cost efficient, than why havent they done so yet(and from the start)? I will say im no programming expert, but im in progress of obtaining a degree in said field, so i would like to see more concrete evidences of resources usage. Which i dont believe we would ever see.

Because they have already told us it's "too difficult" - that's why I keep pointing at other games and what they have done. If it's too difficult for their current staff it's time to get some people in there that CAN do the job. Also because they just didn't have the foresight to realize that housing would be as popular as it is. You might not have been here when they first started releasing info but everything they told us pointed to it being drastically different than what it is. Last minute they just flipped a switch and turned on FC housing for individual players. That's because something in the underlying framework was very broken and they couldn't make what they were working on mesh, yet they felt they needed to release something, anything, and so this is what they did. It was probably the worst thing they could have done. Now there's a load of players who will never get houses and the minority of homeowners like you arguing that it's perfectly fine the way it is.

Bottom line is they need to make big changes to the whole framework because long run it's going to be harder for them to maintain. Throwing more and more servers at a problem isn't going to fix the underlying problem which is this system will never be available to all the paying players, ever. We have a fraction of the house space needed for the current players. Even adding the same amount of new wards won't cover it, and if this game is expected to continue growth they need to take a good hard look at how they are accommodating that growth. They aren't going to be able to afford throwing server after server up JUST to accommodate wards. Not an efficient use of hardware resources.

[Magis]

Lastly if its as you said, that instance is more cost efficient, than why havent they done so yet(and from the start)? I will say im no programming expert, but im in progress of obtaining a degree in said field, so i would like to see more concrete evidences of resources usage. Which i dont believe we would ever see.

The current wards are actual zones. Clients in that zone are sending packets to a server that is consuming and updating the game world for that zone. Now, in the current state... a server has to be dedicated to the zone, and constantly running even if there is no one there. This is why they can't just add zones, it would mean either making one server process more zones (slowdown) or activate a new machine to do it. This is also probably tracked in a DB by a zone id which also means using up more IDs in the DB wish wouldn't be a great idea. FFXI had a limit of 256 zones due to the zone id field in the packet being 1 byte, with a max of 0xFF zones. This is why FFXI used instances for BCNMs, Housing, etc. The fact that the rest of the world was open world and zoned was pretty impressive. I think after Abyssea the network code was modded to expand that number.

With instanced zones, the zones are created and destroyed for the player's or players' instance. This means if no one is in their home at one point, there is no processing going on since no zone exists. You save resources, and can easily add or removed servers when needed. The thing is, our homes are already instanced I would guess. This is why when you logout and back in you are dumped in the ward. The game doesn't have a place to save your player because the instance might be destroyed, so they dump you. Still they could have just created the instance before logging you in if it didn't exist but /shrug. Anyway, the markets wards themselves I would guess aren't instanced and cause all the troubles we have.

The issue isn't really the homes themselves, but the wards.

This is one of the reasons why EQ's AA (Alternate Advancement) system was so loved by their players. It gave them numerous other options to improve their toons beyond just getting the current top end gear. It is a feature I have often wondered why is not included in newer MMOs.

That was similar to FFXI's Merit Point system wasn't it?

[Deathscythe343]

That was similar to FFXI's Merit Point system wasn't it?

That I could not say, as I did not play FFXI.