"Housing is Pain", or "Why We Can't Have Nice (Instanced) Things"

[Ranaku]

I mean we already basically have instanced housing with the apartments. Which are widely not used so idk why SE doesn't just put the space of 2 apartments together or even three and there would be still enough empty ones to give people a immersive housing experience.

But i can see why they don't want to do instanced housing when it comes to houses, since that would mean for every house there would be also the landscape etc. that would put extra stress on the servers. And that for every player can get really bad really fast.

So for the love of hydaelyn SE please let us upgrade the apartments to be a bit bigger, heck let players pay 1m gil for the first upgrade would be even a nice gilsink that most people would definitely use. I think that would make many if not most players happy for now.

[Colt47]

I mean we already basically have instanced housing with the apartments. Which are widely not used so idk why SE doesn't just put the space of 2 apartments together or even three and there would be still enough empty once to give people a immersive housing experience.

But i can see why they don't want to do instanced housing when it comes to houses, since that would mean for every house there would be also the landscape etc. that would put extra stress on the servers. And that for every player can get really bad really fast.

So for the love of hydaelyn SE please let us upgrade the apartments to be a bit bigger, heck let players pay 1m gil for the first upgrade would be even a nice gilsink that most people would definitely use. I think that would make many if not most players happy for now.

That's the thing. There are no gameplay loops involving the apartments that are significant enough to make them relevant. Even the existing housing barely has any gameplay loops to speak of and people just want them as trophies or as places to RP in. The fact that housing is an actual materialized thing in a ward gives it at least some value.

[Heavenchild]

I don't want instanced housing. I like it to have neighbours and to run around in the wards. :3
Also I think that people are just so much into housing because it is not something every player can easily have.
We have no right for a plot, just because we pay a sub. We also have no right to have an ultimate weapon just because of we pay a sub. (and so on)
Housing was all in all fine. We just needed some actions against all those damn resellers who made it impossible to get M or L plots.
And after so may new players came to FF14 there were just too less wards. I never wanted that lottery and in some points its the drama as I expected.
(abused by people with money and multiple service accounts and so on)

But I really would like to hear more about Island Sanctuary. They are so silent about this. That scares me. xD

[Oizen]

I don't want instanced housing. I like it to have neighbours and to run around in the wards. :3
Also I think that people are just so much into housing because it is not something every player can easily have.
We have no right for a plot, just because we pay a sub. We also have no right to have an ultimate weapon just because of we pay a sub. (and so on)
Housing was all in all fine. We just needed some actions against all those damn resellers who made it impossible to get M or L plots.
And after so may new players came to FF14 there were just too less wards. I never wanted that lottery and in some points its the drama as I expected.
(abused by people with money and multiple service accounts and so on)

But I really would like to hear more about Island Sanctuary. They are so silent about this. That scares me. xD

Its hard to see anyone say "Housing is fine" when it excludes an overwhelming majority of players from partaking in it.

[Heavenchild]

Its hard to see anyone say "Housing is fine" when it excludes an overwhelming majority of players from partaking in it.

So you would say...Ultimate, its rewards and stuff is also not okay, because it excludes an overwhelming majority of players from partaking in it?
As I've already said, it was no big problem to get a house before so many new players joined the game. (and they disabled the housing timer)

And housing would not be so demanded if it would be a thing that everyone can easily have. People are just like this. Idk why. xD
The new lottery makes it at least just worse all in all. People with much rl money have big advantage now. :c And the rest can just wait..., wait....wait...., without their Gil.

I already have a small house for a long time. And I camped very often with other players, when they tried to get a house. And they always got one. It was just a question of some observing and patience.
Never took more than 2 weeks and the people did not 24/7 try. We needed some more wards (or servers), a 90 days rule for fc's leader change (for new fc members), and a second lil timer for relocation. (And a shorter main timer. It was really too long)

Instanced housing would just destroy the value of housing completly and people will lose that big interest. But maybe SE is going to implement something similar with Island Sanctuary. We will see :3

[Packetdancer]

Gonna preface this by saying I know nothing of coding and the like, and it will probably show, buuuut.......as far as our "instanced" options in XIV, are the inns, apartments and house interiors not on the same playing field so to speak? Functionally speaking, inns are incredibly limited, but you're still popping off into your own little space, no? :X

So far as I can tell, inn rooms are handled solely on the client side, akin to various other things that have no persistent state. (E.g., your squadron barracks, various little one-off instances in the middle of questlines or waiting to enter a trial, etc.) Which is actually why they forget what orchestrion roll you have set.

It's the same reason that if you and a friend are both standing outside of the Waking Sands, then both go inside, you will not see each other any longer; the individual personal instances for places like that seem to exist only on the client.

Those things don't need to be on the server, because none of their state is relevant to anyone or anything but your specific game client. I would not be surprised if the server basically took everyone in personal instances (inn rooms, trial-arena waiting areas, etc.) and basically metaphorically dumped them into a giant empty void. That way the server could still handle things like gearset changes, retainer interactions, and so on, but leave everything else about running the personal instances -- like "what is the player location within this space, etc." -- up to the client.

Housing, unfortunately, does need to be on the server -- at least, so long as you want to be able to decorate permanently. Or let anyone else visit your house.

As for house interiors, apartments and such... we already know there's a practical limit. If we hit it, you can't go inside houses until people leave some and a slot frees up to load a house again. During the glut of activity around Endwalker's launch, this actually started happening fairly frequently, with people being locked out of their houses.

So you would say...Ultimate, its rewards and stuff is also not okay, because it excludes an overwhelming majority of players from partaking in it?

Not the one you're quoting, but I don't think the analogy is quite the same.

If you look at the ability to do airships (for an FC) or gardening to crossbreed (for anyone) as being the "rewards" for housing, then I'd say the analogy would be to imagine that Ultimate had a limited number of clears. You weren't around when UCoB was current? Welp, sorry, too many people have cleared it. You can't go in to try to get those rewards until one of the people who cleared it deletes their account.

The Ultimate weapons being gated behind Ultimate is fine; anyone who wants to try to for those rewards can get them, because an unlimited number of people can clear those Ultimates. It doesn't "run out" of clears to hand out. Thus, no one is actually excluded from Ultimates -- not in the sense of being excluded from housing-related stuff -- because if they want to do them, they can go unlock them and start trying to do them.

But I'd argue that gardening and FC airships aren't "rewards" for housing, but other systems on their own. And the reason I say this is that there are people who do not care about housing -- they don't want to do interior decoration, they don't care about how the house looks. But they do care about doing airships, or crossbreeding seeds, or whatever. I don't think it's a benefit to gate those behind housing when the result is you end up with people buying houses who don't actually use them as houses, just a place to have a garden plot or for their FC folks to work on construction projects.

Imagine if running Ultimates was gated not behind clearing the savage tier but, say, completing the fishing log. Want to do UCoB? Hope you're ready to figure out all the baits and correct time/weather windows to get all those rare fish, first! Now imagine that the fishing log has a limited number of clears. So not only do you need to do that fishing log, even if you don't care about fishing, but you have to do that fishing log before the fishing clears run out.

Worse, that ends up meaning you take up one of these 'fishing clear' spots despite not caring about fishing, locking out someone who might, simply because you have to do that to get to the thing you actually want.

And that seems a design flaw, at least to me.

[Amenara]

I don't want instanced housing. I like it to have neighbours and to run around in the wards. :3
Also I think that people are just so much into housing because it is not something every player can easily have.
We have no right for a plot, just because we pay a sub. We also have no right to have an ultimate weapon just because of we pay a sub. (and so on)
Housing was all in all fine. We just needed some actions against all those damn resellers who made it impossible to get M or L plots.
And after so may new players came to FF14 there were just too less wards. I never wanted that lottery and in some points its the drama as I expected.
(abused by people with money and multiple service accounts and so on)

But I really would like to hear more about Island Sanctuary. They are so silent about this. That scares me. xD

Everytime I hear someone say this, all I can think is "I have a house and don't want anyone else to have one so I can continue to feel special". You are advocating for me to have access to less of the game not through skill or gameplay but through an arbitrary RNG system. If I wanted to clear an Ultimate fight I could potentially put forth the effort to get amazing at my job, find a like minded group of people and keep attempting it until we beat it. With housing I either have it or I don't. There is nothing more I can do to influence my ability to get it.

All I am saying is that I should have the ability to fully engage with the game if I pay the same sub as you do.

So you would say...Ultimate, its rewards and stuff is also not okay, because it excludes an overwhelming majority of players from partaking in it?
As I've already said, it was no big problem to get a house before so many new players joined the game. (and they disabled the housing timer)

And housing would not be so demanded if it would be a thing that everyone can easily have. People are just like this. Idk why. xD
The new lottery makes it at least just worse all in all. People with much rl money have big advantage now. :c And the rest can just wait..., wait....wait...., without their Gil.

I already have a small house for a long time. And I camped very often with other players, when they tried to get a house. And they always got one. It was just a question of some observing and patience.
Never took more than 2 weeks and the people did not 24/7 try. We needed some more wards (or servers), a 90 days rule for fc's leader change (for new fc members), and a second lil timer for relocation. (And a shorter main timer. It was really too long)

Instanced housing would just destroy the value of housing completly and people will lose that big interest. But maybe SE is going to implement something similar with Island Sanctuary. We will see :3

There is no monetary value to housing other than the ability to garden for a personal plot and/or do the airship/submersibles for FCs. If the value is you feeling special because you were lucky enough to get one back in the first come first serve days, how does myself having an instanced house change that? That I didn't spend hours not playing the game but instead sitting at a placard for a shot to get a house against others doing the same thing? Just because you had to suffer to get a house doesn't mean everyone should have to.

[Jojoya]

So you would say...Ultimate, its rewards and stuff is also not okay, because it excludes an overwhelming majority of players from partaking in it?
As I've already said, it was no big problem to get a house before so many new players joined the game. (and they disabled the housing timer)

One set of players doing Ultimate does not stop another set of players from doing Ultimate because there is no limit on the number of Ultimate instances the game can make available.

One set of players obtaining houses does prevent another set of players from getting houses because there is a hard limit on the number of houses in the game.

Getting a house was a problem on many worlds on occasion in the past, sometimes on all worlds. It's not unique to the past 2 years. But it's also true there were some periods where there was no problem as well - but only because SE had added more wards or a new housing district at those times. The only time it was easy to get a house was 4.2 through 4.4 because SE had increased the number of wards by 50%. Since then, houses have disappeared quickly even with new ward additions.

It's hard to say what state things would be in right now if the lottery was working as intended. Certainly all houses in personal purchase wards would have disappeared, and it's the demand for personal houses that is the highest. Part of the FC demand is inflated by players that can't get the personal houses they want so they resort to using shells FCs for the purpose.

Instanced housing would just destroy the value of housing completly and people will lose that big interest. But maybe SE is going to implement something similar with Island Sanctuary. We will see :3

Housing has no value to a player that wants but cannot obtain it. It becomes a negative in their game experience and places them one step closer to quitting the game if there are other issues with content making them unhappy.

If your line of thinking is correct, then it would actually be in SE's interest to use instanced housing so there would be less demand. Less demand means less need to obtain more/update hardware for the housing servers, no need to have a complicated lottery system for purchase when all the wards could go back to FCFS because there would always be empty plots, more players satisfaction because those who actually care about housing as content wouldn't have a problem getting it, etc.

That's nothing but a financial plus for SE. It's not like this is a housing centric game. While it's a nice feature, few players are basing their purchase decisions solely around access to housing so it would likely have minimal impact on their revenue stream.

This is not actually entirely true, in my experience. I'm sure it's true for some folks, yes!

I'd actually say it's true that most don't cross breed from my experience. Touring wards shows a general lack of garden patches in use (if even placed), and when I do come across them it's usually not any crossbreeding going on.

Larger FCs would be an exception, doing the same as yours, but FCs only account for about 30% of house owners and many of those aren't truly active FCs.

I've offered my friends who want to crossbreed access to my house at times if they didn't have their own house. Only two have ever taken me up on it, and they didn't stick with it more than a couple of weeks.

Players may think they want access to crossbreeding; most don't take advantage given the opportunity.

It will be interesting to see if the "farming" in Island Sanctuary is based on the gardening system in housing, or if the system will work completely differently with no reliance on weather conditions.

[SamSmoot]

I don't want instanced housing. I like it to have neighbours and to run around in the wards.

Fix: Instance the plots, all in one ward. Each plot can have thousands of owners, and once you go out the front gate, you're on the same street as everyone else. Lotgs more folks in the neighborhood.
If you're in your yard, it would be nice if you could still see the street activity (Not sure that could be done.)
If you're on the street, you see a random collection of the houses on those plots, but you can select one to display via the placard (with thumbnails)
Your own house always loads for you when you arrive, but you can still select others on the same plot location to visit as well/

One issue for SE though is increased storage costs, Tens of thousands of houses with all their furnishings and positions to store. I suppose some of that could be alleviated by keeping each player's house data on their local systems, but I suspect that may not be an option on consoles.

[Packetdancer]

Fix: Instance the plots, all in one ward. Each plot can have thousands of owners, and once you go out the front gate, you're on the same street as everyone else. Lotgs more folks in the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, this actually makes the technical issue with instanced housing worse in several ways.

First off, it's still instanced housing. It's instanced housing with an open-world entrance, but it's still instanced housing. So every one of the existing "instanced housing plus this game's server architecture won't play well together" problems still applies; none of that changes. Moreover, if you still have houses and yards separate (which I suspect are very difficult to untangle server-side), you now have actually doubled the number of things that can be instantiated -- not just houses, but yards too.

Even if that part's solved, you've now introduced a new technical/design issue: how do you handle the yards when someone is outside the plot.

My FC has a large house with a lovely big yard, and it actually serves as a very active hub for our FC. While waiting for a roulette to pop or a PF to fill, people will chill around the fire-pit in the yard or sit in the treehouse. They'll use the jumping puzzle we built to get up onto the balcony and do their raid-pot crafting there. They'll run laps around the house on top of the fence. They'll step outside of the yard to go visit the marketboard or retainer bell directly across the street from us.

And they'll have conversations while they do this.

Now imagine your scenario. If you have 5 people in our FC house yard, and 1 person in the yard of another house in the same plot, and one more person walks past... what do they see?

Do they see a yard chosen at random from those in the plot, with six people standing in it (the five from our FC and the one from the other)? Do they see the FC house because there's "more people" there, and the person in the other house is invisible? If there's two people in the other house's yard and they're talking to each other, and five in the FC house yard and they're talking to each other, do the conversations overlap; we hear theirs when we're in our yard, they hear ours when they're in theirs? Or if someone dashes out of the FC yard and over to the marketboard, do the rest of the folks in the FC yard just... disappear, and they can no longer hear the conversation?

Do you just pick a random house exterior to be shown from the outside, and entering the yard is a loading operation (like going into a house already is), so you click on the glowy "Entrance" ball outside the yard before you can see anyone, and have to click on the glowy "Exit" ball to load back outside and get to the market board?

You can absolutely solve all those problems, but not easily. Add a housing score system based on the "value" of decor items, and only show whatever has the highest score from the outside, without any people, and force you to load into the instance to see if there's anyone actually in the yard. Etc.

This is why in games that do have instanced housing with open-world entrances, you rarely really have a front yard in any implementation I've seen. And there's all sorts of caveats as to how the instanced housing interiors co-exist with the open-world exterior.

In Black Desert Online, for instance, I have a couple of homes; one is a small apartment in Calpheon, right along the river. It's lovely. (Despite the horde of NPCs borderline-rioting outside, because my apartment is technically in the slums.) The apartment has two balconies, one overlooking the river, and one overlooking the street (where I can wave to the rioting NPCs). Because both balconies are technically outside of the house itself, as soon as I walk out onto either, if I turn around and look back inside my apartment... I see an empty one. As soon as I step back through the door, all my furniture reappears.

(Hilariously, it reappears by having all the decor literally drop from the sky into the proper positions. Which will never not slightly amuse me.)

If someone else had the same apartment and was on at the same time, and they walked out of their apartment onto the balcony, I would see them through my window standing on "my" balcony. If I walked out, they'd see me walk out the door onto "their" balcony. During the various stretches of time where I'm actually playing BDO, I actually do chill on that balcony; a friend owns the apartment right beside and below mine, which means I can see his riverside balcony from mine. If one of us is waiting for the other to show up to try to do something together, waiting on the balcony is a natural thing to do; when the other shows up, hey, just pop out onto the balcony and wave! I'm certain that if anyone else sharing 'my' apartment was online at one of those times, it would seem weird to them to look out the window and see me pacing around idly on "their" balcony.

In New World, before I gave up on it, I had a lovely little place in Windsward overlooking the main square. It, too, had a balcony... but the balcony was considered part of the instance. If I stood on the balcony, no one in the main square of Windsward would see me; I could see them, but they'd look up and see an unfurnished balcony so far as I know. (I think the housing decor system there was supposed to have the person with the highest decor score have their instance shown to the outside world. So far as I know it never worked right while I was playing, because it only ever showed emptiness when I looked in the windows of houses.)

And while there are houses in New World that have yards, it was always a back yard for the ones I saw. In order to go into that yard you had to go through the house, thus picking which instance of the house you were visiting, and from the viewpoint of anyone wandering around the street, all yards were empty (and all houses were empty if you looked in the windows); you had to actually attempt to walk into the house and then choose an instance from the menu that popped up.

Now, in BDO and New World, the open-world entrance to instanced housing makes sense even with any caveats, because in both cases the instanced housing is inside the buildings you already have in a given open-world hub. BDO is frankly insane inasmuch as they have a few major cities nearly the size of entire FFXIV zones, and you can basically enter every single building in the game (and buy most of them). New World's hubs are very small, but again, most of the buildings at least have interiors you can get.

But in both cases, from the viewpoint of someone walking past (at least in my experience)... every house is empty. You see nothing in the yards, if you peek in a window you see an empty, unfurnished interior. You don't really get that feeling of "neighborhood" because... well, everything's empty. You don't see your neighbors.

FFXIV's open-world entrances are in housing wards already separate from the main world. Even if the instanced housing were practical, going to the housing ward, walking through the streets and seeing nothing but default houses and empty yards... what would be the point? You might as well just go full instanced, with no open-world entrances, and cut out at least a little of the overhead.