Ishgard Housing Details are Out

[Jojoya]

Your world has 700 active players on it...

https://ffxivcensus.com/#ra-oc

Try reading the census information on that website.

Statistics for February 2022

Any reference to "Active" characters, refers to characters that have claimed the following item:
The minion & mount for completing the Endwalker Main Scenario Quest from the Patch 6.0 story

You don't need the mount and minion from the 6.0 MSQ to be eligible to purchase a house.

He's also on a Materia world. You'd be better off looking at the All Characters numbers for those worlds since they didn't even open until the end of January. Not all those characters will be purchase eligible (some were only created to get the 15 days free game time granted to account creating characters on new worlds) but a large percentage will be. And of course many more characters will have been made on those worlds in the meantime. It doesn't take long to meet the requirements to purchase.


Regardless, even if Zurvan doesn't have the population yet for that many entries to be made there are other worlds like Balmung that do. By mid-May, Balmung will be seeing several thousand entries for the 3 or 4 houses likely to be available each lottery period.

Your chances are still going to be non-existent. The competition to buy one now pales in comparison to what's to come. Neither system is good, but neither of them are any better than the other.

Chances in the first lottery period should be decent. One in 20-25 (assuming someone isn't trying for a prime plot) isn't that bad.

Chances in the second lottery period would be poor. One in 200-300 sucks.

Chances after that will be close to non-existent. But still, for those who didn't even try to get a house in the past because of placard camping their chances with the lottery will be better (one in thousands) than before (zero).

[Shibi]

Your world has 700 active players on it...

https://ffxivcensus.com/#ra-oc

FFXIVCensus is a bit broken in it's labels, "Active Players" according to it are people who finished EndWalker, not actually "active" players. And as most of Materia alted and are sprouts... it's quite a misleading figure.

Beats me why they don't just use a term like "End Game" instead.

[Amenara]

Any % chance is infinitely higher than not even trying like with FCFS since my schedule doesn't let me sit at a placard for hours on end, not to mention houses being non-existent right now to begin with.

[dspguy]

Hey guess what? Fun fact. If you used your head. you'd realize that Instant transfer of housing doesn't detract from the amount of houses available. Only for that ward. I know that's hard, but come on. So in turn, it would still allow for everyone to have a chance period.

Sort of. The odds are likely to be the best during the first lottery bird. If you have roughly 1,500 new plots added in Ishgard and say... 30,000 players that want a plot, that's about a 5% chance per player on average. Not all plots are created equal, but I'm talking bigger picture. However, let's say, there were 500 transfers, negating part of the first lottery, that means we have 1000 new owners and 500 plots still up for sale.

The second lottery, we'd have 29,000 players and only 500 plots. Giving odds of about 1.7%. That's much worse than 5%.

The key thing isn't the numbers. The key thing is that transfers will lower the odds for all non-homeowners in the lottery. So while sure, there would be still be an equal number of plots on the server, the odds would be going down. At a bare minimum, if all 1500 plots had transfers, we'd wind up with no Ishgard plots in the lottery.

[Arzalis]

IMO this system is going to get people to wake up to just how bad housing is overall.

The first week will have some winners and a lot of people who lose. They can't blame it on anything except the game now since SE will have eliminated a lot of the external factors. I suspect by week two or three we'll see a lot of "Let's talk about housing" type posts or a megathread or something.

People blame a lot of things like bots, grandfathered players, or whatever else. But ultimately those are all symptoms of the real issue: the system is just bad. The truth is that even if you resolved every single one of those issues there still aren't enough houses.

[Johners]

IMO this system is going to get people to wake up to just how bad housing is overall.

The first week will have some winners and a lot of people who lose. They can't blame it on anything except the game now since SE will have eliminated a lot of the external factors. I suspect by week two or three we'll see a lot of "Let's talk about housing" type posts or a megathread or something.

People blame a lot of things like bots, grandfathered players, or whatever else. But ultimately those are all symptoms of the real issue: the system is just bad. The truth is that even if you resolved every single one of those issues there still aren't enough houses.

The thing about official game forums is that most threads will be people complaining about a system they don't like or doesn't benefit them. The vast majority of people that can no life camp the existing system will not complain about it because it doesn't benefit them to change it.

[Arzalis]

It's a legitimate complaint in this instance. There's no reason for scarcity on something like a virtual property.

I think a lot of people just do not realize how bad it is and this will end up showing all the flaws with very little in the way of excuses.

[Reinha]

Any % chance is infinitely higher than not even trying like with FCFS since my schedule doesn't let me sit at a placard for hours on end, not to mention houses being non-existent right now to begin with.

FCFS never required you to sit at a placard when new housing was released. You just walk to a house and buy it.

[dspguy]

It's a legitimate complaint in this instance. There's no reason for scarcity on something like a virtual property.

I'm not sure I agree. In all of the MMOs I've played, this is by far the one with the most customizable housing. And all of those options require processing and storage. Depending on your plot size, hundreds of items can be placed by pixel, rotated fractions of a degree - and then it all has to be rendered. Each data center is technically responsible for upwards of 60 plots per ward, 24 wards and (soon) 5 cities per server, with about 10 servers per data center. That's 72,000 private instances that could be up at once. It isn't a small number. That also means there are 2,400 housing ward instances up at once. And those are probably always up providing players in that instance with the data for the location of all 30 plots in that instance along with all 600+ outdoor furnishings whose location and orientation have to be sent to each player in the instance.

If you played during the early days of ARR, they had a very hard time spinning up enough instances of dungeons on Tuesdays (tomes reset day) to accommodate the playerbase zerging capped tomes in Amdapor Keep or Wanderer's Palace. And in recent times, they greatly limited the housing instance servers in exchange for getting more players through the queue to login.

I don't think it is as simple as changing a variable in the codebase from 24 wards to 240 wards. There are a lot of other factors involved.

[Arzalis]

I don't think it is as simple as changing a variable in the codebase from 24 wards to 240 wards. There are a lot of other factors involved.

No one claimed it was. The point is they made a system that doesn't scale (like a lot of other things) and now they're very much into sunken cost territory. The ward system is neat, but likely causes most of the issues and I don't think many people would miss it because it's rare to actually see another player there anyway. Even on the most populated servers. Having 24 wards per city per server that must be up 24/7 is a lot of wasted resources compared to housing instances which are basically loaded on demand.

At the end of the day, it's still all excuses. It's entirely feasible to make instanced housing. FFXIV didn't invent housing. There are other games, some of which actually have less restrictions on placing items, that give players their own personal instance. FFXIV is actually pretty limited compared to a lot of them, which is saying a lot since you can do quite a bit with it.

72,000 sounds like a like lot but it's nothing. There are frequently more than 90k players on Steam alone and it's literally the least popular platform to play the game on.

I really think anyone who defends housing in this game just hasn't played a lot of MMOs or experienced other systems.