The Case for Instanced Housing

[Barraind]

What I mean is providing services like Beast tribes and the like in wards could or would help depopulate world maps more than they are. Not sure if this would be a good thing. This gets a bit more noticable if you start bringing vendors for Tomestones/relics/etc to a housing ward, thus making older cities and what not moot.

With some of that, I dont know if it would make a difference. I see maybe 1 person at the Amal'ja and Sylph vendors every now and then when I have to buy rivets or whatnot, 1-2 at the Vath vendor, and more or less none at the rest, though the sylph area will have people doing sylph quests.

Part of my idea is that the dev team has said they want the wards to feel like player hubs, but the way its set up now, they dont really do that.

[Shougun]

Probably totally unneeded now but I thought this might help visualize what I was talking about @Melichoir

Currently:


Power for everyone:

To note instanced area can have a representation of your house too, but as it's the Wild Star style of an area so it follows a lot less strict rules and therefore the appearance could vary wildly from the ward (this is why I listed exterior specifically with the ward), but of course there will be a toggle sync 'match' visuals so you don't need duplicate items if you wanted it to look the same. Again if someone has seen Howel's Moving Castle you can really easily picture the system I'm talking about, also good cute movie if you're into anime movies so I really recommend it if people are in the mood (family appropriate movie, it's not an 'adult' anime).

As you can see the house connects to both the instanced land and the yard, and also means if you stopped playing you'd only lose the ward yard and you'd keep the house like everyone else. Yet if you maintained your yard status you'd have a physical location that was present in the world as a sort of calling card. Once everyone gets housing, as mentioned before, I'd also like to see the game encourage more visiting to the wards through seasonal events and other occasional happenings (if you keep them on 24/7 it might spread people out too much and make it feel less like a thing to do, so I think making it occasional would help give it that sort of 'tourism' season). Those who own a yard could put their gardens there or they could put them in the instanced space, the yard may afford them a few more slots but the instanced space, especially with the new customization options that open up over the game (like scale, xyz position, full rotation), should allow for more than enough to fully decorate it (like Wild Star lol).

Allowing people who buy into the ward might be a means to skip some of the story gating as well, if SE wants to slow people down from clogging up memory of the housing for every option (might be silly to give a trial player 500 slots of memory right away.... lol). Some gating might not be skip-able, but for example maybe you have to finish ARR before you can get your own small outdoors space, meanwhile if you haven't finished ARR but you bought a ward you'd obviously be ahead of the curve slightly. These differences are not meant to strictly incentivize wards but just to help keep the drain more towards players who'll definitely be sticking around for a while or be coming back on occasion. The differences at the end will just be 'yard vs no yard'. Like when you hit ShB and 'you know where' concepts can filter into the system, greatly expanding the potential (custom sky boxes, custom weather, custom scaling and positions of all objects), but also adding some extra memory strain.

So if they add a super cool mega-mansion size to the game while there might not be a 'plot' in the ward system that size the ward user can still upgrade their house to that size (the ward yard will have the size that it needs to fit visually but the interior will be mega-mansion, and the exterior of instanced land will be whatever they want that they've unlocked so far). Which is nice so you can own a small house in the wards, even as a FC, but totally have a huge house in actuality (so long as you invested into that). For lore / world setting you may think of it as teleportation or expansion magic, as both concepts would work.

Obviously the airship, if they went node based would be a lot friendly on server stress though and I think would also be pretty neat. Buy a small highwind cid ship that gives you like two rooms, one has to be a cabin, other your choice, can upgrade the tiers/limitations, slot themes into the nodes like Ul'dah Syndicate (desert opulence), the exterior of the ship having some customization too, like banisters, wings, balloon type, flag. That just being a beginning ship, later getting to things like the Prima Vista with many many rooms and options but because it's node based it's still like 50 nodes to store the entire ship (theoretically less than our chocobo saddle bags, if we just haphazardly assume what type of info is needed to store items and load them on demand, and airships don't even need to load as fast as saddle bags.. at least not at all times). Of course making them super customize-able would be awesome too, but I imagine there might be some people who prefer an upgrade / slot house 'option' in so much as they'd love a house but they would like someone else to decorate it lol (like when you play one of the assassins creeds that have house type systems, the cafe or homestead, and you can upgrade it quite a bit but it comes professionally done for you after upgraded).

[kaynide]

Instanced housing = Apartments with a front yard.

Rather than tear down the system in place and screw over people who like things as they are, why not spend more time advocating for updating how apartments work?.

Mechanically in programming this would would be fine to have housing behave identically to apartments, but I personally hate apartments (also in real life). I want a yard with a fence and some surrounding greenery to look at, at minimum.

Personally as in my first post though I would much rather have something we can gradually upgrade or expand. Nothing as grand as we see in stuff like....say Dragon Age 3 or other rpgs where the player builds an entire town up. Just want a functional base. We are the warrior of light after all. Not necessarily the most important person on the planet, but we are absolutely on first name basis with every major world leader.

At worst we deserve a place the size of quarrymill to operate out of.


Basically my stance overall is keep the wards as is, because people want to use them as is for RP Or other personal reasons. All good! In addition, instanced exteriors with a personal house in addition to great features, making it as good or even better than Ward housing. I am 100% ok with wards being inferior in function because people shouldn’t want them for function, but rather social/ “epeen” aspects. If that is what’s important to the player, no judgment.

[TeraRamis]

Mechanically in programming this would would be fine to have housing behave identically to apartments, but I personally hate apartments (also in real life). I want a yard with a fence and some surrounding greenery to look at, at minimum.

Ditto. But I'm not interested in neighbors. To be honest, the current wards are a massive eyesore - mismatched houses, tiny yards, terrible, gaudy exterior decorations, etc. And, overall, they don't even manage to feel alive - 99 percent of the time they're just empty (and even a little creepy).

Basically, I've never set foot in a neighborhood in this game that I had any desire to live in.

[kaynide]

Ditto. But I'm not interested in neighbors. To be honest, the current wards are a massive eyesore - mismatched houses, tiny yards, terrible, gaudy exterior decorations, etc. And, overall, they don't even manage to feel alive - 99 percent of the time they're just empty (and even a little creepy).

Basically, I've never set foot in a neighborhood in this game that I had any desire to live in.

Yup. My neighbor felt it was a good idea to put a giant Maoi statue glaring right at my entrance

[Eldevern]

Since I owned two mansions, I have some kind of experience of "neighborood". Most of time, it is dead empty. Sometimes when it is a ward with a big FC you can see a few more people but it's not what I call lively since most of time, they don't interact, they just stand half-afk, waiting a roulette to proc or are remaining here while they are gone.
People visiting house? Since I was used to craft in the house, visit are rare, maybe one a week, sometimes two but it is really rare to see more people.
Apartements? Dead empty too. I sometimes see the same and only one player... two times a month?

This said outside of an FCs. Is it different when we are part of an FCs? Not really, most a time, we see... three people and that's all.

If we talk about social aspect, I can't make another conclusion than : it's a sad fail. Many FCs are not lively either.

Considering we currently can lose house, I don't regret I gave up my mansions. I would gladly exchange the whole system for an evolutive instance where you can start little and upgrade step by step. With Wildstar, we know it is technically possible, since the game has been released in 2014 and then, based on a 2010-2012 technology, the current state-of-art allows a lot more (especially thanks to GAFA : they need both a lot of storage, a lot of dynamic memory and a high availability. Since this kind of technology is now ten years old, it is not experimental anymore but the growing standard). People who think they would lose a lot with a complete overhaul don't realize the changes in server technologies.

There is something else to consider : even if there is no new AAA MMORPG to be released anytime soon, FFXIV already somehow look outdated to compare with BDO (that can run on mobile) and it is worst with the coming next-gen. If SE wants the game to last ten more years, they will need a big overhaul.

[MsQi]

Instanced housing = Apartments with a front yard.

Rather than tear down the system in place and screw over people who like things as they are, why not spend more time advocating for updating how apartments work?

As an example, create Tiered Apartments you pay for. Tier one - Current Apartment type: 100 Item placement. Tier 2- same size as a current cottage with upstairs and downstairs, 200 item placement. Tier 3 Apartment - Upstairs, downstairs, 300 Item Limit, and a "Balcony" area that can hold 10 outdoor items. Pricepoint could be 500k, 1 Mil, 2.5 Mil.

Same time, youd increase Housing sizing as promised - Cottage is 30/400 item ext/int, Medium is 40/600, and large is 60/800.

This pretty much gets you to solve both problems at the same time. Housing system remains in place with incentive to have a house (more item size + exterior customization + neighborhood) while giving people something that is instanced so if you want one but cant get a cottage, you can get something similar. Im more than confident that given this option, youll clear up 90% of housing complaints as people will just purchase T3 Apartments if they want a cottage like setup.

Nice. I personally would like to be able to have an apartment in each housing area (so 5 when Ishgard is done), and have the option of upgrading one apartment to a penthouse with a balcony.

[Packetdancer]

The spaces that ARE the player housing options have an interactable placard. Click the placard for a house, and navigate through the list of everyone on that server who owns a house at that spot. Select someones house, it displays the exterior of that house for you as a preview. You can then select to visit it, taking you to the instance of that house. Leaving that house puts you back near the entrance. You can also select to purchase a house on that plot from the placard.

I admit, I don't like this. Both for social issues and for technical ones.

The social ones are relatively minor, I grant; I think a lot of the reason people like yards is so that they can show them off. I have a lovely little zen garden yard, and people who wander through the ward sometimes come by, stop to enjoy the yard, and write little "I love your landscaping work!" messages in my guestbook. If my yard was, say, 20 units down on the list of houses for my particular plot, no one would ever wander by and randomly notice the garden and stop in to enjoy it. That's a relatively minor point, like I said, but I admit a lot of why I made that zen garden-ish yard was for the enjoyment of other people who happen to stop by. I don't know if I would've bothered with doing that if I knew no one else would ever see that garden unless they specifically chose my house out of the list of 20 or 30 others on that plot.

From a technical standpoint my concerns are much bigger.

For reference, right now I can stand in my yard and my neighbor can walk by on the street, I can wave to them, they can wave to me, and we can talk over my fence. There is, for purposes of how the game handles things, no difference between "inside the fence of Khit's house" and "outside the fence of Khit's house"; we're in the same Shirogane housing ward instance regardless of where we stand relative to that fence. Now let's say that we do phased housing, and someone walks past my house and I see them on the sidewalk just outside my gate. I /wave to them... but they haven't picked my house from the placard.

How does this work?

• Is the yard difference just visual? I.e., no matter what yard I have picked from the placard, you see me still standing in whatever yard you have picked? This can create problems where I want to use the yard for gardening, someone else in the same plot wants to use their yard for a gathering, and now from their point of view some random person is gardening in the middle of the fountain in their yard while they're trying to hang out with their friends, while from my point of view a bunch of people are just gathered and talking inside the middle of my bamboo grove while I'm trying to garden. It's probably an even bigger issue with FC houses; my FC has a tendency for folks to gather in the yard when we're queuing for stuff or considering doing something as a group. It's not uncommon to have a couple of parties of people chilling there while waiting for the queue to pop. If someone else had the same housing plot, they'd probably feel overwhelmed having seven or eight people chilling there chatting, sitting on things you can't see, attacking thin air because they're practicing on training dummies, etc...
• Are the yards visually separated? I.e., I just become 'invisible' when I'm not in the yard you're seeing, but you can still see emotes/say that I make? ("Khit Amariyo waves to X'ample Tia.") Still could get surreal/awkward if you're in one yard trying to hold a conversation with folks about using the training dummy to try out a new rotation, while someone in a different yard of the same plot is trying to RP a tea party; you could "hear" each other in the chat box but not see each other.
• Are the yards fully instanced? I.e., you can see a yard visually from outside the fence based on what you've picked, but have to choose to walk through the gate and load into an instanced yard before you can see anyone in that yard? Then even neighborhoods that do have activity would seem dead because you'd never see anyone in their own yards unless you deliberately chose to walk into that yard (loading screen and all, like walking into a house). And similarly, while you could look out across the fence to see the neighborhood, you would never see someone walking past (because you're actually in a separate private instance) unless you walked back out of the gate into the ward proper (again, loading screen and all because of how instances work in this game). In this case, fences would probably turn into invisible walls you can't jump over, and the gate into/out of a yard would become a clickable entrance/exit, like with the "Additional Rooms" door inside FC houses.

I think the reason that BDO's phased housing works, from my experience playing BDO, is specifically that they don't have exterior yards or customization. The different instances of the house are determined by which instance you pick when clicking on the door; you're already transitioning from outside to inside, so there's a natural division and it becomes easy to instance because folks outside aren't chatting with folks inside anyway. In that sense, it's like the "Private Chambers" option inside an FC house, where you always go through the same "Additional Rooms" door to get to private chambers, but you pick which set of private chambers you're going into. (Or going into apartments from the apartment building lobbies, for that matter.)

While I think phased housing is a great idea where it works, I think retrofitting it into the ward system would become clunky and a mess of half-baked compromises, just because the wards were built very much around the idea of exterior customization happening in a larger shared instance.

If we move to instanced housing of some form—which I do think is a good idea, because housing scarcity locking people out of various game systems like gardening and airship/submersibles is Not Good—I think it either needs to be in addition to the existing ward system, or to replace it entirely (and give folks who have existing houses some form of in-game recompense). And since we're working on constructing a new Ishgardian housing ward right now, I doubt "replace it entirely" is one the devs will have on the table.

[Melichoir]

Snip snips.

Are we trying to give everyone property so everyone can have a house, or are we trying to create more social player interactions?

Now, you can suggest that housing is a fail for social interaction. I can see the argument for that. Maybe it hasnt been that effective as it couldve been, and SE has been trying small fixes to to get people to be more interactive. But youd be hard pressed to say that housing doesnt have the intention of increasing social interaction. Since it is apparent that was part of the initial goal of housing, it doesnt make sense to create a housing system that does the opposite of that. So completely instanced housing that removes the neighborhood system, along with bells and whistles that would make visiting cities obsolete, is incredibly counter productive. All you would do is encourage player isolation.

Two ideas brought forth are already superior to this: Shouguns idea on pocket space so you can have your own property to design with works fine. The caveat is that you shouldnt be able to make it a replacement for major social hubs lest you want to promote player isolation. So design to your hearts content for funsies, but it wont be a city hub. The other one is turning the wards into a hub in of itself which I think was Barraind's point. Creating a centralized shopping district within a ward that would function like most city centers do while having some instanced housing.

I would think the solution is somewhere in the middle of all this. Im still of the mindset that providing and upgrading apartments would solve much of the issues (and as a side note: Make GCs have Airship/Subs something you can do there if you dont have FC/housing access, but thats a separate discussion), but also creating a central shopping district within wards would probably help create more player traffic and interaction as well as promote more property usage.

As for the game needing an overhaul, yeah some graphical issues need updating but were not running on new tech here. It's worth noting that FFXIV 1.0 was released in September of 2010, and that ARR was in 2013 and built using the same engine and set up as 1.0. BDO looks nice but that was released in December of 2014. Speaking broadly, BDO came out 4 years after FFXIV did, and was built differently. When they say there are limitations to updates, YoshiP and the devs are not BSing us. It is unfortunate, but to cut costs and relaunch the game, They relied on what already existed and modified it. For them to really overhaul graphics and looks of the game, that would more or less require rebuilding the base architecture of the game - something that is extremely time consuming and expensive. At that point, youd be literally remaking the game from scratch. You see this very same issue from all MMOs that have survived for more than a few years. Aspects get outdated, and they apply bandaids and clever techniques to get around it. But these are only small short term solutions. The game will not have as much graphical fidelity as newer games designed on better engines and techniques. Give BDO another 10 years, and that too will look outdated and poor in quality and there will be nothing they can do to fix it beyond small hotfixes.

FFXIV isnt the most stunning game Ive ever seen, but it holds up pretty well IMO. Theres a lot of small things they can do in the short term that would help quite a bit (update textures to be high res, as an example), but I think overall were gonna be stuck with what we got til this game goes the way of all MMOs.

[Packetdancer]

So, rather than just shooting down the phased housing idea on the grounds of technical/implementation concerns, I thought I should probably contribute an idea or two of my own.

I've already talked about improving apartments; give more size/layout options and an instanced rooftop garden or greenhouse to pick from, so that you a have the option of gardening. That doesn't solve the social side of things, but means players aren't shut out of the gardening system.

I've also advocated FC airships as one way to do things. That way, you free the wards up for individual owners who want yards, FCs don't have to rush to try to get a house, etc. The airships could have a nice greenhouse (for gardening), a workshop (for submersible/smaller airships, so as to allow expeditions), they could also have personal rooms aboard like in existing FC houses.

You could even sail them around to different hubs, so that you can pick what 'zone' you see when looking out the windows or up on the deck; with only needing to set up the scenery below, it would be fairly feasible for the devs to add places which don't normally have housing. Want to park your airship over the Yfaem Saltmoors and look down on the ruins of the Weeping City? Sure! Want to park it over Mor Dhona with the Crystal Tower below? Why not! Settle in above the Doman Enclave, and even have the view below based on the progression of a given person's Doman Reconstruction efforts. Etc. You could even have places we haven't been yet. Maybe you can park your airship somewhere that you can see Radz-at-Han in the distance, or Dalmasca, or Thavnair. Park it where you can see Old Sharlayan on the horizon, or the New World, or head south to Meracydia! Could be an interesting way to let folks get an 'early look' at somewhere we haven't been yet but will go, and would make the airships potentially more desirable than the houses are.

But here's another thought, to come at it from the social side that folks are talking about now: have a type of smaller ward (wholly instanced) where an FC can buy the ward. Big building at the center is the FC house, and then you have a bunch of small housing plots around it which can only be purchased by the FC members. It has the issue that if you leave an FC you lose the house, but that's already the case with FC private chambers... and given the setup, the housing plots could be far cheaper than normal ones, so you wouldn't be out of bunch of gil if you did lose it. Moreover, you could have a far more gracious grace period on those than the current 45 days, since houses in an FC neighborhood aren't a resource that everyone is competing for. It would also lead to a more lively neighborhood if you have an active FC.

It does still have server resource implications; right now, since there's a set number of wards, houses in wards, etc. and even apartments and private FC chambers have a set maximum, you know the ceiling of what resources you might need to allocate for housing and to store layout/etc. By having an open-ended number of instanced FC wards, you now may end up running over the resources you planned for. But that's going to be a problem with any instanced housing that isn't artificially limited in how many are available, including the airships suggested previously. And those issues are not insurmountable, even if they're probably a major pain to address given what the devs have said about the FFXIV server architecture and the forked Luminous Engine 1.0 codebase on which FFXIV is built.