In Regard to Housing in Patch 4.1

[Stabby-Chan]

My housing solution:

1) Return all money and items to all players and reset all plots.
2) Make FC-Wards (better for Gaming) and Player-Wards (better for RPing)
All housing limited to one house/per account.
FC-Housing: Raise an FC's Level up, get an option to buy an FC-House using FC points/money, etc (Internal FC Function) //Now all FC's have a housing option without it being centered on player.
3) Have the Data-Centers run Dynamically-Allocated Housing Server Clusters for all worlds that are in the Data Center. (Housing availability for all)

Why?
Fairness. FC-House availability should have always been through the panel, and not through an individual player. Other games have it right. Individual Player room for housing, Entire Guild Halls for Guilds to reflect their size. FCs should have something to reflect their large size beyond a house!

[Calteru]

(tfr)

There are immediate issues with this proposed solution.

1) This penalizes the vast majority of people who did not buy more than one plot. For example, I would lose the plot I worked for two months to acquire. I have done nothing to deserve this, so it would be unfair.
2) There's a real concern about server resources being squandered with parallel wards being opened. The more wards added, the more server resources used. Can you explain how your solution would avoid this issue?
3) Now there's a pressing, perhaps fatal concern. Housing for all on a game with 10 million registered users would be ENORMOUSLY expensive, and that money would have to come from somewhere. Do you have an idea of a dollar figure on this?


Thank you for allowing me to state my concerns with your proposal. I look forward to your reply.

[Alleo]

My housing solution:

1) Return all money and items to all players and reset all plots.

Yes lets punish all house owners even more because SE created a bad system. There are still lots of people that only have one house or maybe one private and one FC house. Your solution would punish all of them. Also if they create an dynamic housing system that adds wards if they are full (which is probably not possible with the system right now since they are probably really stressing on the servers) why would they even need to take the houses away in the first place? Just introduce the rule with the 1 personal 1 FC house and have dynamic wards after that.

Also I know games like Wildstars and Rift where you can have at least one nice personal house/dimension (in Rift you can have like 20 active dimensions or something like that) so why should be only stick to a lesser system if they could introduce something that would be good for people and FC?

There are immediate issues with this proposed solution.

3) Now there's a pressing, perhaps fatal concern. Housing for all on a game with 10 million registered users would be ENORMOUSLY expensive, and that money would have to come from somewhere. Do you have an idea of a dollar figure on this?

We do not have 10 million people playing the game right now. Probably not even 1 million of active players. Also other games can do that fine. The problem in this one are the wards themselves. Since they are always existing even if nobody is in there, they eat quite the resources. Having completely instanced houses would take away from that quite a lot and should make it possible for everyone owning a house (heck even owning one in each zone). Dynamical wards are probably not that good because they would take more resources but if they want to stick to their faulty system then they either need to put more money in it and truly create such a system or they will always leave behind a quite angry customer base.

[Calteru]

We do not have 10 million people playing the game right now. Probably not even 1 million of active players. Also other games can do that fine. The problem in this one are the wards themselves. Since they are always existing even if nobody is in there, they eat quite the resources. Having completely instanced houses would take away from that quite a lot and should make it possible for everyone owning a house (heck even owning one in each zone).

If you would be so kind as to quantify your response with some hard data, I'd sincerely appreciate it. Specifically, I need an accurate count of daily active players, a list of some "other games" that can "do that fine", and an understanding of how fully instanced housing can populate for people who don't own said house, yet still have the permission to use it, when the owner is not online. Thanks in advance!

[Abelfei]

If you would be so kind as to quantify your response with some hard data, I'd sincerely appreciate it. Specifically, I need an accurate count of daily active players, a list of some "other games" that can "do that fine", and an understanding of how fully instanced housing can populate for people who don't own said house, yet still have the permission to use it, when the owner is not online. Thanks in advance!

FFXIV census as of September shows about 10-25 k of active players per server. They have a website.

[Calteru]

FFXIV census as of September shows about 10-25 k of active players per server. They have a website.

Unofficial, but that's one question sort-of answered. At least we have some kind of datapoint to start with.

Now. What's the cost per-person in terms of bandwidth usage? Adding more stuff will add to bandwidth. We'll also need some kind of idea of how the server would respond to having fully instanced housing.

Before suggesting something, it would save a lot of time and effort if we had some idea of how a proposed solution would WORK.

Also missing: The list of "other games" doing this, and some kind of idea of how FI housing would populate for people authed to used the property but not owning it themselves. (This in particular is crucial information. If we're looking at, say, how SWTOR does this, we will likely run into budget issues. SWTOR "solved" theirs by taking from content development. I don't know if that'd be viable here.)

[Siniztor]

My housing solution:

1) Return all money and items to all players and reset all plots.
Why?
Fairness.

Fairness????? whats fair about any of this in my cause ive had my 3 rp houses for a year i paid $18 to transfer for housing again i paid real money to go to a server with a ton of empty plots...everyone who was on the server who wanted a house had a house or a chance to get a house, Before Se opened the free transfer program due to them over stocking Balmug and having to lock it.As ive istated i and 2 other fc mates counted my server the night before and there was 218 empty plots.

So now in fairness you wanna take away what i paid extra money to $18 cause housing was my #1 prioty to give everyone who got a free transfer a chance at a house...cause lets face it new subscriptions aren't the ones looking for houses in most causes it mid-high pop servers and people who took free transfer to low pop servers who wern't fast enough to get one. those on low pop servers had no issuses and plenty of houses open till free transfers

[Calteru]

Fairness????? whats fair about any of this in my cause ive had my 3 rp houses for a year

Why do you need three houses?

[Siniztor]

Why do you need three houses?

I play 3 differnt char and rp them. all 3 have beaten HW, 2 have beaten all of Sb one is working thru Sb now, all 3 played every week most daily. All 3 have differnt lives and styles, my Dark dragon has a dark den home filed with his throne and treasure, my female kitty has a house built soft and cozy...my male kitty has a pimp house with a dance stage and hot tub.

Which is why i paid to get off a med pop sever a year ago to go to a place i knew i could have housing for all 3..i knew it was within my rights to buy more then one and i knew this server had 100's of empty plots

[Maero]

I really think some of you are making it sound more expensive then it actually is in regards to server upgrades. No i do not have a figure but SE CAN afford to upgrade the servers, they just use sub money on their other game projects instead..
Other games i am sure have less revenue and less servers (Elder Scrolls Online as example) and have nowhere near the issues with housing that we have.