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

[Magis]

I don't want to be all doom and gloom just yet because Heavensward is still early in the expansion, but a lot of people are right. Only thing heavensward really brought was leveling up to 60 and a baby raid that's only fun for about 1 day a week.

No offense, but I'd just like to point out that you (and a lot of people) are just shifting the goal posts with this comment. When people complained about 2.0, people said the exact same thing you are saying; "They had to rebuild the game", "they were rushing just to get it workable cause of 1.0", "wait till the expansion" and similar stuff. Well we are at the expansion, and it seems not only didn't SE change much or fix people's complaints (housing, boring content, etc), in some cases they made the game as bad or worse than 2.0 (back to two dungeons). I though we were suppose to go forward with expansions, not go back to square one.

Edit: and remember various live letters and interviews, Yoshi himself said that ARR was the "building back player trust" phase.

[Kedo]

Same ol' grind.

[Fendred]

An example of a good expansion to a game is Path of Exile's "Awakening" expansion. The devs didn't just add a new area or raise level cap on top of what was already there. They looked over every aspect of the game to make it feel like one seamless whole with the expansion in mind. Problematic zones were redesigned, way points placed in reasonable locations, and the time to reach the expansion area was also considered. The old and new content of the game work in perfect symbiosis with one another. Heavensward acts more like a parasite slowly sucking the life out of its host.

[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.

[AnimaS]

Getting to 60 is not a long process so what did SE do for everyone.. they torpedoed the crafting and gathering systems (the economy on my server is dead) added 2 dungeons that everyone is sick of and most didn't like in the first place.........Alex Normal, ridiculous it's easier then most ex primals. Alex Savage: basically what , 1 % of the entire population of players are even on a3 and most of them are quitting BECAUSE of A3. The only thing that constitutes an expansion are the new zones which once you get through you are pretty much done,unless doing fates for other jobs or gathering. I have never been so absolutely sick of this game in the last 1.5 years as now. 2nd coil and Final Coil were fun, crafting kept expanding through 2.4 (now it's just, gone unless you consider capping scrips weekly and gathering mats for 24 hours to craft 1 item crafting) .......... I've seen so many FC's and raid groups collapse in the past month due to Alexander savage it's frightening. You get to a3 and kick someone, replace, still a problem,repeat ,falls apart. We paid for complete systematic failure and I mean, SE doesn't even say a word. We got word of Void Ark, well assuming its like the last 3 24 man raids ....I guess it will be useless 1 month from release and a task,not fun. Things are.. on thin ice.

[Fevelle]

I might be a little too optmistic, but I think 4.0 will be WAAAAAAAY better developed and implemented than 3.0 was.

Oh, and one question: since they released Ninjas outside of an expansion (patch 2.4) what's the chance of SQEX releasing new jobs at, let's say, 3.5?

[seraseth]

Oh, and one question: since they released Ninjas outside of an expansion (patch 2.4) what's the chance of SQEX releasing new jobs at, let's say, 3.5?

I believe they said they have no plans on releasing new jobs mid expansion.