the whole housing situation in this game upsets me

[BunnyChain]

You know that's a really great idea, but I think it could go a little further still.

Housing Proposal - Apartment complex
[...]

This would actually be an almost perfect(IMHO) solution to the current mess since it adds instanced homes without hurting the existing system, provides a community area and lobby so you still have players in and around the housing location, and allows all players to participate in housing to the full.

Someone's got to burst your daydream.

Q: I can’t buy a house! Yoshida, please do something!
A: I’d like to address this first since there are people saying plots are unavailable and prices are just too high. First off, I owe you an apology for my subpar explanation of why personal and Free Company housing cost the same amount. The prices were determined after extensively reviewing the game’s economy, and they won’t go higher than they are now.

Basically, the reason both personal and Free Company housing plots aren’t segregated is that because it’s been a year since our official launch, the rate at which Free Companies are established will gradually decrease. If the land for personal and Free Company housing was separate, we’d have to keep supplementing both in spite of declining demand for Free Company plots. Plus, when a Free Company is dissolved, its property is relinquished. On the other hand, individual players will continue to earn gil, so the demand for personal housing plots will only increase from now on. Separating the two would result in a situation where a player can’t purchase land in crowded personal housing areas or buy an empty plot in the Free Company areas. So, while I do understand that people want to buy a house right away, we have decided to proceed with a system that won’t keep players from building houses in the long run.

We’re planning on doubling the number of plots in Patch 2.4, and we’re aiming to add even more land in later updates. At the moment, though, we don’t have a good handle on how many players are trying to buy personal plots worldwide, so just sit tight─more is on the way.

Finally, I’ve seen a few posts on the forums saying housing would be better if it was instanced like inn rooms are, so I want to point out that instances aren’t saved. Nothing in an inn room needs to be saved; player housing, on the other hand, necessitates personal save data for things like furniture placement and character location. So, it would really amount to adding more land anyway. During a previous Letter from the Producer LIVE, I mentioned that we would make it possible for players who don’t belong to a Free Company to have a house with a yard so they can garden and raise chocobos, and the current system is designed to do this. We will be doing our best to provide more land as soon as possible, so please bear with us a little longer.

Source

[Reinha]

Someone's got to burst your daydream.

Source

So basically instanced housing won't solve the issue. I'm pretty happy to hear this because I'm in favor of neighbourhoods and would prefer they expanded the current system. If they made houses instanced without adding server space, things would actually get worse. Too many people creating houses would cause the housing server to crash continuously just like what happened with Garrisons (instanced).

[Colorful]

Someone's got to burst your daydream.

Source

Just wondering, but how does that explain FC rooms? Each FC room can have up to 512 rooms, and each of those rooms are "saved". They're always saying things that contradict how things are, like "We can't give you more retainers because the servers can't handle it, but you can buy it off the Mogstation!". So I'm led to believe they're either lying, or their team is just incredibly incompetent (not too be too offensive but I'm just speaking from what they allow us to see, and that's incompetence).

Why are they incompetent? Let's take a look at another game, Black Desert Online (a truly "next-gen" MMO), in that game developers set random buildings located around their open world that you can purchase an instance in, similar to Free Company rooms, but they're out in the world and actually houses. You click on one of those buildings and choose someone's "house" and you enter it without any loading screens (as far as I'm aware there are no loading screens in the world at all, either that or very little). Or Rift even, an older game that has significantly less money than the FFXIV team, you can own entire mini dimensions and they're free (the first 2 iirc) and there's an infinite supply, entire dimensions where you can do more than just furnish a set house template. Even WoW has Garrisons, your own city with NPCs you hire! Not only is it instanced and available to anyone at level 90-91 without paying a single gold, but the transition from the open world to your Garrison is seamless.

Honestly I'm starting to not believe a word that comes out of Yoshida's mouth, it's almost always a lie unless it's a new raid that follows the exact same format as set before, and then he just apologises or makes more excuses because people eat it up like he's some kind of godly figure.

[Dererk]

You should probly look at it this way. FC house is a group thing so it benefits more that the people in it can have their own room. Personal house is a solo thing they don't need features like this (much less work shops.). So their prioritizing the save data on FC houses instead of doing an apartment thing it just makes more sense.

[Colorful]

snip

FC housing has features that can be utilized by multiple people, but personal rooms? No, they do not. Regardless, that wasn't my point. How much plots are there, I think it's several thousand? Let's assume that 2.5k are FC houses, that's a potential of 1+ million personal rooms. How do they have the server resources to expend on that, but not the apartment idea? It just seems to me that they don't want to invest more time into it. Also what he said about housing being "saved" doesn't seem like the case, the instances are created once someone jumps into them, that's why going into the duty finder and coming back out kicks you out of the house, or logging off and on, etc... unless that's yet another flaw with their housing system that they overlooked due to unwilling to spend time fixing it.

[Souljacker]

Just wondering, but how does that explain FC rooms? Each FC room can have up to 512 rooms, and each of those rooms are "saved". They're always saying things that contradict how things are, like "We can't give you more retainers because the servers can't handle it, but you can buy it off the Mogstation!". So I'm led to believe they're either lying, or their team is just incredibly incompetent (not too be too offensive but I'm just speaking from what they allow us to see, and that's incompetence). .

Pretty much this. YoshiP is a producer, not a server admin and he really has limited knowledge on *how* stuff like virtualization and instancing actually happens. They are already doing it so really the only reason they aren't fixing the existing housing is because they are listening to the vocal minority who have built their entire gaming experience around seeing strangers run by in a ward.

we have decided to proceed with a system that won’t keep players from building houses in the long run.

This is a prime example of a comment that literally makes 0 sense. What this says to me is "we're waiting until people either give up on housing and stop wanting it or leave the game for a different one so our population levels drop to a level we're comfortable with. Then the players left will be able to have houses."

So far they are on the right track if this is what they want. The lack of content (and that there still won't be anything new to do for another two months) is making at least one player seriously consider not resubbing for a while. Between that and not having access to content in the game like housing, it's just not worth it to me anymore. What's ironic is I could go back to XI and my mog house will still be there with all my stuff in it. Somehow they made it work over a decade ago, but this new team just can't get a handle on the most basic of things.

[Naunet]

QFT. They need to dust off the idea of instanced housing. Current interiors are already instanced. FC Rooms? Instances. I kinda wonder if the whole "how do we make it easily visit-able?" is the real issue and not the server load.

WildStar has a simple visiting UI that has an option of pulling up a random list, or typing in a particular player's name to visit them. Rift has an entirely searchable in-game database of every single dimension created, that you can organize by name, type of dimension, rating, etc. The "easily visit-able" part is a very easy thing.

[T2teddy]

Regardless, that wasn't my point. How much plots are there, I think it's several thousand? Let's assume that 2.5k are FC houses, <snip>

Sorry but you have drastically over estimated the number of housing plots in this game.

Each world has a TOTAL of just 1440 lots. [3 residential areas with 16 wards x 30 lots = 1440]. On my world there are hundreds of rank 6 to 8 FCs which have never been able to get a plot of land. Nearly half the plots on the world belong to single players [personal houses]

[Colorful]

Sorry but you have drastically over estimated the number of housing plots in this game.

Each world has a TOTAL of just 1440 lots. [3 residential areas with 16 wards x 30 lots = 1440]. On my world there are hundreds of rank 6 to 8 FCs which have never been able to get a plot of land. Nearly half the plots on the world belong to single players [personal houses]

Please do tell me how I drastically overestimated the amount of plots? I'm referring to data centre numbers. I drastically underestimated actually, 1440 lots would be 10080 plots on Elemental alone, assuming half of those are owned by FC which gives us up to 2.58 million personal rooms per DC. Even if we were to do it by world, that's still 368,000 personal rooms per world.

[Nyalia]

Random suggestion - Grand Company Housing. Each ward/subdiv gets one new structure, a Grand Company barracks, which is just a single-floor small house decorated with the Grand Company furnishings for that company that has a stables and personal room door. Anyone from that GC can stable their chocobo in the stables and interact with other chocobos stabled there, same as an FC house. Each stable has a limit on the number of chocobos it can hold, first come first serve, just like the limit on an FC house's stables. The stables are not connected - all 16 for each GC are separate.

The personal rooms likewise work exactly like they do for FC houses, cost the same, and have the same limit. Everyone can buy a Personal Room in a GC house provided they (1) don't already have a personal room in their FC house or another GC house (one room per player), (2) belong to that GC, and (3) the GC house's personal room slots aren't full. Each GC house has individual personal rooms that are not connected to the other houses in any way. You can set your room to be public or private just like in an FC, and you can set a name and greeting and so on.


If you don't log in for two days, your chocobo gets kicked out and you have to go to the same NPC to retrieve him that you do if your FC demolishes their house or kicks you out while you have a stabled chocobo.

If you don't log in for a month, your GC room gets demolished and your items are sent to the same NPC as if your FC demolished their house or kicked you out.


That would provide a form of housing for ~25,000 players. Which... I guess is actually not very many, but still, it's something? Of course, after two days, all the houses would be bought by RMTs and their greetings would be website addresses...