The Case for Instanced Housing

[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.