I'd like to take an extended break from the game, but...

[Kaethra]

Can anyone explain the Cons of instancing this stuff to me? The only one I can think of is it lowers immersion a bit. But the benefits are that housing becomes more accessible and doesn't disappear if you have to go for whatever reason.

The way I see it, a soldier deploying for a year being able to keep their stuff as it was when they left sort of trumps the reasons for not instancing.

But what might truly fix things on Balmung and Gilgamesh, is make an Official Roleplaying server. That way the RP community won't be split, pvers, pvpers, and trolls can go off on their own and people will know for sure what servers to pick.

The (RP) tag on a Roleplaying server attracts trolls like a moth to flame. Its a well known fact that RPers buy items for higher prices due to glamours. In addition to the fact it brings in all sorts of 'other' players. The fact that you have unofficial servers actually curbs it a bit. Unfortunately those servers just got too big.

[AstralKaos]

Can anyone explain the Cons of instancing this stuff to me? The only one I can think of is it lowers immersion a bit. But the benefits are that housing becomes more accessible and doesn't disappear if you have to go for whatever reason.

That's the only con, really. And for that con there's a very, very, very simple solution - if a person/group want to have this neighbourly district thing which barely exists (most servers you will only see your neighbour at the board or in their garden with FC, or alone) then you can fight it out with the others that want that; meanwhile, those that don't care about this sort of thing and just want a house, small, medium or large - can go and easily get one in an instanced little zone that's accessed easily to others should they wanna see by the aetheryte.

Not that saying any of this helps, the dev team clearly don't want to fix this horrid system... no, they want to keeo adding on to it instead.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Can anyone explain the Cons of instancing this stuff to me? The only one I can think of is it lowers immersion a bit. But the benefits are that housing becomes more accessible and doesn't disappear if you have to go for whatever reason.

You can even fix this by having instanced neighborhoods; no more than five lots per instance. Think of it like Sims 4. Unfortunately, the devs won't let go of their immersion argument despite the housing system being a complete mess. It's the same issue that plagued PvP for years. They finally gave in and allowed us not to queue as our Free Company because queue times were embarrassing low. At this point, I think plenty of people would accept less content in one patch cycle if it meant instanced housing and the current system was scraped.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

Can anyone explain the Cons of instancing this stuff to me? The only one I can think of is it lowers immersion a bit. But the benefits are that housing becomes more accessible and doesn't disappear if you have to go for whatever reason.

The way I see it, a soldier deploying for a year being able to keep their stuff as it was when they left sort of trumps the reasons for not instancing.

There is a potentially major downside, but it comes back to how their instance server code and hardware is setup, something that only the devs know. Back at the game's launch, the game had very few 'instance' allocations, which led to wait times for Amdapor Keep (The one and only dungeon that gave weekly tomes back then till wanderer's palace had mythology added) potentially an upwards of an hour+, regardless of role, regardless if you had a full 4 man party ready to go, simply because there wasn't enough instance allocations to go around.

I can only make assumptions as only the devs know how the instancing works, but assuming their server hardware is limited when it comes to total instances they can allocate, I can assume the choice of 'neighborhoods' was made to keep the total housing instances on each server down to 36 instances (12 wards * 3 housing areas) vs 2160 instances (12 wards * 60 plots * 3 areas for houses that potentially need instances). and once again, just making an assumption, but if every 'instance' reserves itself from a collective 'pool' of instances that are limited, then having 2160 per server being potentially occupied could very well lead to that same problem of 'not enough instance severs to go around'. and that's just low balling it, because with instanced housing, there wouldn't just be a 2160 house cap anymore, a server like Balmung could very well have 20k~ instances needed for its housing.

Instanced housing would solve the situation, but could present a technical and catastrophic nightmare from the dev's side of things if implemented in haste without proper testing, or the proper hardware to handle it.

[Zojha]

I can only make assumptions as only the devs know how the instancing works, but assuming their server hardware is limited when it comes to total instances they can allocate, I can assume the choice of 'neighborhoods' was made to keep the total housing instances on each server down to 36 instances (12 wards * 3 housing areas) vs 2160 instances.

Sounds plausible - until you realize that the interior of the houses has to be allocated as an instance either way, so you're not saving those 2124 instances, you only have 36 more. Moreover, every FC house can have up to 512 more instances inside it - Private chambers. If the amount of instances was an issue, people using that potential would be a veritable nightmare for them.

If they had wanted to save instances, they'd have had to design the exterior of the house to fit with the interior, so that both are in the same instance. Easy to do when one house is one instance, a lot less so when 30 houses make one instance (Subdivisions are a new Instance IIRC).

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

Sounds plausible - until you realize that the interior of the houses has to be allocated as an instance either way, so you're not saving those 2124 instances, you only have 36 more. Moreover, every FC house can have up to 512 more instances inside it - Private chambers. If the amount of instances was an issue, people using that potential would be a veritable nightmare for them.

If they had wanted to save instances, they'd have had to design the exterior of the house to fit with the interior, so that both are in the same instance. Easy to do when one house is one instance, a lot less so when 30 houses make one instance (Subdivisions are a new Instance IIRC).

Like I said, it comes to assumptions. Based on zero load times and what I know of dev 'tricks' from the time I've worked as a programmer, I actually think the interior of the houses are 100% loaded in the same instance as the actual neighborhoods, just that the interiors are located far away, beneath the ground, or otherwise inaccessible. There have been plenty of times not just in what I've worked on, but from what I've seen in other games through people using cheat devices or glitches, that objects and stuff that's needed for something specific, but not necessarily needs to be seen by the player until a specific point are often stored beneath the map or out of sight, then the player is simply teleported to a location, or the objects brought into the scene.

In the case of their neighborhoods, I would have put in 30 empty rooms per division far beneath the map, then once the house is accessed, the server would pull all the data regarding objects inside the house to populate it so it'd give the 'illusion' it's instanced. But who knows. I only base it by the nearly zero load times to enter subdivisions and the houses themselves. Either way, It's my guess there's a technical reason behind not doing full instanced housing, and 'immersion' is the 'PR' response.

[Kaethra]

Instanced housing would solve the situation, but could present a technical and catastrophic nightmare from the dev's side of things if implemented in haste without proper testing, or the proper hardware to handle it.

Instancing doesn't put any load on the server. Instancing takes a value in RAM or object, and clones it. Meaning 5 instances take the same space as one. The 'issue' is assigning an instance value to each character as an ID, which would take a few bytes. Then you assign a database to each ID to show what items are where. And that is saved on the character. This part is already done. Its why you can put furniture where you want.

So what happens when you have two people owning the same 'house'. The outside is static. When you enter a gate or door, you enter an instance of the place. It sends you your information during the loading screen and when it appears it appears as your house. Lets say your friend owns the same house. You exit your home through the gate or door and reenter, selecting your friend from a list. You enter their version.

Here's the cool part. The house is already loaded into RAM from you entering your version. It only needs to load the placement of the furniture. The loading time is quicker because of that.

Also all textures of the instance and furniture is loaded from your harddrive. The ONLY thing the server loads is the database of furniture used and where it is as well as the new instance ID. We're literally talking about 2-4bytes of info needed. And who is moving where as normal. That part may seem high, but its not. Zone ID, X, Y, Z coordinates. The zone ID is the only difference. And its needed anyway for Mist, Goblet, ect.

The hardest part is making an access point. And the list of who owns what. Data that is already being used.

As for the potential 20,000 instances. Instances ONLY need to be running when they are being accessed. Just like Dungeons and Duties. Its no more stress on the server than there is now. Hopefully that clarifies.

[Moonlite]

snip.

The original problem with the waits for instance was a design mistake (i would like to say something else). Originally the instance servers for dungeons had a set amount per dungeon so it didn't matter if over half the servers were idle. They did patch to allocate servers so they removed wait. Since then I have only ever seen a wait of 1 min and I think it was the first day of one of the 24 mans. They were also supposedly fixed roulette so it would pick the most appropriate level dungeon for the group. But that doesn't always seem to work and they had a lot of problems with people not getting in. But supposedly is why a full group of 50s doing leveling roulette would get ToTorak most empty servers.

But I would love an honest explanation as to why they haven't instanced houses. If the game has coding issues and they can't, people might be more understanding (might).