Crazy Idea: Everyone can get a house

[Derio]

They would have to buy more instance servers to accomodate such a thing and we all know the current chip situation going on in the world so right now that isnt completely feasible at the moment.

[Packetdancer]

They would have to buy more instance servers to accomodate such a thing and we all know the current chip situation going on in the world so right now that isnt completely feasible at the moment.

I mean, I think the bigger problem is that with instanced housing you aren't sure what the required resources are.

MMOs -- at least of FFXIV's type -- tend to operate on an assumption of X amount of activity. We've seen when wards get overloaded and people can't enter the house, or when there are no servers available for a specific instanced duty, etc. Generally their predictions are accurate, but when things skew above that point, we do see the fact that the game -- as with most older MMO architectures -- runs on a set amount of specific hardware, which has limits as to how much load it can actually handle.

With the current housing wards, as I noted earlier, you have a set metric: X housing districts, multiplied by Y wards in each district, with Z houses in each ward. Make the assumption that, say, at most 60% of those houses are in use simultaneously, and you now have a set, concrete number for "you need this amount of computing resource to keep housing running." (And also, "you need this much storage to hold the state for all housing.") I suspect this is also why there is a set limit on apartments, and why apartments -- and FC private chambers -- are limited to a single small room; it's probably to keep the amount of resources any one occupies at a time minimal, thus able to have many more of them.

Anything that has a relatively open-ended number of active instances in this game is, you'll note, something where there's no state to be preserved. When you finish a dungeon, that instance can just go away entirely, any state destroyed/discarded. The game doesn't have to save off which enemies were killed, what treasure chests were opened, etc., in order to restore the same dungeon state next time you run that dungeon; next time you come back in, it's a freshly-loaded-from-defaults copy of the dungeon, with all the enemies and bosses still alive, all the treasure chests still waiting to be opened, etc. The same is seemingly true of inn rooms; they don't have to store anything, because you can't redecorate, so they can be recreated from scratch whenever you enter one. Which I imagine is also likely why inn rooms can't remember what orchestrion you put on when you leave and come back in. (I do think you could get around that by having a record on the character that is applied to each inn room after creation, but that's not really relevant to this discussion.)

Conversely, a house has to remember where all the furniture is, what wallpaper you used, what orchestrion you have playing, what retainers are where, what you have in the yard, etc. That needs to be stored, so that when you leave your house and come back, you don't have to redecorate again every single time.

So even if the server architecture could support instanced housing (which I don't think it can), predicting what resources would be needed for that would be a guessing game at best. With X districts * Y wards-per-district * Z houses-per-ward, you get a concrete number you can work with. Instanced housing could be any number from 0 (everyone decides eh, now that housing is instanced, they don't actually care) to "the entire playerbase". That's... a pretty wide range. Moreover, if you have instanced housing, players would expect to be able to unsubscribe and then resubscribe later and still have their house. That means that for anyone who ever opens an instanced house once, you need to keep around the entire housing record for them for all eternity. (Or until the remaining moon collides with the planet and the servers are shut off a second time.)

So, again: I don't think the developers aren't implementing instanced housing because they still think open-world housing is better; like I said earlier in the thread, I don't think anyone still thinks this system is better. Inanimate objects probably think this system is broken, which is honestly amazing because they can't even hold opinions in the first place! No, I think the developers continue to try to hold to the current system and try stopgap measures and band-aid fixes to improve it because the alternative is probably not viable, at least not without a major and massive reworking of the entire MMO's underlying server architecture.

This is part of why I like to suggest that FCs lose access to open-world housing and get instanced airships at a specific rank. There's still likely a whole slew of architectural problems with that, but the number of FCs -- especially of FCs who've ranked up significantly -- is way smaller than the number of players, which helps to reduce the problem to a (maybe) manageable size. And moving the FCs out of the open-world housing wards would also then free up big chunks of the current housing for personal houses instead.

(Moreover, architectural limitations notwithstanding, the fact that FCs have no ability to interact with the exploratory airship/submersible system or gardening or whatnot without having a house feels like a borderline-unforgivable design flaw. Housing, broken or otherwise, should not gate participation in entire other non-housing-decor-related systems. I understand how they got to that point, and sympathize, but anything else about housing aside, that is an issue that I do think really needs to be seriously addressed. Especially because I feel like that restriction helps to feed into the resentment of the current housing situation.)