Crazy Idea: Everyone can get a house

[LaylaTsarra]

But you never talk to your neighbors. Literally nobody does. You just sit in your own house and interact with your friends. Wards are completely antisocial already because everyone just sticks to interacting with their own cliques and nobody actually socializes as a community. There's no reason we can't have wards and solo instanced housing at the same time.

I love wards I'm in them all the time. I live in housing districts. That's not to say that instanced housing can't be built alongside the current system. Why they've never done more with apartments is beyond me.

[Evergrey]

Imagine what possibilities a private house could bring.
People have multiple times asked for increased item limit for house items and SE have stated that it's hard to do as every house in a ward brings up the load for that.
A private housing might've made it so people could've had a much higher limit to place items with.
And with private housing there could be a feature, much like when looking at other peoples Adventure Plate, an option to visit their house (if they accept visitors)

(I'm just gonna mention some private housing I've experienced personally)

Wildstar had private housing and it was wild.
I spent much time visiting other players houses to see what crazy stuff they might've done with it and I say a lot of great stuff.

Elder Scrolls Online have personal housing and there's a lot of stuff you can use to really make a house your home.

[Syln]

but I want neighbors! I like being able to look at other people's houses and sometimes seeing the fc that lives next to mine. They really should just make it so the game adds wards automatically

As much as i love peoples roamming around, that's a fair price to allow everyone to get their hand on a house.

WIldstar did that and it was awesome, by far my favorite housing system to date.

[Varilyon]

Just take away every player house, decrease the amount of wards to 6-10, make them FC only and give players different instanced houses, where they can bury their Gil in.

[DamianFatale]

But you never talk to your neighbors. Literally nobody does. You just sit in your own house and interact with your friends. Wards are completely antisocial already because everyone just sticks to interacting with their own cliques and nobody actually socializes as a community. There's no reason we can't have wards and solo instanced housing at the same time.

I talk to my neighbors. We actually formed a cross linkshell and are networking together to make our ward a thriving community. Just because not everyone has put the effort to, doesn't mean it can't happen, or that there aren't benefits when this is possible. I'm excited for my new ward and friends to talk to.

[sagacious]

What if. WHAT IF: We had instanced house plots, single houses existing in their own seperate instances, with a set price for different house sizes, that everyone could save up gil for and buy and customize to their heart's content and you could still invite other players into your instanced house?

Think about it.

It's been ten years and they have never implicated a desire to make instance housing. Instance housing is just a pipe dream wake up.

[Titor]

I have owned the same house since 2.x, and I rarely see anyone at all. It does not feel social. One of the few interactions I had was a fc leader of a neighboring small harassing me for owning a private house that was a bigger size than his fc. I’d love instanced housing, and I have a house.

I have a challenge for anyone that thinks housing is social- go run around a ward. Any ward, and count how many people you see. Outside of wards that have a big fc in them, you are unlikely to find anyone at all.

[Seraphor]

Instanced housing is not some unexplored, unknown option.

While I'm sure your solution would work to a degree, it's not like nobody has ever mentioned or considered it. As it is apartments ARE instanced and there's still limits on those for whatever reason.

Perhaps we should be asking the developers what roadblocks THEY see to this solution and why it hasn't been implemented?

This is because apartments aren't truly instances in the way people are suggesting, as unlimited zones.
Apartments, just as the interior of houses, and areas such as the Solar in the Waking Sands/Rising Stones, are actually shared spaces that simply display different things for different people.
This is why:
1. The Solar has 'instances', i.e. "You are in Instance (1) of The Solar." so that on expansion and patch launches, the zone doesn't get congested.
2. Housing has become congested in the past, namely on EW's launch where loads of people were camping out in their houses with autoclickers to avoid the AFK timeout.

In both cases, too many people in those areas will cause them to become 'full' and not allow any more people in. Yes, you could try to enter your house and it would say "This zone is congested".

So houses, and apartments, and indeed any form of instanced housing that uses the same system, would be susceptible to congestion and be limited in number. Thus it doesn't solve anything, it would be the same as providing more wards, and still require additional server capacity.


In order to implement truly unlimited instanced housing, so that everyone can get their own space, you'd need to use the duty servers, like Eureka and Bozja do. This results in temporary instances that are loaded and unloaded as needed, so as long as not everyone is using that at once, they're virtually 'unlimited' in number.
The downside to this is of course, if you're in a duty, you can't then queue for another duty.
People use housing as downtime between duty queues, and if you couldn't queue up while decorating or chilling out in your house, it wouldn't be a very popular feature.
It may also prohibit the use of certain databases such as retainer inventories, chocobo saddle bag, FC settings, etc. given that currently all other duties do. Although they may be able to provide access for duties that don't involve combat which most duties currently do.

For the record, I expect this is how Island Sanctuaries will work. Instanced personal duties.

[Illmaeran]

Snip

Thank you for the well thought out and informative response. I've been wondering about certain technicalities regarding apartments and this brought up topics I hadn't considered before.

[DiaDeem]

So... apartments?