New info on housing plots, PVP, squadron changes

[Krotoan]

And example of how a few games do it. Hell even voxel based games do it like that.

You all would be surprised how much is actually done client side. The only thing the server needs to 'talk' to clients about in real time is when someone moves within visual range of another character or a change has happened. In fact I just ran resource monitor to see how much data is being used.

Inside Limsa Lominsa it was about 16kb/s to load into the game at the first time. Stabilized around 1.2kb/s....

You ran resource monitor on your own computer and are telling us that that's all the data that needs to be relayed? ALright yes. to display where everything is is minor, we need a position, a state with flags for dyes, and the light sources, mayybe some collision maps. Client side. I don't think you understand the problem though. The bottleneck as has been described is server side. Since so much is done server side to avoid possible item hacks and such, they said that something like every minute (bear with me here I am going simply from memory and I'll go look for the actual post later) the item and area servers are exchanging data constantly. Like everything you are holding in all of your inventories and it's amounts and states along with your customization and progression (all your achievements and clears and challenges). In addition we don't know how that info is relayed. Is it a giant text file? Probably not since that would be TINY. Is this badly done? oh yeah. But it's what they have to work with.

I get that you see this as a simple solution since you seem to have experience with other, well written games implementing much more complex seeming systems successfully. But this is a tarball of recycled and mishmashed gunk painted super nicely and given a body kit. I don't work for them. You don't work for them. We don't know what's under the hood on their side. If someone you're trying to buy something from says "that's beyond my scope of work". You don't get to tell them it's not. As you said: Money talks. Don't like the lunch that comes from this truck? Buy it somewhere else.

And hey, give me some perspective, what experience do you have in game design, production and online data management? I do network management and operations for an ISP. I'm not trying to pull rank or anything but I'd love to know if you're speaking from technical know-how or possibly just past education. I've never made a game nor coded a program, but have a sibling who does programming all the time and it looks and sounds complicated as hell even for someone who's tech savvy.

[RiyahArp]

I think yes, they exchange data constantly, but it's based on rules that say what they can trust the client with. Like if you went into an instanced battle, you would not trust position, HP or MP at all, so frequent server checks to make sure the values match. But you coud trust inventory more, since within an instance it doesn't change often, and things like class or job abilities trusted very much, since you can't change normally inside an instance. So there is a lot of data sent, but its triaged by kind and the bulk of it wouldn't be as much data as you'd think. I'm not an expert though, this is just from reading sites like Gamasutra (which I recommend, you find out a lot about games from it)

[Claviusnex]

First I want to say that I have always considered any move to instanced housing as a parallel system to the current ward system. If people want to be in a ward and are willing to live with the wait and restrictions I see no reason not to allow it.

All the code, except for dynamic increase of instances (which shouldn't be too difficult to write, seeing as it would only make a check here or there and either copy a set data or not copy it), is already in the game.
Most importantly, there are apartments that are instanced locations which players can customize.

I don't want to hear this "inside or outside" crap. There is no such thing in this game. It's just graphical talk, there is zero difference for the games engine. Every instance have its set parameters, and the only difference between "inside" and "outside" is how the parameter that allows or denies certain pieces of furniture be placed is set. The other differences are superficial, in that they decided to make the outside a large instance with exits into many smaller instances. That have nothing to do with the code at all. It's just how they designed it, and there is zero reason why they couldn't do a single-plot sized instance with a single exit into a single "inside" space. The entirety of the code exists.

This is what I have been saying for a while. SE could build a parallel housing system that is fully instanced. This would allow the interior and exterior to share the instance that is only instantiated when a player enters their property. In fact making the exterior and interior part of the same instance resolves the small number of exterior furnishings currently allowed with the ward system. Another problem it could resolve is the inability to upgrade the house without moving. It would also make system resource management easier in a number of different ways.

Why they are not doing it is clear. Money. Housing with customization does require significant amount of computing power and drive space. They would NEED to buy new physical servers to match the demand. And they find the expenses exceeding the gain. Simple as that. Everything they say about how it's not possible or whatever are just excuses to shush as many people as possible. It's a business. They lie. That's normal. As long as they lie as to why they don't bring something that they never did make a promise for, there is nothing "wrong" with that.

The only solution is to hope that whatever bonzos at Square Enix treat Final Fantasy XIV as cash cow for other projects will finally see it as a stand-alone game that should be invested in more significantly from the huge funds it earns, instead of moving that money into multiple unrelated crap-games.

SE doesn't need to buy dedicated servers if they design the instanced housing system correctly. All they need to do is lease a dynamic server pool from their datacenter provider and have the system add or remove housing instance servers as needed. It is a concept that has been around since the 1960's in one form or another and is being done everyday. With the pool SE would only pay for the system resources when they are in use and not have to waste money with privately owned servers that will likely sit idle much of the time. My gut also tells me that a dynamic housing system would probably cost less than the ward system they use today.

[Kaethra]

And hey, give me some perspective, what experience do you have in game design, production and online data management?

Trained in Tactical and Strategic networks for Satellite Communications for the Army Signal Corps, as well as data, networking, and tunneling protocols (a little beyond simple VPNs). As well as working as part of a development team for a video game as well as other creative works after military service.

My credentials check out. The only difference is I have a bit more faith in SE's devs than you do. While its definitely possible that they have used a mess of code to work out housing (and the rest of the world). I don't believe that is the case. In coding, there is a multiple ways to approach a problem. But at the end of the day, the code that works the best is the code that works simply and efficiently. And even coming from different people that end result is going to be roughly the same.

Don't take this as a dig personally. But I find it a bit funny that you call the other games well written. Everquest 2 is anything but (well its alot better now), but they did get the housing right. And I'm pretty sure ESO nearly copied the method. And from my experience in housing in FFXIV in the apartment, it feels like SE decided to do the same (well.. SE did it before ESO).

[Krotoan]

Trained in Tactical and Strategic networks for Satellite Communications for the Army Signal Corps, as well as data...

Don't take this as a dig personally. But I find it a bit funny that you call the other games well written. Everquest 2 is anything but (well its alot better now), but they did get the housing right. And I'm pretty sure ESO nearly copied the method. And from my experience in housing in FFXIV in the apartment, it feels like SE decided to do the same (well.. SE did it before ESO).

Never played EQ 2. But compared to FFXIV the original, anything is well written. I have very little faith that the original mess was anything other than recycled code slapped together till it did what they wanted at the bare minimums. Pieces of other games crammed together till they looked like a bigger game. I dunno if you played 1.0 and before but it was bad. Just experience wise it was bad. You'd click and ............... OK now something happens. I had whole groups of friends quit just after 2 days of having to deal with it. Non-responsive, crashy and buggy. The original didn't come from SE's devs, it came from some subcontracted company. I have all the faith in the world that the current dev team is doing everything in their power to get things done efficiently and quickly (2.0 is a whole nother game than 1.0 was) , but I also understand their foundation is shaky as hell.
I'll defer to your own experience in that hey, I've never actually written a game. But given what I've discussed with my own sibling and my experience with my own states network, if you start with a bunch of hashed together junk it does nothing but get worse and worse as you try to tack on more.

[Kaethra]

-snip

I get where you're coming from. I didn't get to see 1.0 personally, but just watching videos of it was cringey. Like peeps paid for that.

As for tacking on code. What I'm about to say, is going to make you and everyone else who has worked with group projects laugh, but you have to use a sort of discipline and standard. But of course bureaucracies and 'leadership' make that an impossibility. But it helps so damn much as you can imagine. That's the hard part. Taking the amalgamation of crap and convincing the people above you to go to something simpler.

I'm HOPING they started simple with housing. But if you're right.. well its hosed. Its hosed bad. That is until someone high up gets greedy enough to tell them to make something happen. Which is why I said (in this thread or another about this) that they're sitting on a goldmine. They'll come through. It might take time. But greed is a little more powerful than complacency. I make that sound worse than it really is, but you get the idea.

[BillyKaplan]

In instances its only for those who are present. Wards exponentially create load on the server. Instances more evenly spread it.

You're ignoring the server-side load of actually saving and maintaining all that data. Imagine every single player, not even character, player, has even a small house. How many items/positions/dyes combinations would have to be saved and maintained? The data bloat is huge and from what Yoshi-P keeps saying in interviews, I don't think the infrastructure can handle that much which is why they have to run maintenance and likely some extra development before they release more wards. It's not just network strain they have to worry about. Otherwise I think we'd have seen some more apartments by now.

I feel like Galileo trying to explain how a telescope works and everyone is claiming its heresy instead of just taking a look.

Nah you're just not seeing or refusing to see what other people are talking about, and no matter how well you explain yourself, we still disagree based on our own experiences and knowledge. No need to get so sassy.

[TaranTatsuuchi]

..
Since so much is done server side to avoid possible item hacks and such, they said that something like every minute (bear with me here I am going simply from memory and I'll go look for the actual post later) the item and area servers are exchanging data constantly. Like everything you are holding in all of your inventories and it's amounts and states along with your customization and progression (all your achievements and clears and challenges).
...

IIRC, it was that character data was synced to the servers every 15 seconds.
Much shorter than a minute.

[Alleo]

Honestly i see it as away to cut off the excuse of the expense of servers being to outrageous to implement. Y

The idea to put them the cash shop (in my case), just lets us have the option to have a home in game i could never afford with gill.

It's not a good solution by any standard, it's just one less thing they can use as an excuse.

If some of the reports are correct FF14 is one of their big cash cows for SE thus they should have more than enough budget to implement something that will give everyone that can afford it a house. Cash shop would just be giving them money for something that they did wrong and that they chose to not change over the years. That is imo the worst way to ever implement more housing. Also sorry if that sounds mean but wanting cash shop housing because you cant afford it is also bad. You easily get Gil by doing dungeons and the MSQ. Level one gatherer to 70 and you can collect the treasure maps which drops expensive items and lots of Gil too. There is no reason why someone should not be able to at least get a small house even if they dont craft anything at all. If you cant afford that maybe housing isnt truly for you. (And if you want something bigger like a mansion one simply has to put more afford into it) I mean you still have to buy the house itself and on top of that every house item too since you dont craft.

I mean whats next? Raid completion in the cash shop because someone does not have the time to raid? Really I dont want to be mean or anything but playing the game for a longer time should give one enough Gil to buy a house..heck a big problem is that everyone could buy a small one since its kinda cheap yet its so limited.

You're ignoring the server-side load of actually saving and maintaining all that data. Imagine every single player, not even character, player, has even a small house. How many items/positions/dyes combinations would have to be saved and maintained? The data bloat is huge and from what Yoshi-P keeps saying in interviews, I don't think the infrastructure can handle that much which is why they have to run maintenance and likely some extra development before they release more wards. It's not just network strain they have to worry about. Otherwise I think we'd have seen some more apartments by now.


.

So theoretically if every house was owned by an FC and every FC used every instanced FC room available, the server would explode? Because even though a lot of houses are owned by single players, the housing system itself started as FC only. Did they truly just hoped that it would never come down to everyone buying most of the FC rooms? Also the wards themselves are not really that good for the servers too. Instead of instanced housing which only creates itself when someone gets to the plot, the wards are here 100% of the time. Increasing the wards over the years will just create more and more stress on the servers, so I cant just see how this will be good for us. If they dont change the housing system they will hit a wall somewhere in the future where they either have to pay quite a bit to upgrade their servers to get more wards or they wont be able to create more thus limiting it even more.

Also Yoshida himself said that they will look into creating bigger apartments so it seems that this is possible for them. I believe they either just dont want to change the system because it was their idea thus they dont want to change that or they want to use the old system as long as possible to save money. In the end if nothing much changes in 4.2 they will just get hate and rage for every future housing release and there will be a point where it will be enough.

(Also other games do it just fine. I can play Rift for free yet own around 20 active dimensions on my character and can own all dimension keys that exist. They range from small dimensions to something so large, where people built a version of the Titanic in it. So yes other games are doing it just fine so either they are just bad at it, dont want to change it or their old code is just so horrible that its not possible. Which may mean that they need to start to change that otherwise we will get more and more excuses that some things wont be able to happen thanks to that)

[kikix12]

SE doesn't need to buy dedicated servers if they design the instanced housing system correctly. All they need to do is lease a dynamic server pool from their datacenter provider and have the system add or remove housing instance servers as needed.

I think, though I may be wrong, that Square Enix bought the company that owns the datacenter, and that the savings from having the servers under their own umbrella were why that location in particular was picked. Hence, they'd pay in one way or another all the same.