The Case for Instanced Housing

[Shougun]

I might be misunderstanding your point, so explain what you mean by pocket space. Im not referencing FFXI cause I do not have experience in that one, so your example is lost on me. Based on what you were saying, what it came across as was ward housing is still instanced housing - you just have it in a 'ward like setting' but you wouldnt have a neighborhood. Going to your house just puts you in your house/yard with stand in buildings or the like for the surrounding areas that you can see over your plot walls, but couldnt actually walk over and visit.

If you watched Howel's Moving Castle just picture the door, if not.. it's neat if you like anime so go watch it lol.



But basically as a ward user you have purchased your instanced housing interior, a ward exterior yard, and a pocket world space instanced exterior. Like OP's image, like Wildstar or other instanced housing systems, the instanced exterior is going to be significantly larger than your yard (with wildly more free customization, like changing your backdrop so you're a floating island or with a specific weather pattern, or you can scale / float objects without it messing with others).

Instanced users will only have the instanced housing interior and instanced exterior, they will not have a ward yard. You can also add a housing link to the instanced system in the ward system, just to encourage instanced housing users to be able to exit to a ward sometimes even though they own no ward. Also I think adding in game supported competitions and other incentives to visit strangers (that have the public flag on) would be good, as well as adding more seasonal event / content concepts to the wards.

Basically you only own a ward house because you want to be part of the ward, if you -just- wanted a house you'd be instanced. People who don't want neighbors wont take space in the wards and those who want neighbors will be there. Ward users however would lack not a single feature, everything is available to them (hence they're not punished).

Ideally to add the instanced portion will get lots of granular upgrades and customization choices (like Wildstar), of course some of the purchases from ward upgrades would cross over into instanced (like buying a large house increasing the instanced interior). As I'd like to see housing come into the game sooner, and be a smoother process that can evolve with you throughout your whole experience. So definitely not losing the gil sink but parsing it down into better smoother bite sized pieces.

Instanced housing being better is dependent on what your goals are.

Totally fair lol. I was just being impish. :P

On a personal level they're potentially superior, like Wildstar, but that's also because I don't really care to have some stranger decorating my visual horizon with their phooka theme and would be more impressed with a system that adds long term progression and higher levels of customization. It's also why I suggested an Airship system that behaves more nodular, so it's low on memory use (instead of 200 xyzs of ?? items it's just like 5-50 nodes of 'slot y is ?? element'), is a system that can be good for those who can't decorate/don't want to but still want a home base (like how pretty the in game inn rooms are), and ultimately can still be nice for ward users. Since the home would be far more personal decorating touch, but the airship would definitely feel homely with an outward outpost/mobile base vibe and have customization still- just can't x y z place a flower put but rather upgrade rooms (nodes/airship designs) and change their themes and SE decorates it for you. I'd still think wards are a bit silly yet in that circumstance I'd probably just leave it alone as a salt topic because airships could easily still act as a long term progression system that co-exists and grows with your character, adding a personal space for those who didn't have one before for whatever reason, and allowing FC and players to enjoy content they normally couldn't due to scarcity issues (gardening/submarines/etc, via the Cid Workshop concept the thread mentions).