The Case for Instanced Housing

[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]

...

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.