Why neighbourhoods ?

[BellBixbite]

The last thing they want it to turn housing into garrisons like in wow and basically isolate players. In neighborhoods you are still in the public eye so to say. The last thing SE would want to do is emulate wow and have players isolated alone in instanced areas. If you want the housing neighborhoods to be alive then spend more time there and grt involved. Host your own events in them. Do something besides crying on the forums and demanding a solution be handed to you.

[Oizen]

They haven't been improving, lottery isn't improvement, it's just workaround. What I'd call improvement is increasing the wards size to 64 for every housing zone at the very least

I prefer permanent solutions instead of chasing a problem but maybe I'm a minority in that.

The last thing they want it to turn housing into garrisons like in wow and basically isolate players. In neighborhoods you are still in the public eye so to say. The last thing SE would want to do is emulate wow and have players isolated alone in instanced areas. If you want the housing neighborhoods to be alive then spend more time there and grt involved. Host your own events in them. Do something besides crying on the forums and demanding a solution be handed to you.

They're not alive now. Even when RP venues hold a party, they're INSIDE the house, inside an instance. The actual neighborhood is still a ghost town.
I don't understand why you think things would be different. Any isolation is done on a player by player preference, not by a system itself.

[Avenger]

I like seeing other houses (except for ugly Moogle monstrosities) as well as other players in the area. We actually made a linkshell for our old neighborhood, and several people on my friend list are former neighbors. I would fairly regularly encounter people I didn't know, but who lived in the area, at the market board. Many of us log in or out at the FC house, and we will often be seen outside using the market board, practicing against the target dummy, crafting, etc.. It has been fun wandering around and talking to people in Empyreum as well as people are moving in.

[Avenger]

That being said, it seems to me one of the biggest complaints people have about apartments is that they can't place (or use) outdoor housing items, including some (often rather nice) seasonal event rewards. I could imagine them fixing this eventually by either 1) allowing outdoor housing items to be placed on the island or 2) adding instanced garden terraces or roof gardens to the apartments.

[Illmaeran]

adding instanced garden terraces or roof gardens to the apartments.

I want my rooftop beer garden venue NAO, kktxhbai.

[Sindele]

One big problem standing in the way of any hypothetical solution is that we're still occasionally hitting server instance caps - as in the "extreme server load, you can't zone in, enjoy spamming your doorway for 10+ minutes to get into any kind of house/apartment" instance caps. It's possible this limit is artificially low for what the current server environment can handle, but if it's not.. there's not really a fast solution other than more servers, which is exactly the problem we're in anyway. Barring an easy performance breakthrough, you're looking at probably months of code refactoring.

[juicybug]

I like seeing other houses (except for ugly Moogle monstrosities) as well as other players in the area. We actually made a linkshell for our old neighborhood, and several people on my friend list are former neighbors. I would fairly regularly encounter people I didn't know, but who lived in the area, at the market board. Many of us log in or out at the FC house, and we will often be seen outside using the market board, practicing against the target dummy, crafting, etc.. It has been fun wandering around and talking to people in Empyreum as well as people are moving in.

same, i hate moogle and shirogane houses.
first house i saw in empyreum was a shirogane house and its so ugly.

[Dzian]

But that said, the neighbourhoods concept will only truly shine if the entire FC is filled with active FCs with active members, and not FCs with min. (4people FC) just to grab a house in the FC-only wards.

That'll never happen. The concept around Free companies was basically groups of players working gto gather to get stuff done. To promote teamwork and bonding. The neighbourhood concept was an extension of that..

The problem is they never gave players any of the content to support that concept. Actually FC based endgame content or even the age old idea that FCs could summon primals in the open world against mighty bosses. And the sky across the entire zone would change when you did. Set ablaze in flame if you summoned ifrit or a truly chaotic storm if tou summoned ramuh.. just one of many broken promises regarding FCs.

The result is that FCs are nothing more than a glorified chat channel and most of the connections within them are often incredibly superficial. That and the games big push to be a single player rpg and not an MMO.

It's evident in almost every aspect of the game.. even raiding. Where the difficulty isn't the content. Its getting people to work together and do it..

[BellBixbite]

I prefer permanent solutions instead of chasing a problem but maybe I'm a minority in that.



They're not alive now. Even when RP venues hold a party, they're INSIDE the house, inside an instance. The actual neighborhood is still a ghost town.
I don't understand why you think things would be different. Any isolation is done on a player by player preference, not by a system itself.

Have you been to rp venues lately. Many host outside now in the public areas and front yards of their plots

[Padudu]

Have you been to rp venues lately. Many host outside now in the public areas and front yards of their plots

I go to RP venues and I still don't see why instanced housing would be a bad thing. The venues that host things like that are far and in between, anyways. And most "public" rp spots tend to be held outside the wards in the outside areas (Ishgard, Rhalgar's Reach, ect). Still doesn't change the fact that wards are mostly useless outside of that and the RP portion who even uses the wards are more than likely miniscule in comparison to the rest of the population. Please stop using RPing as an excuse lol