We deserve an explanantion.

[TwistedTea]

So, not reading through it all, might have already been said.

1. Neighborhoods
Has been established for years that Yoshi P. wants a neighborhood experience. Lively and actively social housing wards full of players. There are comments about this in older article interviews.

What Yoshi P wants is not in line with the reality of the severe supply shortage especially on NA servers.

Even on Balmung, having owned houses in all residential areas, I barely saw my neighbours. Maybe twice a year.

The neighbourhood feel is nice in theory but in practice with increasing server populations it results in atrocious access to the majority of the playerbase for ward housing.

2. Instanced Housing
So many people just don't get it. There is an instance server. It governs all the current housing interiors, probably each of the housing wards, every apartment interior, every dungeon, raid, trial, the Firmament's DoL gathering area, the Ocean fishing boats, and any other case of something that is instanced, is run on these servers.

You think you can add the stress of thousands and thousands of housing interiors onto this without crashing the entire game?

Everyone keeps screaming instanced housing, without realizing just what it would take to deliver that. They'd need to add new servers for every world, just to handle the strain, and that means sub prices would go up to cover it all.

Limited ward housing consumes more server resources as the ward houses are always partially loaded.

And SE's solution so far has been to add even more wards (new servers or reallocating existing server resources) thus increasing the server stress even further.

But yet you think fully instanced housing would cause more server stress than limited ward housing?

[UkcsAlias]

But yet you think fully instanced housing would cause more server stress than limited ward housing?

Instanced housing has 1 issue. What if you want to see houses of others? For inspiration, or just to sometimes take a look, being able to view go into other houses is a welcome feature. If you spent effort making it look nice, you might also want to show that off to others.

But still, if instanced housing would only show a few extra houses that are nearby (like for example 4 houses, which are semi random selected), it might already be a decent alternative. The semi-random part then simply can mean that someone who is working on his house was loaded in, or a house that was also loaded in for someone else. or it simply loads in another random house. This should allow some compression to take place as only a few houses need to be loaded in for ward rendering (server wide this might still be 100 houses, for 200 players). However, you will never see the other players actively walking (although maybe there are even ways to do this).

Instanced housing should take less resources, but it shouldnt be a 1:1 ratio either. I want to see other houses, that is part of the housing system! And instead of complete randomizing and just teleporting to a house, the house facade is something that matters, and usualy is visible enough from a distance. Being able to see multiple at once is on that more efficient than just hopping from house to house.

There are ways, but they are complex. Islands on that at least are a bit more simplistic in design. And hopefully some knowledge from that can be used for housing as well. Because i suspect that those actualy will take more resources per house than wards would (because wards technicaly have more restrictions).

[Corvus_V]

Instanced housing has 1 issue. What if you want to see houses of others? For inspiration, or just to sometimes take a look, being able to view go into other houses is a welcome feature. If you spent effort making it look nice, you might also want to show that off to others.

But still, if instanced housing would only show a few extra houses that are nearby (like for example 4 houses, which are semi random selected), it might already be a decent alternative. The semi-random part then simply can mean that someone who is working on his house was loaded in, or a house that was also loaded in for someone else. or it simply loads in another random house. This should allow some compression to take place as only a few houses need to be loaded in for ward rendering (server wide this might still be 100 houses, for 200 players). However, you will never see the other players actively walking (although maybe there are even ways to do this). Some creep? Crazy EX on your yard? Spammer? A random horse? Someone parkouring on your roof? Just put them on a list. Why not?

Instanced housing should take less resources, but it shouldnt be a 1:1 ratio either. I want to see other houses, that is part of the housing system! And instead of complete randomizing and just teleporting to a house, the house facade is something that matters, and usualy is visible enough from a distance. Being able to see multiple at once is on that more efficient than just hopping from house to house.

There are ways, but they are complex. Islands on that at least are a bit more simplistic in design. And hopefully some knowledge from that can be used for housing as well. Because i suspect that those actualy will take more resources per house than wards would (because wards technicaly have more restrictions).

Just apply an ID, similar to a phone number for people to visit instanced homesteads. You dont need neighbors. The instance can open whenever people are inside and close when people arent, similar to a dungeon. They wouldnt constantly be in use. Only a few, like an RP venue ( which would probably benefit greatly from access control) would be in high use.

There really is just no reason not to do it at this point. Just make it a freaking house surrounded by trees in the middle of the woods, or a snowfield, desert. Just any random inaccessible backdrop so you can have an exterior and interior functionally the same as whatever size house you want.