Crazy Idea: Everyone can get a house

[Krotoan]

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.

That's what instanced housing IS though. That's what ANY instanced anything would be. You can't have unlimited bandwidth and storage space for anything unless we swap to an on-the-fly server management like AWS or something which is likely incompatible with the rest of the game unless the whole thing is ported. An instance, as you mentioned, is the same zone but separated for you personally. Therefore is taking up bandwidth (to communicate that you are moving and interacting with it) and storage (to remember where you put things and what to show) Unless we moved to an entirely different server system, any sort of instanced housing would automatically have limits.

The problem you're stating is probably part of why they might think instanced housing is NOT a solution: I.E. we already have that kinda and it has storage/bandwith limitations. But instanced housing frees up all those instances of peoples yards for the 20 whatever "wards" that are ALWAYS loaded. Instancing is useful in that IF someone has a house and never uses it, it never gets loaded and to the server is a non-issue.

Yes people could get locked out of the instance if everyone decides to sit in their house all day or all the people who ARE locked out of housing now just use it 24/7... but there's the potential for everyone to have a house, if not access to that house all the time.

As I said I would like to know what the Devs have against going full instance.

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.

This is likely how house interiors and apartments work now, since Eureka and Bozja, like all duties, can get "congested" too. If enough people are taking up instance reservations for whatever duty server, you cannot get in. As is evidenced by the couple of duties famous for RNG botting runs which were basically inaccessible to normal players when the bots were rampant and the rewards were higher.

[Wrytched]

If I remember correctly, houses in Everquest were like this. you had a city or town with doors, and those doors took you to an instanced house. Players had could buy an instanced house and if you invited others they could choose YOUR house when clicking on the door, much like selecting a ward or visiting an apartment... The neat part about housing in Final Fantasy XIV is that the exteriors of the houses can customized. This would be something you might need to sacrifice if you choose to instance.

If storage is an issue, why not charge real money like you do with retainers? House size X with storage items Y = Z$ per month and then you can have tiers... This would easily fund the server/memory requirements necessary for rendering these virtual bits of real estate.

Why are you not enforcing the demolition of old properties or taking away the lots from people who have more than 1 for their character or account?

Why not make housing linked to your account so your ALTs can use it too?

There are countless things the developers could do, if they thought there was value in this.

Maybe Final Fantasy XIV should end here with the 1st arch completed. Make a completely NEW game, new graphics engine, better graphics and game physics. New Classes and Skill trees that allow people to choose their own path when allocating stats. I know that you need to maintain balance, but why get stuck trying to expand a game when you can make something even better based on all the lessons learned.

[BrokentoothMarch]

So... apartments?

Without even tackling the pitiful amount of features apartments have compared to houses: They too, are limited. In not too long, all apartments will be gobbled up in my server following the Empyrean implementation. Preceding that? No apartments. Anywhere. And there's regular scans for houses and apartments ongoing by discords to collapse on them instantly.

This little cute coyness the dev team have with instanced housing has been seriously testing my patience as of late. I will keep banging this drum until they introduce instanced housing or they remove housing as a feature on their advertisement. So many events even offer housing items as well, so it's unsurprising to see people perpetually angry about it when they're presenting those exclusive items front and center as if taunting the community because of their own incompetence.

[TaleraRistain]

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.

EverQuest II has fully instanced housing and guild halls. You can own multiple houses of different styles. I have a vampire's castle (long story) as one of mine. You can set other players or your own alts as Trustees who can access them with varying levels of access. You can also customize your public access level. You can sell on the market board equivalent from your home. You have pets that you can let run around and they interact with each other, much like our minions here. You can decorate, of course, and you don't have to glitch nearly as much as you do in XIV. There's so much that instanced housing could be here if they would investigate these other games.

As to neighborhoods, I hang out by the bell next to the market board down the path from my FC house a LOT. And most days I don't see a soul. Nobody is even talking in shout chat. SE needs to tangible reasons for players to be in the wards if they want to make the argument that we need things like neighborhoods.

If I remember correctly, houses in Everquest were like this. you had a city or town with doors, and those doors took you to an instanced house. Players had could buy an instanced house and if you invited others they could choose YOUR house when clicking on the door, much like selecting a ward or visiting an apartment... .

It was EverQuest II but yes that's exactly how it worked. There were zones with multiple buildings and different doors so everyone wasn't crowded around the same door. And pricing could vary if the buildings were in zones with better amenities.

Also the same for guild halls. There was one big guild hall building and then you would choose your guild's personal guild hall from the door.

[Gemina]

EverQuest II has fully instanced housing and guild halls. You can own multiple houses of different styles. I have a vampire's castle (long story) as one of mine. You can set other players or your own alts as Trustees who can access them with varying levels of access. You can also customize your public access level. You can sell on the market board equivalent from your home. You have pets that you can let run around and they interact with each other, much like our minions here. You can decorate, of course, and you don't have to glitch nearly as much as you do in XIV. There's so much that instanced housing could be here if they would investigate these other games.

As to neighborhoods, I hang out by the bell next to the market board down the path from my FC house a LOT. And most days I don't see a soul. Nobody is even talking in shout chat. SE needs to tangible reasons for players to be in the wards if they want to make the argument that we need things like neighborhoods.



It was EverQuest II but yes that's exactly how it worked. There were zones with multiple buildings and different doors so everyone wasn't crowded around the same door. And pricing could vary if the buildings were in zones with better amenities.

Also the same for guild halls. There was one big guild hall building and then you would choose your guild's personal guild hall from the door.

Allow me to point out what instanced housing will never bring a player...



This screenshot I took of my message book it not to boast or brag. I don't even have any idea what would constitute a high number of likes and messages. I am posting it for a couple of other reasons:

The first is I don't know 597 players. Not even close, let alone talk to that many players. I think you can like a plot more than once, but I digress.

The second are the comments. I can only show one tab, but I have 3-4 tabs with comments about my home. I put an astonishing amount of time into my place, and it was finished long before message books were even available. Each and every single one of those comments made it all worth it. It also makes me wonder how many players have actually stopped by that I don't know about.

To know people have came and visited my plot, loaded into the house, looked around, loved it, and left me a comment, and did so completely unsolicited means so much. I can't even describe the elation that is felt. If housing was instanced, like so many players feel they want and would make things better; this would not exist. I would have this home I've spent hours on, and nobody can see it. It just exists in this little tiny corner in cyberspace. All by itself.

Might as well put instanced housing in Ultima Thule. That would be a very fitting zone to have them.

[BrokentoothMarch]

Snipm.

Don't care plus link didn't work. You're really just rubbing it in as you're effectively saying, as Mucha s you'd like to imply otherwise: "I don't want instanced housing because then I won't have a way to get my ego gently stroked in some faux projection of superiority."

Come off it. And if you think instanced housing is purely only able to host one person, i suggest you move out of your rock. Path of Exile nailed this since 2013 and their housing focus is sub-null.

Regardless, I must regretfully inform you that neither I nor most people care enough about the well-being of your ego to be willing to sacrifice a function of the game. Please try again.

[Masekase_Hurricane]

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.

That would be too easy and SE isn't oprah :P

[Gemina]

Don't care plus link didn't work. You're really just rubbing it in as you're effectively saying, as Mucha s you'd like to imply otherwise: "I don't want instanced housing because then I won't have a way to get my ego gently stroked in some faux projection of superiority."

Come off it. And if you think instanced housing is purely only able to host one person, i suggest you move out of your rock. Path of Exile nailed this since 2013 and their housing focus is sub-null.

Regardless, I must regretfully inform you that neither I nor most people care enough about the well-being of your ego to be willing to sacrifice a function of the game. Please try again.

I had to fix the link because I resized the first image upload too small.

The thing is, the fact that you erroneously mention that I am just rubbing it in only goes to show that you acknowledge the benefit to residential districts. You just don't like it, or to be told that your precious instanced housing in other games is an inferior concept when it comes to expression. Who is really the one with an inflated ego here? Especially considering your argument just resorts to personal attacks and assumptions on my demeanor.

You have a thing or two to learn, that is for sure. Humility being one, and how to express yourself like a functioning adult instead of a entitled, silver spoon fed kid for another. One thing that's for sure is not every player in FFXIV deserves a house. Instances or otherwise, and you have proven exactly why that is.

[Darthgummibear]

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

What neighbors? Just about every ward I have visited since I started playing this game has been almost completely empty, and I'm on one of the most congested housing servers in the game.

[Masekase_Hurricane]

What neighbors? Just about every ward I have visited since I started playing this game has been almost completely empty, and I'm on one of the most congested housing servers in the game.

the neighbours excuse has always been lame as the fecking instanced area is still going to be in a zone that will be bustling with people.