The Case for Instanced Housing

[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.

[Eldevern]

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Don't get me wrong, my intention isn't to sound harsh on SE.

In my opinion, the first idea of SE about housing was right : make it FCs only to favor social interactions.

When they have opened it to individuals, it has changed. Back in ARR times, some plots were available and it was not that lively, but full individuals (or ghost FCs) wards are just dormitory cities. As far as I can imagine housing, Wildstar is the system that looks to me to have the best balance.

My main grievance on SE is to make FCs and individuals to compete for a content designed for FCs. The best solution (and realist) we could have is :
Extended apartments : three size. Opened to FCs.
Greenhouse as an option for players and FCs.
Workshop as an option for FCs.
(why not to place the door for the workshop and the greenhouse at the apartments hall).

..

The idea of FCs wards is probably not that tricky for ressources if housing becomes shared with alts and if they keep the lock one FC house and one individual house per server per account.


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What I wish -without illusions- is a FCs wards system where the three sizes are replaced by options : everyone can have the S size but you have options to make the garden bigger or add rooms/levels to the house. With the lock and shared with alts, an expandable system can be opened to individuals.

[kaynide]

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

I am very specifically not proposing anything geared toward more social interaction. Not that they can’t happen or shouldn’t. I am assuming you mean like, random social events between players, like bumping into the neighbors.

If SE were to invest time in more social stuff, I would suggest adding it Gold Saucer. Things like a theme park with rides would be fun

[Melichoir]

I am very specifically not proposing anything geared toward more social interaction. Not that they can’t happen or shouldn’t. I am assuming you mean like, random social events between players, like bumping into the neighbors.

If SE were to invest time in more social stuff, I would suggest adding it Gold Saucer. Things like a theme park with rides would be fun

I just want to see where this all sits at, because the criticisms for ward housing and the like are all over the place. As suggested here, people have said that all housing should be instanced since they never see anyone in the wards as it is (I disagree but thats just from personal experience). I dont think this was the intent of the devs based on how housing was set up.

I suppose what Im more worried about is going down a path, even with instanced housing, that would make major cities moot at that point and promote player isolation. Some suggestions to improve housing (after making it instanced), was to also then start incorporating elements of city life, which pretty much would make going to cities a moot point all together. Im personally opposed to this direction cause I think increasing player isolation would be overall bad for the game.

Thinking about Shougun's ideas about instanced housing and airships, and to increase the usefulness of GCs, I was thinking what if they created a new housing system based on Airships like suggested. However, you have to build it.

So there would be Airship and Submarine workshops at GCs. You can build airships and subs for expeditions. And (as long as your rank is high enough), you can then build a personal airship that can operate essentially as a mobile cottage. Instead of forking over 3.5 Million, you would be required to craft/create the items needed to develop that airship. Once built, itll pretty much have an interior/exterior set up. Interior a lot similar to a cottage, exterior will have an area for housing placement. While you wont have a ward, you would have a mobile home essentially. You can take your airship and travel to hubs. While there, teleportation fees from your airship will be cheaper depending the locality. Places it could be stationed would be Rhalgers Reach, Idilshire, your home GC, Kugane, Ishgard, etc. Each location would have its own theme surrounding area. Maybe we would have to have GC items like fuel kits that you spend ventures on that you need to buy to move your airship from a location. Upgrading your Airship to larger sizes will require more parts and advancements, but you can slowly overtime build up your airship, going from small, medium, to large.

This will give players a bit more flexibility. Players who want to upgrade and improve on their 'lot', well now you have it. Players who want instanced housing, You got it. Promoting Crafting and Economy based actions, There you go. GCs now have a bit more use than just being a thing that exists. You want a larger property but cant get a spot, done. You control that now. Upgrade as you want. You want a property in multiple places - covered. As for look and feel, the base model will look the same, but will have features that will be specific to certain GCs, as suggested by Shougun. So you want a certain looking airship, better sign up to that GC for those features. Also yeah, you get to name your airship. You want tenents, yeah that should be fine (the only thing I can think of that would be an issue is if you had a tenent on your property as you moved it. Im guessing you would have to force disembark them before you fly away. This is to avoid allowing a lower level player reach a place they shouldnt technically. Like a level 25 character being in Ishgard before theyve even unlocked that part of the story.

If you wanted to go next level for this, you could have Small, Medium, large sized Airships for individual players, then FC sized airships - A special airship that can only be built by FCs that has special features and abilities. What features? Dont know. but Im sure we could think of something.

Accessing your airship can be done manually through the airship nodes already in places like Gridania and the like. Youd go there, could select to use a GC airship (if you still used that feature), select your own, or visit someone elses airship thats docked there by opening up a list of airships, their names, owners name, and private message. Otherwise you can teleport to that airship if youre already a tenant, or if you use the estate teleport feature through friends list.

And wards would still exist - If you dont want to, or dont think you can build your own airship, then just pay the flat rate fees for a ward house.

This would be a parallel housing system and would come with caveats. Mainly, if they were to develop this system, it would likely sap resources from other areas of the game for a time. They wouldnt be able to easily recycle what is currently on hand. And there are obviously some thigns that would have to be considered, like how current exterior housing items work. There may unfortunately be limitations where you cant add certain items to the exterior housing of your airship.

Furthermore, this wouldnt be an easy endeavor. Gating is probably something we should be concerned about and promoting because you want to avoid 'dead housing' - people who just take up housing space and dont do anything with it. While its not bad like it would be in a ward, it is still junk information the servers have to store. Let alone if you did have a list system as mentioned above, you want to avoid having players who dont do anything with their property clogging up that list. That was a problem with Wildstar, and not something I would want repeated here. So part of the suggestion would be that it would require untradeable unsellable crafted items. This means that a person who wants to have an airship will have to put time and effort into it. The material costs may add up to be the same price as a ward house of equivalent size but you may not necessarily pay that much directly in Gil.

People may not agree with me on this, but making an instanced house something you have to work a bit for by promoting player action (such as actually picking up crafting) is probably better for overall health of hte game. If you have higher level crafters, then youre set. If youre jumping into crafting for this, youll have your work cut out but the benefit of doing this (beyond your own personal place) is now you will have functional crafters leveled which will help you out in quite a few other ways. I think itll hurt RMT services a little bit as well. While you can argue that people will use RMT to buy gear to do the crafting, the simple fact will be that RMT will not level your characters. You wont be able to buy the items off the MBs to build the airship. Youll have to do some of htis yourself. Parts can be exclusive to GCs as well - spend GC points to buy some of hte necessary materials for the crafted items. The point is this kind of housing wont be accomplished by only having tons of gil. Part of why you would want this gated, btw, is to actually discourage excessive housing. Part of the reason we have limits on interior items is due to server constrictions. Opening up housing to everyone without any form of catch to it is gonna really up the server burdens. People who want housing and want to do something with it would be rewarded through their efforts. Having an airship house will be more than just "I had the gil therefore I got it without issue." Thats my thoughts though on it.

Could this work? Sure. Some of what this requires would be no different than how apartments operate currently. The biggest effort would be the mobility and listing issues, but I dont see any reason why the devs cant technically due this as is, because retainer locations and access is also based on City State Locations. So its obvious they can actually move player assets around as necessary. Checking up on housing and information can be done already with the ward lists. Houses are considered individual locations in this model, so that shouldnt be an issue either. I think the game fully has all the parts to do this. They would have to bring it all together.

[Eldevern]

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It's just an opinion (also my experience), but as a player since ARR beta, players isolation started both at the PF release and after some dramas related to Coil statics, FC chests thiefs and chat shouts, if not malicious, at least with a dubious humor.

I don't think instancied housing would change things. People still have use of the cities aetherytes, at least when they visit other worlds or just because they travel from an area to another. I don't see why instancied housing would make cities empty. Because of minions and mounts show-off (or weird RP/emote spam) some people already avoiding some places as much as possible because of the mess it creates on the screen (when it doesn't lead to have lags and other latency problems). Some NPCs remain only in cities too.

I understand the problem about some features people ask to be added to housing, but for example, take the MB in housing disctricts, some people where complaing it would kill MB in cities... do you feel it actually happened?

The game often look empty but it is mainly due to the number of maps, the routine feeling (sound more fair than a "lack of content") between two patchs and the fact to play during the rush hours or outside of them.

[Melichoir]

snips

Player isolation generally starts when you no longer have to travel in game. You saw this a lot in wow. Sit in Org or SW and just queue for dungeons. Its the same for most MMOs. What I mean to avoid with instanced housing is making your house 'the hub' - as in your private residence can accomplish everything that can be done in a city. I think MBs in housing actually do demonstrate some of this for two reasons - Housing 'worth' for a lot of buyers takes into account how far their residence is from a MB and that yes, I think it has decreased traffic from cities though maybe its not as noticable due to housing capacity. I mentioned in another thread that Sarg has 12k people averagely active, with only 1260 plots of housing. Thats only 10% of hte player pop. As a personal anecdote - among all the poeple I know who own a house, almost all of htem use MBs near their residence followed by Limsa's MBs since its right there at the aetheryte.

If they wanted to turn housing into hubs while doing the instanced thing, the earlier proposal would probably be the path to take: Make a central market area where Vendors, NPCs, and MBs are literally circled around a central Aetheryte you teleport to. I guess what you want to do is encourage some kind of 'town square' in some capacity - Either at cities, or in housing districts.

[MsMisato]

If they wanted to turn housing into hubs while doing the instanced thing, the earlier proposal would probably be the path to take: Make a central market area where Vendors, NPCs, and MBs are literally circled around a central Aetheryte you teleport to. I guess what you want to do is encourage some kind of 'town square' in some capacity - Either at cities, or in housing districts.

I want to say that was the original idea way when FC housing first launched. Player housing was to come afterwards but the wards never really took off during the first couple of years. So they probably scrapped that idea all together. Honestly they launch housing way to early. It was launched in the first patch of ARR and FCs really didn't have the money to buy a mansion or a house. Some barely could afford a cottage. The pricing back then was nuts and based off server popularity. It really is a Real Estate simulator lol and I think they plan to keep it somewhat scarce.

[Eldevern]

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You still have to travel for a lot of reasons.

In my experience, people are rare close from MB in wards. I always see the wards empty, even close from apartments. The only MB that are a bit more livelly are when there is a big FC around. And even so, it's not rare I see people from the FCs in front of the MB in cities.

For me the player isolation has started with the incentive to make people move to other servers + PF + chat dramas + Coil statics dramas AND there are a lot of maps and cities.

Now, to talk about instancied housing, I've always thought about something with a central aetheryte with some NPCs and features.

This said, it really seems that the IG experience from NA players, UE players and JA players are really different.

[kaynide]

I’m not sure it would take too much away from major hubs. I’d even be Ok with instanced housing not having access to the MB.

My vision of instanced housing is basically something like the Doma reconstruction, but more choices/less linear and on a smaller physical area.

Someone had mentioned Skyrim’s hearth fire expansion and that’s a good way to think..as “this will be your GC area..do you want a) a barracks/training hall, b) a tavern/mead hall or c) a more academic dorm.” Something like that anyway.