First successful housing patch??

[Keridwyn]

Why this is so hard for people to grasp I will never understand. It's like telling someone "why don't you just move?" when they're in a bad place. For some people, housing is going to be more important to them, and they'll leave. For others, housing is still important to them, but juuusssst underneath the friendships they've established on Balmung, and so they choose to stay.

Ideally SE would have dynamic wards that would flex with demand, generating the next when the previous filled completely. However, their infrastructure just isn't designed for it and they don't seem to really be inclined/able/allowed to change that. So Balmung is going to have to hope that the apartment changes that they're looking into are actually worthwhile. Which, ironically, is a bit like real life when you think about it. How many people in big cities live in apartments versus single family dwellings? Gotta move to the burbs if you want your own space.

[Alyanna_Elingval]

However, their infrastructure just isn't designed for it and they don't seem to really be inclined/able/allowed to change that.

Why would they though? From what I've seen a good majority of the servers still have open plots, some a lot of open plots. No business is going to make decisions on how to allocate resources based on extremes, which in this case would be the overpopulated worlds. They're going to focus on the things that affect the most people, on the most servers. There's a reason they've been trying to push server population balancing. Housing seems to have meet demand on most servers. Some people may still want larger homes, but it seems the people who wanted a home got them on most servers. So how can the patch not have been successful? They just need to work on cutting down fraud/cheating, whatever you want to call these dummy FCs, and improving apartments for everyone that has them.

[Zojha]

No business is going to make decisions on how to allocate resources based on extremes, which in this case would be the overpopulated worlds.

Putting resources where you need them instead of everywhere equally regardless of whether they are needed or not is actually common business sense. It ensures that you don't waste resources, which are usually precious, as they are limited. Computers might not even be a thing if the engineers coded everything to have the same amount of bits, logic and memory, regardless of how much is needed for a given implementation.

SE is being rather wasteful and puts the onus of using the resources efficiently on the players. Instead of putting the resources where their customers need them, they ask their customers to please go where they put the resources. That's very convenient for them and if their customers play a long, well... more power to them? It's something that doesn't work in every industry.

[Alyanna_Elingval]

Putting resources where you need them instead of everywhere equally regardless of whether they are needed or not is actually common business sense.

I'm not saying put resources into random projects. I'm saying if you're SE and you're trying to improve housing are you going to put resources into dynamic servers that expand based on population to benefit just a handful of worlds, or are you going to put the resources into something like improving apartments, which affects everyone who owns an apartment on every world, and will also reduce demand for houses in general?

[Penthea]

Ideally SE would have dynamic wards that would flex with demand, generating the next when the previous filled completely.

That actually wouldn't be ideal given that loads of players would wait for someone else to buy the unwanted plots so when a new ward pops up they can get what they really want. Players would complain about a system that would force them to buy something they don't want just so something decent can become available in the new ward.

Imagine you or your fc don't want a cottage, but that's all there is left. Would you waste money on a cottage you don't want? Or would you wait for someone else to force a new ward to pop open? Sure you can relocate but that's an extra step, and of course it's extra cash. It would be better than what we got now, but not ideal.

Really they should have made all plots be equal. You buy the land, and based on what house you build you get a certain size house and garden. This would also allow players to upgrade or downgrade a house size without having to wait for a new plot to open. And if SE chose to make wards dynamic it would be less punishing to players who want a specific house size.

[Aldotsk]

While I think there should be more wards in other servers, Balmung definitely should not get more wards. It's going to cause more people to go there.

The more congested the server is, the lesser chance it gets. Servers should be balanced out considering cross-world LS/FC alliance is coming.

That way more people will consider moving to other servers and help it grow whether it's RP community or friendly and healthy gaming community. One server should not determine everything to be there and not others. You have friends who refuse to move with you? Then they must not be your friends who aren't respecting your wishes.

They reopened the congestion gate for Balmung. It's literally asking people to congest this server and create other servers to decline. Did you see 10 servers go preferred when they reopened it? Do you know how ridiculous that is?

[Keridwyn]

That actually wouldn't be ideal given that loads of players would wait for someone else to buy the unwanted plots so when a new ward pops up they can get what they really want. Players would complain about a system that would force them to buy something they don't want just so something decent can become available in the new ward.

People are already doing this now. It went from 'SE, there are NO houses' to 'SE there are only SMALL houses'.

Imagine you or your fc don't want a cottage, but that's all there is left. Would you waste money on a cottage you don't want? Or would you wait for someone else to force a new ward to pop open? Sure you can relocate but that's an extra step, and of course it's extra cash. It would be better than what we got now, but not ideal.

I did 'waste' money on a cottage because any house was better than no house. Like a lot of people when 3.1 went live I counted 45 days from the patch and waited up on Christmas for the chance to get a cottage. I then upgraded in 3.3 when new wards were introduced by demoing my cottage and running to the closest medium to my friends. During the moratorium my friends moved to Shiro and since I no longer had all my friends around me (and didn't want to move to Shiro) I moved down on the beach instead. Eventually I want a large but I'm happy 'wasting' money on these side grades until the large I want becomes available either through the demo timer or through a future ward release. I don't need my dream plot to be able to enjoy housing.

Really they should have made all plots be equal. You buy the land, and based on what house you build you get a certain size house and garden. This would also allow players to upgrade or downgrade a house size without having to wait for a new plot to open. And if SE chose to make wards dynamic it would be less punishing to players who want a specific house size.

Honestly I don't disagree with you there, instanced plots or personal instanced housing would both be okay with me.

When I said 'ideally' I meant it. Imagine what our housing system would be like currently if dynamic wards had been in place since day one. Would we have a demo timer? Would we be limited to how many plots we can buy? No. Neither of these unpopular (or I guess semi-popular in the case of the purchase limit) changes would have happened. I think we'd still have seen the advent of the random timer to stop folks flipping larges and mediums (because you know that would have happened) but I don't think we'd have seen the housing crisis hit this scope. Housing wouldn't have been limited beyond how many people your server had. Nobody would have cared if you bought a whole ward, some might even have cheered you on. While I would have been a luxury good it wouldn't have been a limited one.

However, here we are. Dynamic wards are no longer feasible because of the newer changes to the system. Even instances plots like you talk about aren't either (even though I'd really enjoy it if it were) because SE doesn't want to mess with HOW the wards are set up. Apartments are hopefully going to end up bridging the gap. They say they're working on changes so we can hope that they expand apartments, add the option to upgrade your apartment to a larger size, and add some sort of indoor gardening ability (like perhaps an indoor box planter similar to the planter partitions or a window box).

So that's why I said 'ideally' because it would have headed virtually every other issue off at the pass.

[HyoMinPark]

Something to also consider with the dynamic wards idea is think about how it will function in a game that has 4 housing districts. What will happened if/when the developers add a 5th one? What if they introduce Ishgard housing in 5.0, and everyone that was flocking to Shirogane and spawning new wards picked up and left en masse for the latest and greatest new housing district? This is basing off of what happened when Shirogane released—a lot of people left the old housing districts for the newest thing. And you saw complaints everywhere with 4.2 about how all of Shirogane housing was sold out, and people were mad they didn’t get a plot in Shirogane because that’s the only place they want to live, etc.. I don’t doubt that it would be similar if Ishgard housing were added, especially since there is a big demand for that.

Dynamic wards could probably work if there was only a single housing district, but with 4 of them, people are going to cram into the current, most popular one, and if any are added in the future, they will just move there, and rinse and repeat.

The servers just can’t handle dynamic wards, I don’t think. They couldn’t even handle Early Access.

[Ill_Matic]

Come on over to Goblin if you want a special plot! Half the wards are empty in each district lol

[Septonyte]

3.3 was a great housing patch as well. Glad this one ended up more like 3.3 than 4.1.

It feels like 3.3 was easier because 4.1 was too little housing in combination with too much advertising. Seriously. Luke 20 - 25% of the stormblood advertising and that much of the pre-4.1 live letter was about shiro.